by Dana Czapnik
This fucking bar is small and narrow and dimly lit and covered in dust, and the ceiling is low because it’s located inside one of the entrances to the subway station at Times Square. And the tiny, disgusting bathroom is located right next to the bar. I mean it—right next to the bar. And the door never closes all the way, so the whole bar smells vaguely of piss and ammonia, though I suppose that smell could be wafting in from the subway. The only lights above the bar are two red light bulbs, each dangling by a wire. Stacked above all the bottom-shelf liquors are various artists’ renderings of a hammer and sickle, including one mixed-media piece by Violet, and worn pamphlets of Marxist literature, though I don’t think anyone who owns or patronizes the bar is actually a communist. Sometimes they play music from the Red Army choir over the speakers, but now they’re playing Tom Waits, and it’s very possible that the only albums Glasnost actually owns are Rain Dogs, Numbing Agent’s demo tape, and the Red Army choir’s greatest hits. They don’t have any coasters, so the wooden bar is covered in stains from the condensation from people’s glasses. I trace my finger around one of the rings and wonder whether everything—people, places, art, political movements, the whole gorgeous roiling human adventure—eventually all becomes kitsch.
Max throws her arm around Violet’s shoulder. “This girl’s the best, ain’t she?” she says to me, then purrs into Violet’s ear, “You’re so sexy when you’re angry and bitter and jealous. That’s crude oil for an artist. Fuel, baby, fuel. Can I bite you now? Please? I think you could use a bite on the neck from someone who really loves you.”
As Violet puts her hand over Max’s face to push her away jokingly, I notice behind her, through the packed bodies in the bar, that Shaw has a girl with long, dark hair pressed against a wall. And he’s making out with her. For a moment, I want to protect Violet and I don’t want her to look because I know that would hurt her, because she loves Shaw the way I love Percy, and I want to save her from humiliation. But how can I let him get away with that? By protecting her, I’m also implicitly condoning his behavior.
“Vi.” I nod my head in the direction of Shaw. She swings around, and her huge puffy blond fro creates aftershocks in the air. Shaw pulls away from the girl and turns around. I can tell by his face he’s seen Violet, and he starts pushing his way through the crowd toward us.
Max watches the scene unfold, and she leans toward me, grabs my face, looks deep into my eyes, and says, “Prince Charming was a necrophiliac and had a foot fetish. Remember that.”
“Let’s go,” Violet says, and she grabs her worn leather backpack and pulls me out of the bar and up the steps of the station, leaving Max behind laughing, cruelly, as if to say, I told you so, on her barstool perch.
“Violet, wait.” Shaw, the chain smoker, is panting from the one flight of steps. “She kissed me, man! This is bullshit.”
At the top of the stairs, I realize how very drunk Violet is. She’s swaying, and her eyelids are at half-mast. Suddenly, she kicks Shaw in the shin, and I think she connects the steel tip of her motorcycle boot directly with bone, because he crumples to the floor writhing in pain and doesn’t let go of his leg.
“What the fuck, Vi?”
Violet stands over him, taking no pity. She leans into his face and whispers, “You’re thirty, you know that?” and then stubs her cigarette out on his used leather jacket, turns, grabs my arm, and pulls me away.
I look behind me as I walk to watch Shaw, to make sure he’s okay, because it’s totally possible that Violet may have broken his leg, but I see him get up and inspect the hole she burned in his coat.
“You fucking bitch,” he screams after us. “Don’t ever call me again, Violet . . . Violet?!”
Violet has her hand in the nook of my arm and she pulls me to her new apartment, three avenues away, and she keeps mumbling to herself something like, “I can’t believe I’m still in high school, I’m still in high school, it’s all still high school,” which I don’t really understand.
