by Sean Ferrell
In Redbach’s bar these memories rushed back to me as I watched Mal. I stood quietly, thinking of the fortune I had read in the wood. My days of allowing Mal to boss me around were over. I didn’t know what I’d do. I didn’t know what grand plan I should have. I wanted to sit down. I was tired. I could barely move my right ankle when he finally got my foot free. Disgusted, I realized I’d been standing barefoot in puddles of beer.
Mal said, “Listen, you had fun tonight. Admit it.” He got the last of the nails out of my left foot and poured alcohol on my feet. “You don’t even bleed. Look at that.”
He was right. I moved my feet and couldn’t find any wet blood. Just a touch of red dried at the holes where the nails had driven into the floor.
“Just pull these out of my hands.”
Mal stood and rested the hammer on the bar. “Not until you tell me you had fun tonight.”
“This isn’t funny, Mal.”
“Say it.”
I chewed on the inside of my cheek and took in a deep breath. Someone had moved the ashtray back in front of me, right between my hands, and now I had no way of moving it. It stank, nearly as bad as I’m sure I did. I saw myself as if from above: small, and sad, and stuck like a roach in a trap, same as Mal; he just didn’t know it. Actually, he did know it. He just didn’t care. Or, worse, he was glad of it.
I said, “I’m sick of being in this shithole. I’m tired of these people coming in and staring.” I was exhausted, more than I’d ever been. I closed my eyes and readied myself for Mal’s reaction, for his defense of the indefensible. Then I said, “And I’m sick of you telling me what to do.”
It didn’t come. I counted to twenty, and it still didn’t come. I opened my eyes. Mal, quiet, ground his teeth, stared at me. I felt afraid and certain that Mal would do something to me. I could see it in the casual way he turned away, and as he looked over the dirty glasses and ran his hand across the edge of the bar, I thought he would turn and take the hammer and make me hurt. I didn’t feel pain, but he would try to make me. Then he did turn toward me, but his eyes dulled over and a smell rose up around us, salty and coppery. Blood. I could practically taste it. I looked down at my hands, spotted only little drips where the nails first broke through the skin. Mal reached for the hammer on the bar and that’s when I saw the cut. On the back of his hand, from his thumb to just past his wrist, a mouthlike gash opened at me. Blood came out and ran into a pool on the bar. It collected in the gutter and mixed with spilled beer and alcohol. It ran away from me.
I yelled for Redbach. Commotion outside, but no sign of him.
“What the hell?” Mal said. “I must have hit myself with the hammer.” His eyes swam. “It’s not fair. You get hardware put into you and nothing. Me, I bleed all to hell from just…You know, it does look like you’ve got holes in your hands and feet.” Mal was drunk and distracted and apparently happy to bleed on me. “From where you drive the nails in. That asshole earlier was partly right. It’s like you just have permanent piercings. You probably wouldn’t even feel the nails if you could feel pain.” Blood continued to run off his fingertips.
“Just get my hand free,” I said. He pulled the nails from my right hand, his blood dripping onto my hands and the wooden bar, then gave me the hammer. My left hand was stuck to the bar in a little pool of beer and daiquiri mix. I pulled the nails out of myself, something that had become second nature to me, like shaving. There is a sucking sound when nails come out of skin. It’s the skin trying to close up and keep you from bleeding to death.
Mal looked into the opening on his hand and said, “Look at this. You don’t even bleed. Me, I’m a gusher.”
I grabbed a towel from the bar and wrapped it around Mal’s hand. On our way out people wanted my autograph and Mal told them to go fuck themselves. One guy in a leather jacket wanted to punch me in the gut as hard as he could. Mal called him an asshole and said I wasn’t Harry fucking Houdini, who’d died after an unexpected blow to the stomach. Redbach asked me if we’d be back the next night.
We got into a cab without answering. The driver turned and smiled and I told him to get us to the nearest hospital. He looked at me like I’d just told the punch line to a bad joke.
