The Thomas Berryman Number

“I’m planning to be in Nashville the first week, the last week in June,” Berryman said. “You should have the remaining money. You won’t hear from me until then.”

The southerner added a few conditions of his own. Then the phone call was over.

Berryman took a long, deep breath. He’d momentarily lost control of the situation, but now he had it back.

He left the booth running a white comb back through his curly black hair.

I don’t know at what point, but at a definite point, within the span of say five minutes, Ben Toy began to talk indiscriminately about anything that came into his head.

He talked about mathematics, about God—I think, about his parents in Texas, my nineteen-fiftyish oxblood loafers, lobotomies, Martin Luther King … all kinds of ridiculous, moronic things that didn’t coordinate.

It was scary, because I’d started to believe there was nothing really wrong with Toy.

“My mother used to dance in Reno, Nevada,” he spoke very seriously to me. “That’s why nobody in Potter County wanted to take her out for a goddamn celery soda.”

I slowly stood up, no shirt on or anything, and I called Asher.

He came, and then three more aides came running. They walked Toy back onto the hall, and he went quietly, meekly. I filially turned off the Sony, which had been silently going about its business.

Ronald Asher was closing the heavy quiet room door when I arrived on the hall. The other three aides and a nurse who was just a young girl were standing around with him.

“He broke off a fucking needle in his ass,” Asher said.

I gave him an uncomprehending look and peeked in through the observation window.

“Annie gave him the needle, and then he just flip-flopped over on it.”

“It came out,” the young nurse said.

“Jesus,” I said. “I don’t believe the way he just … went off. Poof.”

“Believe it,” the nurse smiled.

“I don’t know where Ben’s head is,” Asher said: “Shulman thinks he knows.”

“Too much Psilocybin,” a tall aide in a Levi’s shirt said.

“A lot of patients just let their minds run loose when they’re in here,” Asher said. “Some of them are crazy because it feels better is my theory. Fuck my theories though.”

Looking back through the observation window, I watched as Toy suddenly jumped up in the air. He floated on his back, then drop-kicked the screen window with his bare feet. He repeated this stunt several times, his back

whopping

the narrow mattress on each fall.

“It won’t hurt him,” Asher said without looking in. “I think it calms him down. Like the way little kids rock in their beds.”

The young nurse looked at me and shrugged.

“My daughter does that,” I said. “Rocks in her bed, I mean …”

The nurse asked me how old she was. We went back to the glass-encased station and joked our way back toward normalcy. The girl had never had a needle broken off on her before.

I’d walked to the hospital, and I walked back, cutting a diagonal across the grounds, then going into some woods.

I climbed a tall, forbidding fence at the end of the woods. Darted and stalked across the Long Island Expressway. Made private discoveries in the face of speeding headlights.

Back at the motel, I drew myself a steamy, hot bath. I climbed in and things slowly began to come back into perspective.

I remembered another mad scene I’d witnessed. It was in a snooker hall and gin mill in Frankfurt, Kentucky. (At that time, in ’62 I think, I was carrying a small pistol myself, so I was no great judge of madness.)

What happened was this.

A scarecrow-looking farmboy in the bar had decided he was going to sneak a dance with this other boy’s girl. They started dancing to this slow Elvis Presley song that was popular back then, “One Night” I think it was, and when the other boy saw what was happening, he walked up to the dancing couple, spit in the scarecrow’s face, and then stabbed him in the crotch area. Just that quick.

Everybody in the bar immediately crowded around the crumpled clothes and body on the dance floor, and with hot eyes and crying, and low whispers, they kept repeating around the circle that

Old Bean

had been

stoh-bbed.

If you had taken that word’s meaning from its tone, you’d have guessed that the pleasures of dance and whiskey had been too much for Bean, and that he’d passed out.

Pistol on and all, I’d nearly thrown up on the spot.

The news about the Harley Wynn photograph came while I was up to my neck in hot bathwater and suds. I was reading single pages out of Jeb Magruder’s book on his life & Watergate, then putting it to rest on the lip of the tub. I found it infuriating that he’d had the cunning to churn out the book so quickly.

The news came when I was melancholy, sentimental as country music, missing Nan and Cat and Janie Bug like close friends moved out of town.

It couldn’t have come at a better time if I’d been in charge of planning my own life.

The phone rang in the bedroom and I just let it ring. I thought it was Asher or that nurse checking on me.

It kept right on ringing, a little red light buzzing with it.