She’s practically despondent once we get to her stoop. I have to dig through her bag to find her keys. The entryway door is stuck, so I push at it with my whole body to open it and I get a little dirt on my dress. We walk up the four flights of stairs, and I open the apartment door for her as she sulks against the doorframe. As soon as I open the Murphy bed, she flops onto it face first. I notice that scattered on the floor are six-inch-by-six-inch squares of a painting on canvas that’s been cut up. I pick a square up off the floor and see it’s a section of the lips and chin and earlobe of Venus. I want to cry for her. It was a masterpiece, a thing of beauty. And now it’s totally destroyed.
Violet faces me, her cheek smushed against the bed, and sees me holding the piece of canvas. I look at her as if to say, Why? I let the square go, and it floats back onto the floor. I pull her boots off and lie down next to her.
“It’s all over for me, Lucy-Loose.” Her voice is muffled by the sheets. She turns over so we’re both lying on our backs and looking up at the ceiling, with its cracking paint. “My best days are over.”
“Vi, you do realize that you’re only twenty-five? And, you’re, like, living the dream. You’re an artist. You’re totally independent and living the life you want. You answer to no one.”
“It’s all a sham. I’ve been working a nine-to-five job at a marketing firm. Designing prescription-drug brochures. That’s how I can afford this place. I didn’t want to be a starving artist anymore, so now I work forty hours a week for thirty-five thou a year, health insurance, and a fucking 401(k).” She rubs her eyes. “They don’t even match my contributions. I sold my dreams for fourteen hundred bucks a month, one free pap smear a year, and a prescription for Ortho Tri-Cyclen, which I’m pretty sure is making me crazy. I am the cheapest whore in New York. Don’t tell anyone, okay?”
“Who would I tell?”
“The worst part of it is that I didn’t live my art. Max—Max lives her art. I do not. Y’know Sartre was wrong, right? Hell isn’t other people. Hell is yourself.”
I get up and go over to the sink and fill a glass with water for her. The water in the glass is murky and gray.
“Let it settle,” I say as I hand the glass to her as she sits up. But she ignores me and gulps it down.
“Life was supposed to be a car commercial, y’know? Great soundtrack, leather seats, empty roads. But the sad reality is that most of adulthood is dealing with D-bags like Shaw and people you don’t like but you have to be nice to for the sake of civility. And the rest is paperwork. Filling out paperwork. Standing in line to process paperwork. Waiting on hold to correct incorrect paperwork. Paperwork. That’s adulthood for you, in a word. Who knew being a free spirit was going to be such a grind?”
“This is the whiskey talking. You’ll be over all this in the morning, I promise. There’s something about the combination of alcohol and the night in New York. I think it has something to do with all the asphalt. The concrete. The pavement. The blacktop. That we have so many words for it . . . the way the Eskimos have so many words for snow. It is our inescapable atmos—”
“Being a New Yorker is a syndrome. When you’re in New York, you can’t wait to get out, and once you’re out of New York, you can’t wait to get back. That’s why no one here is happy. You know where we should move? Canada. I’d be so bored there. There’re so many plain people with straight hair, but, y’know, maybe it would be better for me. I don’t know any Canadians who have to take antidepressants. Maybe that’s the secret to happiness: move to the Great White North, to the sticks, and be bored off your ass. Live off the land, you know? Kill your own chickens.”
“What are you talking about?”
“I don’t know. Where’s Shaw? I need Shaw. He’d understand.”
“You beat him up outside the bar.”
“Oh, that’s no big deal. That’s just what we do.”
I can’t help but giggle. “He was making out with a girl. In front of you.”
Violet nods and smoothes her hair back. “It
’s a sad day when you finally realize that not everyone you love has to love you back. It’s a lesson I keep on forgetting I’ve learned before.”
* * *
Eventually, Violet falls asleep. It feels important that I stay with her until she does. I know I could crash with her, but I’ve got a restlessness in me and I need to be somewhere I can breathe.
I head down to the street, but who do I find sitting on the bottom of the stoop? I clunk my uncomfortable strappy heels that are giving me blisters in at least four spots down the concrete steps. Shaw looks up at me with a pathetic expression on his face. He pats the concrete next to him, so I sit down.