“Hospital?” he asked, his accent thick. His hair was cut like Elvis Presley’s, and he wore sunglasses even though it was probably three in the morning.
“Emergency room,” I said, pointing at Mal’s hand. “Doctor.” I pantomimed a sewing motion. The driver turned away slowly, kept looking at me in the mirror, and pulled away from the curb. The heavy traffic surprised me, and we moved almost immediately behind a bus, too close to its ad for malt liquor.
“I could use some of that.” Mal leaned heavily on the door, the bloody towel tight against his hand.
Our cab followed the bus to the corner, then made a couple of rights. I watched the stragglers on the sidewalks, the last people who were wandering home. Some couples, but mostly people by themselves. There were young women with bags hanging from their shoulders. They walked past groups of men on street corners. All these men, from the ones dressed in expensive Italian shoes and shirts going home from the clubs to those looking through garbage cans, had the same look in their eyes as the women passed. Mal had that look tonight, I thought.
I turned to him and asked, “What the hell happened in there?”
Eyes closed and head back against the seat he said, “I cut my hand. What happened to you?”
The meter clicked upward. I said, “I can’t keep doing these crappy gigs. I can’t keep living in that shitty hotel.”
“Do whatever you want,” Mal said. “It was a mistake coming here.”
For an instant I thought he meant the bar and was going to agree, but when he refused to look at me I knew he meant something else. I didn’t say anything and after a moment, sensing I needed to hear more, he continued. “I never should have come with you to New York. It’s gonna kill me. Should have gone to LA like I wanted, but you had to follow that fucking business card. You’re gonna move on. You’re fine. You fit in anywhere. Not me. I’m still in the circus, only it ain’t in Texas. It’s right here, being your babysitter.”
I couldn’t see. I was drunk and angry, and either or both blinded me. I hoped the cabbie might accidentally drive us into the river or headlong into a light pole. I heard my teeth grind. I said, “I never asked you to do anything for me.”
His head bounced against the seat, his eyes still closed. “Didn’t you? Would you even be here if I hadn’t brought you? You’d still be in Texas. Probably still shoveling shit for Tilly, looking at that bloody card and saying, ‘What do you think it is, Mal? Do you think I might have rented the suit there?’ Couldn’t get past the card. Couldn’t get past Darla. If you’d listened to me and just paid that karma back on some other girl, you’d be fine. Instead…” He trailed off.
Car horns blared as we pulled up to the entrance of St. Vincent’s Hospital. Mal paid the cabbie with money from the nail-driving show. Blood on the bills hid dead men’s faces. Mine or his, who could tell? He handed the rest of the cash to me.
We walked around the waiting area, bathed in a mix of ammonia and mildew odors. The ceiling radiated wall-to-wall fluorescent lights and the air-conditioning vents blew a racket of cool air through the room. It wasn’t a hot night, and the cold air that poured over us raised goose bumps on my arms. Right by the door a man lay facedown on a gurney, a white sheet concealing whatever poked from his back. A woman leaning against the wall wore a T-shirt that said here we go again. The seating area was full, but no one looked sick. An old woman knitted while watching over two sleeping children, and farther down a group of men in green coveralls huddled around one another, whispering, bunkering themselves from the rest of the silent room. It looked like a crowd waiting for a bus, not a doctor. From another room someone cried out. One of the men in coveralls hung up a cell phone in a panic, but he didn’t get up.
Mal kept walking around the main desk. It sat in the center of the
room, like a giant donut. Near the desk a TV hung from the ceiling. Mal pointed at it. “Look at that. I think that’s you.” It was me. A home movie of me made back in Texas. The show must have been one of those send-us-your-tapes-and-we’ll-air-it-and-won’t-pay-you-a-dime programs. We stood there, staring up at me in front of a lion’s cage, until a man in scrubs approached and looked us up and down.
“What happened here?” he asked. He showed no surprise or amazement, no curiosity. He looked at a magazine he carried with him, folded back on itself and then in half, pinched to a clipboard as if to trick people into thinking he held only official medical documents.
