*
We played for almost two hours. He had brought a travel chess set with those little magnetic pieces on a small folding metal board. He won one game and I won one. As we played, his menace seemed to recede with each move. At first, we didn’t talk. We simply concentrated on the game. Little by little, I remembered how to play. The moves, the strategies, the almost unbearable stress of chess.
The noises of the park gradually increased with the passage of time. When I first got to the park, it was relatively quiet. But then more people appeared and scattered voices could be heard, and then shouts, and then the music, both live and recorded, became louder and louder and the notes of different kinds of music overlaid other sounds of music until you couldn’t hear any song clearly.
As we played chess, the black man and I, the memories of my father and his father playing chess came back to me. I was a child of nine or ten. My grandfather would come over to our apartment on a sunny Sunday morning. I remembered the sunlight streaming in the kitchen windows through the sheer curtains, the way you remember how light used to be. Without much in the way of greetings, the two men would sit at the enameled metal kitchen table with the wooden base and take out the chess set. It was an old wooden set with intricately hand-carved pieces in a well-worn mahogany box. The chess set must have been in the family for generations. Whatever happened to that chess set? Did it disappear into the same black hole with my Superman comic books and Mad magazines and the tooled leather-bound volume (with those glorious color illustrations) of Wide World Sea Adventures?
Chess was a game of infinite patience, the way it was played by those two men. There was no time limit. A move could take a half-hour or longer but, once you took your hand off the piece, the move was irrevocable. As final as Judgment Day. It was a stern test of wills. My father and my grandfather would play wordlessly for hours on end, implacable in their desire to vanquish the other. Father and son. Locked in a merciless duel to the final outcome. There were no interruptions for food or drink, and I never saw them go to the bathroom.
My mother would take me out to a movie or to the beach and when we returned hours later the two men would be sitting in the same positions. The only evidence of the passage of time would be the fact that there were fewer chessmen on the board.
A single game would take the whole day. When one finally beat the other, the two men would grunt, stand and shake hands, and my grandfather would take his leave after tousling my hair.
The black man was a good chess player. We seemed to be evenly matched. As the minutes ticked by, my eternal vigilance was gradually replaced by a sense of serenity, the likes of which I hadn’t experienced in years. The chess game was engrossing, the weather was perfect, the park was full of children’s squeals of delight.
“What’s your name, man?” the black man asked, as he put my king in check.
“I’m Tony, Tony Mendes,” I said and stuck out my hand.
He took my hand and shook it heartily. His hand was rough and his grip was firm.
“You don’t look like no Tony Mendes,” he said. “You look like Cecil Fotheringhay the Third, or some other high-toned British aristocrat.” He gave me a booming laugh.
My heart started to beat faster. “That’s my name all right. What’s yours?”
“Ethan Cross.”
“Glad to meet you, Ethan,” I said. I moved my king out of check.
“You not from here?”
I shook my head. “No, I’m from Troy. Upstate New York.”
“Never met nobody from Troy. I’m from Detroit.” He put my king back in check.
“What do you do? I mean, what kind of work do you do? You said you had to go to work.” I moved my king out of check.
“Livery driver. Mostly drive the night shift. What you do?”
I hesitated. What do I do? I disturb the universe. I walk out of a family, however pathetic it might be. I read books. I hide from existence. “Not too much of anything,” I said. “I’m sort of taking it easy right now.”
He squinted at me with concern. “You out of work?” He put me back in check.
“In a manner of speaking. That is, I’m out of work, but I’m not looking for work. If that makes any sense.”
He seemed puzzled. “Don’t make no sense to me. If you don’t want work, that’s up to you. But you ever want work, you come to me. You hear?”
There were no moves left for me. The game was checkmate.
CHAPTER XIX
You probably wonder how I spent my days in this deserter’s paradise. There isn’t much to relate because I didn’t do much. I’d always been a creature of fixed habits and my routine didn’t vary much. I would generally rise at eight and do fifty push-ups and fifty leg raises. Then I would have a breakfast of granola and black coffee.
I didn’t read The New York Times or The Wall Street Journal or any other publication, for that matter. I simply wanted to recuse myself from the quotidian news that overwhelmed the lives of most Americans. It was a question of making a choice to withdraw from the cosmic and small events of the twenty-first century that bound the people of the country together in polite or heated conversation. The world was too much with us. I didn’t want the world to be too much with me.
After breakfast, I’d stroll over to Washington Square Park and play a game or two of chess with Ethan Cross, the black man. Ethan had become my best friend or, rather, my only friend. Through a process of careful consideration, I’d come to the conclusion that Ethan wasn’t going to eat my heart, after all. In point of fact, Ethan turned out to be an existentialist and existentialists, as a general rule, weren’t cannibals.
Ethan had read more of Sartre and Heidegger than anyone I knew. He didn’t find it contradictory that both existentialists had been on opposite sides of the Nazi question. Heidegger had supported Hitler in his speeches at the University of Freiburg and Sartre had been imprisoned by the Nazis and had joined the Underground resistance during the German occupation of France. Ethan simply saw it as further confirmation of the basic tenets of existentialism. He said it was a perfect example of the multiple options available to man because of free choice.