“So I fucked up pretty bad, huh?”
“Uh . . . yeah.”
“It’s not like we’re in a serious relationship or anything,” he says defensively.
“Are you really thirty?”
Shaw reaches into his jacket pocket and takes out his pack of Marlboros. He’s got four cigarettes left in the pack, and he offers me one. I shake my head. “No, thanks. I don’t smoke.” He lights a match and watches the tip of it flare before he puts it to the end of his cigarette. In the glow of the streetlamps he looks exactly like he intends to. Maybe still waters are still because there’s no current underneath the surface, and depth has nothing to do with it.
“I’m thirty-one.”
“Don’t you want to, like, settle down by now? You’re kind of a grown-up, aren’t you?”
“No one grows up. People just age.”
“Okay, so if you have no interest in settling down or just being with her, why are you even here?”
“I don’t know. Violet and I, we’re like . . . like . . .” He makes two fists and repeatedly punches them against each other and pulls them apart as though a miniature bomb is exploding in his hands. “We both have very sensitive self-destruct buttons.”
“But do you love the pilgrim soul in her and the sorrows of her changing face?”
He looks at me, surprised. “Ah, you know Yeats?”
“Doesn’t everybody?”
Shaw sort of laughs through his nose and nods his head as he stares at a car trying to parallel park in a space that’s too small across the street. “You’ve got about a ten-year window for believing everyone thinks like you. Enjoy it.”
“Um, okay. But, do you? Y’know—love the pilgrim soul and all that?”
“What does that even mean? What in the hell is a pilgrim soul? No one ever loves someone the way people are loved in poetry. You have to find a more realistic standard-bearer for love, otherwise you’re going to spend the rest of your life very disappointed.”
Oof. A punch to the soft spot inside me. He takes another drag off his cigarette.
“Those cause cancer, you know. Says so right here on the package.” I pick up the pack from the stoop and look at the surgeon general’s warning and am about to show it to him until I read it and realize it’s not the one about cancer but the one about birth defects.
“Everything causes cancer now. Even the sun.” He looks at his watch. “Hey, listen, you know what time it is? It’s, like, one in the morning. Don’t you think you should get home?”
“Yeah, probably.”
“Let me put you in a cab.”
“I don’t have enough cash to make it all the way home.”
“How much you think it’ll be, ten bucks? Here.” He reaches into his back pocket like a hero and pulls out his wallet. He opens it and finds it empty. A big gaping mouth of zero. “Shit, I’m all out too. Let’s see if we can borrow some from Violet.”
“No, it’s okay. I’d rather take the subway. I don’t want to wake her. She’s finally sleeping.”
“I’ll walk you there.” I can tell he doesn’t want to walk me. That he’s putting on a new mask to see if it fits—the one that projects, Hey, I’m a good guy. But I see through the whole thing.
“It’s only like two avenues. I’ll be fine.”
“You sure?” I nod. “Man, you city kids. You think you’re invincible.”
That’s because we are.
He walks up the steps and feels in his pockets, looking for his keys. I hear him mumble, “Shit,” and then, without a thought, he buzzes Violet’s apartment, and I’m ready to go up there and strangle him. No one responds, and I’m hoping all that cheap whiskey in her system will drown out the noise and she’ll sleep through it. But he buzzes again, holding down the button for a good ten seconds.
“What do you want?” The top layer of her voice is angry, but beneath that is the distinct inflection of resignation.
Shaw leans his body into the speaker and puts his hand gently up to the metal as though it were Violet’s real face.
“I’m really sorry. Can I come up? I forgot my key.”
“You forgot it or you lost it?”
“I don’t know. I probably lost it.”
About ten seconds pass in silence.
Don’t do it, Violet! Don’t!
“Vi . . . I have nowhere else to go.”