Mal pulled open the blood-soaked towel and showed the doctor his cut. “I slipped while shaving,” he said, “and my friend was recently nailed to a bar and needs to be disinfected. He’s had his shots.”
The doctor looked at the cut, then at me, then at my feet. “You’re bleeding on my floor.”
I looked down. I’d left my shoes and socks at the bar. Bloody footprints on the tiled floor wandered in lazy circles around the donut in the middle and were punctuated with drips from both my hands.
“Well,” Mal said, “look at that. You do bleed.”
I looked at the young doctor and asked where we should go. “With all these people here. You’ve got to wait your turn.” Then he turned and walked away, reading his magazine.
We walked across the waiting area and found two seats that had opened up. I kept looking back at the TV, but it had gone to commercials. Mal unwrapped and retightened the towel on his hand. I watched as the blood on my hands and feet slowly dried.
“I don’t remember ever bleeding like this before,” I said. I was a little scared. I didn’t know if this meant something had happened to me. How many nail holes could a person have before it was too many?
Mal coughed into his hand. “I’m moving out when we leave here.”
I looked at him and didn’t say anything. I didn’t know what to say.
“No,” he said. “Forget that. You move out. I need that shitty little room. You’ll make big money in no time. I’ve got no place else to go.”
“Fine,” I said, and then I made my way across the room. My stomach growled and I felt slightly dizzy. I hadn’t had much to eat all day. I headed toward a table with coffee and cookies. On the TV my image popped back up, out of focus and shaking, about to perform the trick that drove me out of Texas.
My friendship with Mal ended just that quickly. He’d gone from being a guardian in Texas to abusing me in New York and now he’d kicked me out in an effort to get away from my success—if you could call being on a late-night video show success—angry that we’d headed east rather than west. I didn’t know where to go or what to do. I was hungry and there was food on the table in front of me. As I continued to it I bumped into the young doctor, only now he had a mop and a bucket. Revealed as not a doctor but the janitor, more concerned with the cleanliness of the floor than the suffering of those on it, he slapped water to tiles.
“Hey, asshole,” he said. “Quit walking around. You keep bleeding on my floor.” He pulled the mop after me as I walked across the room, all the way to the cookies, and smeared my bloody footprints with his dirty gray water that smelled like black cherry soda.
three
FOR A VERY brief moment after Mal kicked me out of our hotel room, I thought I would end up living on the streets. The idea didn’t scare me. The street just presented itself, without any other options around it. I left Mal at the hospital and took a cab to the hotel. On the way back it occurred to me that I held the money from my unexpected performance, so when I got to the hotel I stopped at the front desk to get a room of my own. I wondered if I’d ever had a room of my own.
The thin woman behind the glass, with her ringed eyes and beakish nose, looked like a strange, denuded bird on display. I thought she would never leave her cage, and it looked rarely cleaned. She asked if I wanted the room for the night or just for an hour.
“The night,” I said.
“Wait, you’re one of the guys in room seven, right?” She pulled out a piece of torn paper, a corner from a tabloid. “You got a phone call here while you was out.” She slipped the paper under the half-circle hole in the glass and on it I found, written in the neatest hand I’d ever seen, a simple, telegram-style message:
Michael. Agent.
Saw show. Must talk.
Please call.
The Manhattan phone number at the bottom looked important; somehow the digits all made sense together. I memorized them without trying.
Mal was right. I’d have little trouble finding money, an agent, or attention for doing what came naturally to me: inserting sharp and jagged objects into my skin.
The next morning I called the number to talk to Michael. Instead I talked to his enthusiastic assistant, Robert. Robert took my call as a great sign. He’d seen my “show” live and gotten my number from Redbach.
“I know Michael will be happy you called.” Robert spoke in a professionally manic voice. “You know, I showed him the tape. Even though it was, like, a copy of a copy of a copy, it was still pretty good. Michael agreed. We both thought you just have to have an agent.” He sounded like a prophet revealing the mysteries of life.
