So what do I do, I said, With this carpet?
There’s a day for bulk pickup and a number to call, but I don’t know them, she said. If you just leave this shit out here, Ricardo will get a citation and he’ll have your ass. If Ricardo don’t kill you right out, he’ll put a voodoo curse on your fucking ass so you wish you were dead, and don’t say I didn’t warn you.
But I can’t live with this cat-shit smell, I said. And the cat hair. How many cats did you have in there?
I don’t know what you’re talking about, Mrs. Lupino said, And I don’t care, she said. So go fuck yourself.
Mrs. Lupino slammed her window down and stood at the window and kept on yelling at me, cats crawling all over her.
I looked both ways on the street for Ricardo, the super, the voodoo custodian who was going to put a voodoo curse on my fucking ass.
As I looked, there was a sound, a huge roar down the street. An orange Dumpster crashed down off a truck onto the asphalt.
The way I did it was I rolled up sections of carpet and sections of foam pad. I walked like I knew what I was doing, walking causually around with carpet and foam pads under my arm. When I got to the Dumpster, I kept walking, didn’t break my stride, just tossed the sections of carpet and foam pad into the Dumpster and walked on like I had never seen a stained beige cat-piss saturated carpet and crusty foam pad in all my life. Did that eleven times, then bought a cup of coffee at Café 103. The jukebox was playing my favorite Blondie song about the monster that ate everything. No Charlie 2Moons. I finished the coffee and returned to the scene of my crime.
Two guys were standing in the Dumpster, and the back gate of the Dumpster was open. One of the two guys, the one who was probably Ricardo the voodoo custodian, said he was going to fucking kill the motherfucker who’d dumped that motherfucking shit in there.
Didn’t stop, didn’t look, just kept walking.
New York drop-dead fuck-you was easier than I thought.
THE REFRIGERATOR LOOKED like an old ’53 DeSoto. I moved it out from the wall, and cockroaches and mice went every which way. Had to stop and roll a cigarette. Hundreds of crusty scurryings back into vasty dark. Same with under the sink. Under the sink it was alive. Fuck roach motels, I needed a roach grenade.
I unplugged the DeSoto and filled the garbage can with four jumbo kosher pickle jars, mostly juice, a crusted jar of Grey Poupon, a box of Jiffy mix, six cans of opened cat food, and whatever else was in the refrigerator. I carried the garbage out and dumped it in the cans out front. Then I carried out what was in the freezer—didn’t check to see what was inside the four foil-wrapped bundles—just pried the bundles from the glacier in the freezer, carried them out, and dumped them, ice and all, into a garbage can.
When I got back from the hardware store, there was an old man sitting on the sidewalk. He had taken all the jars from the garbage can and set them around him. He was dipping a pickle into the Grey Poupon and he ate the pickle. The four frozen bundles were stacked next to him: unwrapped frozen cats, thawing puddles onto the sidewalk.
Hardwood floor was under the beige cat-piss carpet. Brillo scrub and Murphy Oil Soap made it shine but didn’t take away the stink.
* * *
ONE NIGHT, I think it was the night after I scrubbed my beige fake-tile linoleum kitchen floor, I heard somebody singing. All the windows open, sitting on the toilet reading New Yorker cartoons. The apartment was the color of the sunset. I crawled on my hands and knees through the apartment on my shiny hardwood floor to the corner by the window, peeked out.
Ruby was standing in the rectangle of earth where I’d plant the cherry tree. He was playing a guitar and his hair was wet, slicked down, looking like he’d just showered.
Come down, come down from your Ivory Tower, Ruby sang. It’s cold, so cold, in your Ivory Tower, and warm, so warm in my heart.
On the hardwood floor, leaning up against the wall, I was rolling a cigarette. Ruby couldn’t see me. My mother’s nerves.
I was hiding.
The tracks on Ruby’s arms, the purple bumps. His breath when he was close, something sweet like flavored mouthwash or fresh gum. There was something else about the sweet.
The truth was, Ruby was a heroin-addicted hippie with skin problems.
Ruby was a ne’er-do-well.
I couldn’t have sex with a ne’er-do-well, or anybody. Male, female, dildo, vibrator, dog, cat, goat. Personne. No sex for me, none.
Not since Charlie.
Jamais.