We would argue this for hours.
“There’s absolute free will,” Ethan would say in his deep voice. “You got to make your own choices.”
“Yes, but some choices are preordained, aren’t they?” I would say.
He would shake his head. “Nope. You trying to avoid responsibility for your decisions. Man got a multitude of choices, endless choices.”
He would often convince me of the correctness of his position. But then I would nudge him with some mention of God or death or nothingness.
And he would say, “Man got to negate the nothingness of the world by creatin’ an essence for himself and a structure for the world. Without man, there ain’t no structure.”
“What about God?” I would say.
He would shake his head sadly and look at me as if I were a child who doesn’t understand. “Nietzsche already done told you, God is dead. So, if there ain’t no rules that God created, man got to make up his own rules. Because man is free, he got to invent his own values and purposes. You can create the person you want to be and you got to be that person with all your heart.”
So I became an existentialist too, since I had obviously been following an existentialist philosophy without even knowing it.
Ethan and I would have a sandwich for lunch on the park bench. Then Ethan would go off to work and I would stay and read for a while. About three or four o’clock, I would head back to my apartment and engage in my new pastime.
I wrote poetry on my folding table. Haltingly, at first, but with growing confidence, I put words on paper. That’s all there was to it. You put black on white. I took a ballpoint pen and wrote words on a lined pad of paper. One word after another. The words formed pictures or captured a feeling or just resonated a cadence. Sometimes the words had a pounding rhythm, as old as Pindar or as new as Kipling. I sounded out
the words in the silence of my monk’s cell and the words could be hard or soft or sweet or harsh, but they were my words.
I was creating a thing. A new thing that had never existed before. No one else might ever see the poems, but they did exist. They weren’t words on a label on a bottle of medicine that thousands of people might read and heed or not read and not heed. The words wouldn’t protect people from overdoses or drug interactions, but they would fill me with wonder. Wonder that I was writing poetry. It might not have been good poetry, but it was my poetry.
It was like the occasion when some friends took Samuel Johnson to see a woman preacher. When the sermon was over, the friends asked Dr. Johnson what he thought of her performance. He said that it was like a dog walking on its hind legs. Not that the dog could do it well, but that the dog could do it at all.
My poetry was not as good as T. S. Eliot’s, but it was better than Rod McKuen’s. It dealt with desolation and despondency, the twin horsemen that drove so many good poets.
The poetry infused my life with a sense of direction. No longer was I simply absorbing words. Now I was placing and rearranging words in an order that had never existed before.
I wrote for an hour or two every day. Then I would eat a frozen dinner at home or go out to one of several cheap restaurants in the neighborhood and eat an ethnic meal, in keeping with my growing desire to branch out from numbingly bland Anglo-Saxon dishes and taste with gusto all the spices and flavors of the world. It might be Korean or Indonesian or Greek or Indian or Thai or Vietnamese. Now that I was a citizen of the world, I wanted to savor a rijsttafel of cuisines. But I ate small portions because I wanted to lower my weight.
And I was successful, because I lost fifteen pounds in the first few weeks. I surprised myself with my new sleek appearance. No longer hairy, gray and overweight, I was younger, thinner, smoother and darker. You wouldn’t have recognized me if you had known me in my corporate label-writing days. You would have taken me for one of the new breed of city sophisticates who tried so hard to be pococurante but ended up looking like a phony assistant director on a Merchant-Ivory film.
After dinner, I would return to my apartment and read some more, while listening to Bach, Mozart or Beethoven on a portable Panasonic CD player that I had bought at a Korean electronics store for a hundred and twenty dollars. The unit was small but the sound was perfect because a CD player, by definition, produced perfect notes. So I listened to perfect music on a perfect player. I always kept the volume low, so as not to disturb anyone. My perfect universe was based on the reciprocal balancing notion that I would not disturb anyone and no one would disturb me. In fact, my very survival depended on it.
On those evenings when I didn’t feel like staying home, I would watch a movie at one of the local theaters. There was a wide choice of films, but my guidelines were very clear. No Hollywood films of the standard variety. My aim was to avoid happy endings, at all costs. Movies should not make you feel good about the human condition. I wanted to see thoughtful films that prodded you to look at an idea or a person in a new way. So I saw independent films, but most of them were disappointing. I would watch foreign films also. But I was tired of seeing movies from third-world countries. All those Iranian and Nigerian and Indian film makers with their forgettable films of hardscrabble dirt farmers and their interminable efforts to scratch out a bleak existence from the unyielding soil.
Of the old second-world countries, only the Polish films were good, and only some of those. The movies of Polanski and Kieslowski and Wajda had that hard edge of sardonic realism with a thin stirring in of the gruel of humanity.
And, of course, there were the Swedish films. Grim, dark and cold.
Therefore, I resolved to see only films from the G-8, which used to be the G-7 before Russia was invited to join the Group of Seven, but heaven knows why because Russia was certainly a poor excuse for a major industrialized nation. I would not see Russian films because they were amateurish and boring, so I ended up seeing movies from the old Group of Seven, Poland and Sweden.
