For twenty-nine minutes and thirty seconds, stars, actors, dancers and technicians went through the motions of playing "Who He?" under a corpse with starting eyes and swollen tongue ... a victim of the savage, merciless warfare in our frontier town, murdered by the ferment in a man's mind.
I knew the corpse. I know what killed him. I'm still friendly with most of the cut-throats who watched him die. I've spoken to them, questioned them, and heard what they couldn't say as well as what they said. I've pieced out all the strands that wove themselves into a rope around a man's neck. This is the story of what happened....
CHAPTER II
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.