My rolled cigarette was in the palm of my hand. I didn’t light it. Outside, Ruby sang something Italian. Mario Lanza wavy opera voice loud on East Fifth Street. When Ruby stopped singing, somebody clapped.
Silence from Ruby for a long time. Then—not for me to hear—just like he was talking to himself, Ruby said, William of Heaven, what am I going to do with you?
THE BATHROOM WAS just big enough to turn around in, a big sag in the floor at the base of the toilet, one corner of the shower unit duct-taped, a beige plastic curtain, scum-brown toilet bowl, one narrow opaque window. Cat hair in the shower, in the sink, a cat-hair rug around the toilet. Behind the bathroom door, the full-length mirror screwed to the door whanged my body out in bulges, the light from the fluorescent halo on the ceiling unrelenting from above, light you should never look at yourself in the mirror in.
The shower curtain was held together by mildew. When I pulled it back, a cockroach went up my pant leg. I yelled like a murder victim, and just like that I was naked from the waist down, shaking out my pants, checking my butt crack and balls.
That called for another cigarette.
I fixed the toilet so it would flush, swept the kitty litter and cat shit out of the shower and from behind the toilet. No way that bowl would ever not be brown. Under the toilet the beige fake-tile linoleum curled up; under the linoleum, dry rot. Sprayed the dry rot with Raid.
The on-sale paint was red, real red, the red like lipstick. I had to buy a ladder, too. I started with the ceilings first. Then the walls in the front part. The red paint onto the yellow tobacco-stained walls, the line where the red paint stopped and the tobacco yellow began, made me want to throw up.
About halfway, I started running out of red paint, so I bought two gallons of cheap white and mixed the white in with the red. The color of your cock after choking the chicken. The red-pink paint on the tobacco-yellow walls was even worse.
The worst was the pink in the bathroom. The bathroom was the last room and the bottom of the paint can, so there were streaks of white and streaks of red.
THE DAY I painted the bathroom, my red answering machine clicked on.
It is this way. To admit ignorance is the highest knowledge, Ruby’s voice said, It is the necessary condition for all learning. Leave a message. Beep.
It was Ruby.
Autumn Sonata, Ruby said.
There was a siren going by on Ruby’s end, and the traffic was loud.
I went to pick up, then didn’t pick up.
It’s this movie, Ruby said, About a mother, Ingrid Bergman, and her daughter, Liv Ullmann, and Liv is pissed at Ingrid because Ingrid was such a shitty mother.
Sounded like Ruby struck a kitchen match against the telephone speaker and deep-inhaled.
That’s when Ingrid Bergman says this great thing to Liv Ullman, Ruby said. Ingrid says she’s forgotten her life. Her life just passed her by somehow and the reason, she said, was because she didn’t have a Talent for Reality.
What a Talent for Reality is, my dear William of Heaven, Ruby said, Is acknowledging that you’re here and remembering it. And those two things—being present in your moments and then remembering your moments—is the only way you can make it in Wolf Swamp.
I’m a lot like Ingrid, Ruby said.
But there’s still hope for you, Ruby said.
It’s a Bergman film—Ingmar Bergman, not Ingrid, Ruby said. Ingrid’s just in it. Every once in a while you can catch it over at the Film Forum.
Autumn Sonata,
Ruby said. Let’s you and me go see it sometime, OK?
Ruby, beloved, beloved Ruby.
You were already dead. I was still dead.
A talent for reality, I had not.
THE CHEAPEST PLACE for futons was on Sixth Avenue. The guy who sold me the futon was a Sikh and had his head wrapped in a turban. Eighty-nine dollars. The futon was covered with plastic. I set the futon on the sidewalk bent like a horseshoe; then I crawled into the bend, stood up, adjusted the futon on my head, and walked home carrying the futon on my head, only able to see a couple of feet in front of me. Three blocks and five avenues. One hundred degrees that day. The worst was the plastic rubbing against my head and neck. I should never have taken Eighth Street, with its narrow sidewalks.
Got called a stupid motherfucker at least a hundred times.
Fuck you, I said back a hundred times, but I don’t think anybody heard me.