She could say, “You should’ve thought about that before,” or “Good. Enjoy sleeping on the streets, asshole. Hope someone jumps you and steals your shitty coat.” But Violet has a heart, which, it seems to me, is a horrible thing to have. And because of that, she lets him into the building without a word of admonishment. He exhales as he pushes the door open. I see him struggle to open it as I did earlier. I shake my head as I leave.
“Hey, Lucy?” I look back at Shaw in the doorway. In the shadows, his wrinkles are far more pronounced, and I wonder if he’s telling the truth about his age or if his looks are just the product of some hard living. But even in the shadows, it’s obvious that the laugh lines are far more prominent than the worry lines, and they always will be for a guy like Shaw, who’s good looking enough and charming enough to surf the world on everyone else’s charity. “Don’t be mad at her.”
“I’m not mad at her. She’s just feeling lonely.”
His face falls. “Hey, do me a favor, call us when you get home.”
“Sure.”
“Promise?”
“Yeah, yeah. Sure. I’ll call.”
Later, when I get home, I do call Violet’s place to let him know I’m okay, but the phone just rings and rings and rings.
* * *
I usually avoid Times Square. Aside from our attempt at watching the ball drop, the only time I think I’ve walked through it in recent years was when I went to pick up my fake ID with Percy last fall. But Times Square at one in the morning, after the tourists are gone and the men hawking their fake Rolexes have retired for the night having lost their audience of suckers, is a different place. The adrenaline-soaked desperation that usually fills the atmosphere is replaced by the last morsels of despair, the globules of oil you find lining the bottom of a Chinese take-out box. A place full of nothings. After my wreck of a night, I belong here.
I’d expected to see the usual cast of characters: the bridge-and-tunnel crowd stumbling from the subway, high from their night at Roseland Ballroom or Tunnel, making their way to Port Authority to catch the last bus home, the depressing, raggedy prostitutes with the fuck-me boots and empty, made-up faces, the drunks, the louts, the bums . . .
But it turns out not to be that way at all. No prostitutes. No used syringes or dirty condoms decorating the sidewalks. No Black Israelites packing up their signs and soapboxes. No peep shows or dealers. Just me, in my prom dress and strappy shoes, and some other wanderers walking in some antiseptic, daydreamed version of New York on a lot in Hollywood, or maybe walking in the calm of the eye of a storm. A man in a torn-up army coat holding a sign written with ballpoint pen on a piece of cardboard that reads “Help a Vietnam Vet” says, “I like the way the lights shine in your dress,” as I walk by him. I glance at his face for a moment and see he’s around the same age as Shaw. He looks like an extra. He probably picked the coat up at the army store, the same place I bought my book bag. Or maybe he bought the coat at Urban Outfitters, and I wonder who are th
e fools that drop coins into this man’s cup.
I head down into the subterranean cathedrals of the Times Square subway station, and there’s the rumble of a train as it approaches. I race to catch it, narrowly making it into the first car before the doors close.
It’s one of the old red cars with a door with a window in the front. I stand against it, my face pressed up against the glass. I watch the moldy gray steel beams holding up the sidewalks above us go by as the train begins to slowly accelerate on its rickety wheels. I could sit down, but I’m in a pensive mood and want to watch the train barrel through the maze. Riding the subway in those red cars with the gray seats feels like being on a wooden roller coaster or on a creaky wooden ship. I imagine I’m the figurehead and I feel the sea salt and the wind whipping at my green satin prom dress, feeling less like I’m destined for golden shores and more like I’m lost on the ocean. There are so few of the red trains left, I miss them and their unintelligible graffiti. They feel like some sort of fading artifact found buried in a fossilized version of my past.
There are towns in that imaginary place I hear about in the news all the time, that place called the Midwest, with the flash floods and the brownouts and the telephone lines that get taken out by trees and lightning. There are towns there that I bet never change. People are born in those towns and then they grow up there and then they move away and then they return periodically for different reasons, and they find an inarticulate comfort in the store on the corner that is always there. And the football fields that still have drainage problems in that one spot. And how the potholes never get filled and the place always smells the same—of pine or moss or oil.