After the movie, I would have a cup of decaf at the local Greek diner and then return to my room to retire in splendid isolation. My last thoughts of the day centered on the nature of perfect freedom within the confines of our structured society. How many naked nomads could thumb their noses at a world that said, “You must.”?
And then I would fall into a deep untroubled sleep. But it was a sleep built on a fragile base of blissful ignorance, because I had no idea of the misfortune that awaited me.
CHAPTER XX
At a certain point, I came to the conclusion that masturbation was not enough. Pascal, the French mathematician and philosopher, had said that all of man’s troubles stem from his inability to sit quietly in his own room.
I had been sitting quietly in my own room for a long time. You know, when you just sit and think for long stretches of time, your mind naturally turns to thoughts of sex.
So I thought of sex, incessantly. I had started thinking about it because of a phrase from Flaubert. I’d been browsing in Julian’s bookstore early one evening, searching through the Egyptian section which was in the African section. Next to Lawrence Durrell’s Alexandria Quartet was a translation of a book by Flaubert in which he tells of his trip to Egypt in 1850. While in Esna, Flaubert describes his visit to the house of Kuchuk Hanem, a dancing girl from Damascus, “a tall, splendid creature, lighter in colouring than an Arab.”
What set me off was Flaubert’s description of his copulation with Kuchuk. “Her cunt felt like rolls of velvet as she made me come. I felt like a tiger.”
I could think of nothing else but folds of velvet for the next few days. I wanted to feel like a tiger. I wanted to enter those sublime rolls of velvet.
So, against my better judgment, I set out in quest of copulation. I had no idea where to find a woman, but I knew that if I went to a bar, it would probably take several dates to achieve physical intimacy, as the women’s service magazines liked to put it. I had no phone, so the woman wouldn’t be able to call me. That might pose an obstacle to a two-way relationship, since I would only be able to call her from a pay phone. In addition, I wasn’t interested in a relationship with the give and take of extended conversation and endless questions. I had spoken to too many women over the span of too many years with minimal results to show for it.
The most promising course of action would be to find a professional woman. But I didn’t know where to go. The Times Square area seemed like the best choice considering its sordid fascination with the underside of human desire.
So, on a dreary midnight, I took the uptown A train three stops to Forty-second Street and Eighth Avenue and walked through the purgatory that is called the Port Authority Bus Terminal in search of a female body. I exited the terminal and continued walking north up Eighth Avenue. The night was cool and cloudless. I passed several porno video stores and porno movie theaters of differing persuasions. These purveyors confirmed my suspicions that I was in the right location, because it was unlikely that lust would be aroused without a corresponding outlet for that liquid desire.
I strolled for a long time past piles of garbage on the sidewalk and all-night grocery stores without finding anything resembling a willing woman. That’s not to say there weren’t many women who were appropriately attired for the profession in question, but they all seemed to be hurrying somewhere else. It may have been that these women were unaware they looked like prostitutes, but I doubted it. It was more likely that they had assumed the appearance and coloration of that species in order to attract the admiring glances of the men they were interested in meeting in order to establish a formal relationship.
The neighborhood didn’t smell very good. I didn’t know if it was the garbage or the greasy restaurants or the animal droppings, but something gave off a putrid odor. Even though it was after one in the morning, there were still quite a few people on the street. I continued to weave back and forth between Eighth and Ninth Avenues in the Forties
and Fifties without finding any stationary females.
Finally, in the high Forties, I walked past a doorway in which two women were standing. They may have been whores, or they may not have been. It was becoming increasingly difficult to distinguish between the real thing and the not-so-pale imitations you encountered every day. To look like a slut seemed to be an ideal that many women aspired to.
I stopped halfway down the block and crossed the street to circle back. It was important to make no mistake in this enterprise. From where I stood on the other sidewalk, they looked like the objects of my desire. Two willing women who might be rented for a half hour to provide the ultimate feminine function.
I crossed the street and approached them. One was tall, thin and white. The other one was black, with a fuller figure and a pink plastic handbag. They both wore skirts that were much too short.
The tall white one looked closer to my conception of Kuchuk Hanem. I was no Flaubert but maybe I could pretend that I was for just a few minutes.
Neither woman smiled. Was I wrong, or weren’t hookers supposed to smile invitingly? Whatever happened to the old come-hither look? Instead they both stared at me with faces devoid of expression.
The black woman spoke first. “Hello, sugar,” she said. The words were friendly, but her tone was coarse. She had long blond hair which was probably a wig.
“Good evening,” I said. “How are you this evening?” If you closed your eyes, you would have thought I sounded like a telemarketer.
“You want me to suck the veins out of your dick?” she asked me.
Her query pretty much confirmed my suspicion that she was a prostitute.
“That’s very kind of you,” I said. I tried to visualize her offer, but I didn’t see how it physically could be done. She bowed slightly toward me so I could see down the front of her low-cut blouse. Her breasts looked like ripe eggplants.
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