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The Last Angry Man
 About the Book
About The Movie
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Preview
Chapter 1
Hours before the nightbell had commenced its furious buzzing he had been awake, neither mildly awake nor half asleep, but wide-eyed and alert, his mind crammed with the photographic clarity of insomnia. It was an unbearably hot night, hot as only a square of attached slum houses can get, the heat stewing and intensifying in the crib of ramshackle backyards on which his bedroom window looked out. The oversized window fan (he had installed it himself) was no help either. In the early morning stillness it clattered like a jackhammer.
The buzzing had caused him to start, jerking him to a sitting position in the old double bed and triggering an arthritic spark in his lower spine. The luminous face of the dresser clock read three-thirty and he cursed softly and considerately, although he was the only one in the house.
"Aaah, the bastard. The bastards won´t let you live."
Sighing, he plopped back on the moist pillow, hoping that the bell-ringer would grow discouraged and return to his tenement warren. Normally it was his wife´s function to trudge to the front window and advise the caller The doctor is not in, he has gone for the evening. It was a small lie, and few of them ever believed it, but it worked most of the time. But his wife was at the beach for the summer; if the visitor persisted he would have no choice but to undertake the distasteful journey himself. He was too old and too tired for night work. Why couldn´t they get that into their thick skulls?
"My dear lousy patients," he said half aloud. "Why don´t they bother some young shtunk of a specialist? Why always me at three-thirty?"
By now he realized that the waiting game would not deter the nocturnal intruder. The buzzing continued, in long agonized peals, in brief bzzt-bzzt-bzzts, and occasionally, to his horror, in the unmistakable beats of "shave and a haircut, two bits."
The impudence brought him up sharply again, and he probed for his slippers at the bedside, swearing steadily and quietly, and, somewhat irrelevantly, framing a theory of nightbell ringers. The shorter and politer the buzz, the greater chance it was a "regular," someone he had known for years, on a genuinely urgent mission. When they buzzed wildly they were usually transients, people whose own physicians (probably fancy internists and pediatricians) refused night calls, and in a last desperate attempt tried his bell simply because he had been around for forty years. The worst of all were the uncontrollables, the addicts, alcoholics, and loonies, like the one now camped on his stoop.
Padding across the cramped hallway, through the narrow living-dining room, he decided, again without too much pertinence, that it was the fault of the specialists. "The lousy professors should drop dead," he muttered, "let them go out at night."
Again, he heard the dum-di-de-dum dum, dum-dum. Why, the rat was enjoying a Halloween prank! A neighbor´s dog unloosed a resonant protest, and across the street, somewhere in the cage of Negro tenements, a window slammed open. He held the undone pajama string in one hand (finding time to denounce the thieving manufacturers who put out such defective merchandise) and peered through the copper screen. It was an old-fashioned screen, heavily framed in wood and bolted securely on all four sides. Even with his head pressed against it, he could not see the top step; the caller´s identity was hidden from him. Below, Haven Place lay peaceful under its normal patina of filth. The skeleton of a ruined sofa, set afire that afternoon by little children, lay bathed in Consolidated Edison lamplight in front of his car. The awareness that it would remain there until he supplied a liberal tip to the street cleaners distressed him briefly.
"Who´s there?" he called down. "What the hell is all that ringing about? Haven´t you people any consideration?"
Abruptly, the buzzing stopped. From below, the unseen ringer called back.
"You de doctor?"
"That´s none of your business. Get out of here."
"You de doctor?"
"You´ll find out who I am, you little shtunk! I´ll come down with a baseball bat and you´ll know who I am! Get away from here before I call the police."
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