PLAIN WHITE SHEETS on the futon and a white pillowcase on the feather pillow. The army blanket folded down the way Bobbie liked it. Next to the futon, my ashtray—an old green plate I found on the street. Next to the green plate, on a chipped white plate, a cone of incense burning, Mountain Pine. Mountain Pine still no match for City Cat. Next to the white plate, the oscillating fan. Next to the oscillating fan the red telephone. Next to the red telephone, the red answering machine.
The table in the front window. I used the ladder for a chair. I found the table next to the garbage cans in the middle of the block on East Fifth between First and Second, next to the Ninth Precinct—a chrome Father Knows Best table plain as day, out on the sidewalk.
Interesting juxtaposition, architecturally, I thought—the table and the ladder in front of the window.
Out the back window, across the courtyard, was a smaller building, three floors. One night when I looked out, the lights were all on on the bottom floor, soft rose-colored light. A man sat reading a magazine in a wingback armchair, under a lamp, by a table. He wore a starched white shirt with the sleeves rolled up, and a striped tie loosened at the neck. His hair was black and slicked back like he’d just showered. He wasn’t wearing pants. Through the opening of his shirt at the bottom, the white of his underwear. The black hair on his legs was the same as the black hair on his arms. He wore shoes, shiny black dress shoes, and argyle socks, and garters around the calves of his legs. Newspapers spread out all around him on the floor.
Just like that, like he knew I was watching, he pulled his white jockey shorts down to his knees, opened his knees wide, stretching the white shorts, and started jerking off. The magazine fell to the floor. The man stopped, pumped again, and then quick grabbed for the telephone, cradled the receiver in his neck, dialed a number with his free hand.
My red telephone rang.
E.T., phone home.
But it’s not the truth.
The man talked into the phone, arching his body up and up, his shiny black dress shoes on the newspaper, pointing his cock down, splashing onto the newspaper.
Then he hung up and just sat there and stared at the floor. I could see his heart beating in his chest and belly, he was that close. Then the man pulled up his legs under him, curled himself into the chair, reached for the light, and turned the light out.
TO THE LEFT of the eleven cast-iron steps at 205 East Fifth Street, three cement steps go down to the ground-floor entrance. There’s a glass door there with a poster, a picture of the Sacred Heart of Jesus. Jesus points to his bloody heart that’s on fire, his heart clutched by a crown of thorns more like barbed wire. What the poster says in swirly letters just opposite the Sacred Heart of Jesus is STRANDED BEINGS SEARCHING FOR GOD.
When you get up closer to the poster, you can read about the revival meeting for Charismatic Catholics that was held in October of 1978.
Then there’s the three Polaroids across the bottom.
Under the first Polaroid it says: Woman Being Possessed by the Devil. The woman’s black hair is sticking up and she’s not wearing makeup and her eyes are rolling up into the top of her head and she’s wearing a gunnysack.
Under the second Polaroid it says: Woman Being Healed by the Word of the Lord. A priest is holding his hands over the woman’s head and her eyes are still rolled up, but her hands are folded the way when you pray.
Under the third Polaroid it says: Woman Healed by the Word of the Lord, Alleluia! The woman is smiling and she’s looking right at you and there’s a pink bow in her hair and her hair is a pageboy and she’s wearing a pink dress.
MRS. LUPINO OPENED her door when I opened my door on my way to the Laundromat.
I know what they’re doing downstairs, Mrs. Lupino said and raised her swoops of eyebrow pencil.
The devil is gathering forces, Mrs. Lupino said.
No Charlie 2Moons at the Laundromat. The heat inside was worse because of the dryers and the smell of detergent and that fresh-smell stuff you throw in the dryer with your clothes. The robin’s-egg-blue walls and beige linoleum, the tubes of fluorescent light, unrelenting from the acoustic-tile ceiling.
The line of chairs down the middle of the room was orange and curvy plastic. Everyone was smoking. The washing machines all going, the dryers. Three or four big black flies bouncing inside the windows.
All the washing machines were full except for three that were broken. The bulletin board next to the change machine had signs about a lost cat, Tai Chi classes, and an apartment sale; free Drake College Take Control of Your Life brochures; photographs of missing children.
I changed my five-dollar bill into dollars and my dollars into quarters, and on the last dollar the change machine ripped me off for seventy-five cents.
It was noisy in the Laundromat, plus the woman attendant didn’t speak English, so I was shit out of luck.