“Great.” I fought an urge to hang up. “Thanks.”
Michael’s office was in Times Square. The woman behind the desk, who under any other circumstance would have crossed the street to avoid my type, warmed to me as if I had diamonds falling from my pockets.
Alternating mirrors and movie and television posters lined the waiting room walls. I glanced around. My face flashed by in the mirrors. I sat down and buried my face in an issue of People.
When Robert came to get me he led me down a hall lined with more mirrors and posters. Only then did I realize how bad I looked. I had worn my suit because I really didn’t have any other clothes. Mal had lent me most of my other outfits. Now I was myself: crumpled, dirty. And the tear in the right pants leg from Caesar’s claws hadn’t repaired well.
“I’m so glad you called us.” Robert flashed smiles at me over his shoulder, a beacon as we wandered through a maze of halls to Michael’s office. “You know, I showed Michael the tape, and he loved it. He was shocked to find out you didn’t have an agent.” He said this as if he hadn’t told me the exact same thing when we spoke on the phone.
“Yeah. By the way, did you have to pay Redbach for my number?”
“Well, he made us buy the tape before he’d tell us.”
I asked what they’d seen on the tape. I had imagined it was me in Caesar’s cage. I was wrong.
“It’s you nailed to his bar. He sells them for twenty-five dollars.”
“I didn’t know there was a tape of that.”
“You mean there are other tapes?”
“Yeah, well, it could have been the one of me in a lion’s cage.”
Saying that brought the reaction people normally save for watching me pierce nails through my hands. Robert stopped short and a man in a much better suit than mine stood in a doorway, eyebrows arched and mouth gaping. Their excitement made me nervous. They looked at each other a moment, then Robert smiled and said, “Michael, this is him.”
Michael smiled back at Robert. It was some sort of infection. “Let’s go into my office.”
A window aimed up Broadway dominated the room. It was actually three windows that formed a slight arc, and the crowds on the street below flowed like a tide. The room felt like the bridge of a great ship plowing through the people. I imagined the building moving forward, the masses being left behind.
Michael and I sat in chairs facing the windows. We looked at each other over a small table with ice water pitchers and crackers. Robert brought a couple cups of coffee, then disappeared.
Michael reclined heavily into his chair, almost as if pushing back in order to tip it. His suit remained neat, even while sitting, and the sunlight coming through the window caught highlights in his slick hair. He treated the v
iew as something he’d seen too many times for too many days. A distraction. Me he watched. It wasn’t a gawk or a stare, which I normally received. Just an appraisal. I grew very aware of scabs and scars littering the skin between my fingers and thumbs. The staple holes along my neck and in my earlobes. The cuts on my lips from biting myself. The nicks on my face and neck from my razor. I could be so clumsy even while standing still. Even the cuts and punctures down my back and buttocks felt revealed. He took it all in, a judge of how I’d treated myself.
He remained silent.
“I’m not sure why I’m here,” I said.
He grinned. “That’s okay. I do.”
Another minute went by in silence and the chair no longer seemed as comfortable. Michael noticed my fidgeting and poured me a glass of water. “Most people would want to pitch you this or that,” he said. “I just want to tell you a story. You want to hear a story?”
“Sure.”
“It’s your story, actually. But I don’t think you know it as I do. You know your story one way, just as you lived it. But I know it as it’s presented right now, in one shot, just from the way you sit there, looking around and nervously jiggling your knees. I know it as the image of you as you are right now.”
He stood and removed his jacket, placed it on a hanger on the back of his door, retook his seat.
“You’re not really certain of where you’ve come from or how you got here. Everything is a bit overwhelming, scary even. You’re uncertain of whom can be trusted because you’ve been deceived in the past. But through all this uncertainty and deception, and sometimes good times, but often hard, you’ve had one thing, a gift, a talent that you have that no one else seems to have.”