A couple of times, when a washing machine went into the last cycle, I grabbed my duffel bag and started toward the machine, but—twice this happened—just as I got there somebody stepped in front of me.
Finally I got to a machine in time. I turned around, leaned against the washing machine, held my arms out in front of it.
In all the world, I am standing in front of a beige washing machine in a robin’s-egg-blue room that’s too hot, unrelenting fluorescence from above, sun through the dirty front windows squint-bright, Tide, Era, Downy Fabric Softener, cigarette smoke, sweaty bodies, orange curvy plastic chairs, flies buzzing.
Two men and two women—four people—just trying to get their wash done like me, were standing right there, ready to pounce on the washing machine I held my hands in front of. Four people staring at me, white people, nice, probably good educations—a philosophy major, maybe, physical therapist, movie extra, office temp—staring at my washing machine, ready with their laundry bags and detergents and fabric softeners, waiting for me to make my move.
The problem was, at the washing machine next to the one I was guarding, the guy was taking his wash out—so now there were two washing machines available that I was putting my body in front of, stretching my arms out over.
The problem was, I was pressed against the washing machines and my duffel bag was over on the orange curvy plastic chair, too far away to stretch to.
Hell of a fix. Up Shit Creek. In a world of hurt.
These are my beige washing machines and you can’t have them, I said.
It’s been over an hour, I said.
It was no use. I was the baby rabbit. They were the wolves.
My voice was loud and each word that came out of my mouth was a complete word, an uttered word, not stuttered.
You better watch your asses, I said, I’m a Crossover, I said, And whatever happens to me, happens because I’m afraid of it happening.
Then: To admit ignorance is the highest form of knowledge, I said. It is the necessary condition for all learning.
Then: Tony Orlando and Dawn, I said.
The two men went down first, back to their orange curvy plastic chairs. The women didn’t advance but they didn’t retreat either. The one woman looke
d over to the other woman.
Fools rush in where wise men never go, I said.
My mother never loved any of her children, I said.
Then: Famous potatoes, I said.
The two women went back to their orange plastic curvy chairs, sat down.
New York drop-dead fuck-you.
One step, two steps, three steps over to my duffel bag, dragged my duffel bag over to my washing machines.
No Charlie 2Moons in the Laundromat, but Rose was there. I hadn’t met him yet. But I remember his black hole in the fluorescence. Rose was sitting at the end of the line of plastic curvy chairs, staring at me over his rhinestoned cat’s-eyes reading spectacles. His hair was a blond shag. Baggy colorful Bermudas. Long huge black feet, perfect toenails. Thongs. He was smoking a cigarette, fatter than American cigarettes, no filter. French. His one leg crossed over the other, the leg bouncing. He was reading a magazine, The Atlantic, his T-shirt swimming-pool blue with red letters. The T-shirt said FUCK APARTHEID.
LIFE CAFÉ IS called Life Café because all the walls are covered with Life magazine covers: Dwight Eisenhower, Vivien Leigh, Susan Hayward, Dag Hammarskjöld, Adlai Stevenson, Elizabeth Taylor, the Atom Bomb.
The people at Life Café—hair the way I had mine in the sixties. All of them in black, every once in a while a flannel checkered shirt. Vegans: beans and rice, carrot juice, bottled water.
No Charlie 2Moons in Life Café.
Ruby wouldn’t stop calling, so I figured if I went out, had lunch with Ruby, talked sense to him, that Ruby would leave me alone.
If wishes were horses then beggars would ride.
Ruby and I sat at the table in the alcove that was the smoking section of the restaurant. Right above Ruby’s head was Lana Turner the way she looked in Imitation of Life. Lana Turner was staring at me. Ruby ordered coffee and a cinnamon roll and I ordered a carrot muffin and cappuccino.
Ruby was dressed the same as last time—all in red, shiny red secondhand polyester, a shirt collar airplane wings flying out from under his chin. Red polyester pants with lumpy knees, brown boots with a gold ring on the side, worn-down heels. In daylight, Ruby looked older and even more beat up. But underneath the beat-up, ever-beautiful, according to Duke Ellington. It was like Ruby was an actor playing a role, street and drugs makeup put on him so he looked tired and gray, but really he was Paul Newman or Matt Dillon or somebody healthy and handsome like that.
In the City of Shy Hunters Page 7