I took him on a tour of the city, everything that he wanted to see but Ground Zero. Then again, Alex was more of a bar guy than a sightseer. Unfortunately Alex finally had the determination to sightsee something. That landmark, of all places, was Ground Zero. Whenever I was in New York I never went anywhere near Ground Zero, home of the former World Trade Center, and I kept out of tall elevators if I could, which made the Empire State Building a hands-off attraction. A lot of people don’t know this, but the north and south towers actually had their very own zip code, NYC, 10048. I couldn’t care less about the progress of skyscraper cranes and construction crews. I’d been there once several years earlier and that was enough for me. I’d seen all I wanted of New York City, 10048.
When Alex suggested peeking his head through the fence to see what those skyscraper cranes and construction crews were up to, I stayed behind, down the street and around the corner in Starbucks. He couldn’t understand why.
“I don’t get it. I thought America was in your blood.” Alex pondered my refusal to go with him. “I thought you had relatives in Jamestown and Gettysburg, Pearl Harbor and the Mayflower. And now suddenly you’re not interested?”
“I guess history isn’t always so romantic for those who’ve actually lived through it. We’re almost always homesick for the times and places we’ve never been.”
“Uh-huh, like that time you and billions of others across the world lived through September Eleventh from their television screen? I know, very traumatizing.”
“Something like that,” I said. “Except I didn’t actually get around to watching it on television until later that evening.”
“Yeah, me too. And that’s exactly my point.”
I leaned back in my chair and defiantly sipped on ice coffee. “Have fun,” I said. “I don’t much care to see it.”
“You’re loss.” Alex left Starbucks behind.
I watched him walk down the street in the direction of Ground Zero, hands slung in his pockets, whistling something as he went, and it suddenly occurred to me that I’d never actually gotten around to telling him how I was present and accounted for in the seventy-fourth floor elevator when United Airlines Flight 11 crashed into the North Tower.
“Do you find a visit to Ground Zero to be traumatizing?” I said to the person in the business suit reading the New York Times.
“I got over it.” He never looked at me.
“You visit it much?”
“Who hasn’t?” He turned a page in his newspaper.
“I haven’t,” I said.
“You’re not from around here, are you?”
“No.” I took another sip of my ice coffee. “I guess I’m not.”
8
Staring up at Leah Bishop’s REPUBLICAN BLUE billboard was just as invigorating with Alex as it was earlier that morning with Cousin Joe. I wanted to tell everyone that I knew her. I sat in homeroom with her. We smoked cigarettes together. I kissed her too. And it all happened on the private stage of my own life. But that was another life. The way I figured it, I’d lived two of them already. The first ended on September Eleventh. Another began with Elise. Now I was pretty sure that one was over, except Leah was back in my life again, sort of. At least I hoped she was. Maybe I was a kitten in another existence. Maybe I had seven lives left to live. And maybe that’s why I got the feeling that Aristotle always wanted to murder me.
“I know that woman.” I strained my neck to stare at her image.
“Uh-huh,” Alex said, doing the same. “That bridesmaid from Boston.”
“Yeah, but I knew her from high school.”
“Uh-huh. Sure you did.”
“Her name is Leah Bishop. I should know because we had homeroom together, and sixth period drama, and we were really good friends for years. We kissed and everything.”
“Yeah, that’s what the billboard says. Leah Bishop.”
“We’re gonna call each other too, probably this weekend. I know she’s busy, so I’ll probably come back out here some other time to visit with her.”
“Care to pull up her number on your phone and show me?”
“Well, I don’t exactly have her number. She said she was gonna call me.”
Alex just stared at me.
“I’m not making this up.”
“It’s OK.” Alex grinned. “You don’t have to start making up fake girlfriends whenever I’m around.”
“You’re having fun with this, aren’t you?”
“You know I am.”
9
Lunch consisted of Toni’s Pizzeria and Deli. Every time I passed through New York City I made a stop to see Toni, which was roughly several times per year. Toni was a stocky olive skinned Italian of medium height and a negligible gut. He wore a thick gold chain that tickled the Cimmerian hairs protruding from his V-neck shirt, hints of tomato sauce decorated his shirt (this time it was featured under his left nipple), a handsome roundish nose, plump cheeks, and the dome of his skull was bald. He always remembered my face but never my name and asked how the wedding business was doing.
“Lot’s of people getting divorces these days,” he said.
“Yes, but lots of people getting remarried, over-and-over again.” I held a single finger up whenever I made a scintillating point.
“You my friend are brilliant,” he said.
“How about the chicken and mushroom linguini?” I looked up at the wall-sized menu. “I hear they have the best chicken and mushroom linguini,” I turned to Alex.
“You don’t want the chicken and mushroom linguini.” He frowned. “No, for you, Capellini and shrimp basil with Roma tomatoes bathed in olive oil, coming right up.” He scribbled the order on a notepad and tore a single sheet off. “That will be seven dollars.”
I’d been to Toni’s dozens of times and never once had the chicken and mushroom linguini. The last time I attempted to order it he demanded that I try the Italian sausage tortellini.
“And what will it be young man?” Toni looked to Alex, pressing ten hairy knuckles over his glass countertop and leaned in.
“Joshua here claims you’re chicken and mushroom linguini has an excellent reputation.” Alex bit his finger as he spoke, never letting his eyes fall off the wall-sized menu. “But I get the feeling, whatever I decide on, that you’ve already predetermined my order.”
Toni grinned feverishly. “You know my motto. There’s always next time.”
10
“This is the life,” Alex sighed from the steps of the New York City Library. “I’m in the greatest city on earth with an old college buddy, working a gig, and watching beautiful women pass.”
“They certainly are at that,” I set my Walt Whitman book of poetry down long enough to take in the pleasantries and agree with him. People passed through the two New York City lion statues without a care in the world. The lions never growled or asked anyone for a belly rub either. Cookie and Lionel would have ruled this town.
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, there was no better place to watch the city unfold than the steps of the New York City Library. Men and women in all walks of life, great and small, paraded by there. I couldn’t always tell which of them were kings or peasants or servants of those kings, but that’s how I figured it was supposed to be. I liked to sit between the mouths of the two lions and consider how universal we were, eyebrows, earlobes, nostrils, jawbones, lips, legs, toes, ankles, fingernails, and hips, and yet so entirely individual. The woman and all that came in the shape of womanhood and all that was the make-up of a man. I liked to consider the likelihood that we were all related in some way, a family of millions upon millions of people. Sure, we all stemmed from the same aboriginal human parents, but then consider the tyrant dictators, conquering generals, dynasty-rulers and ruined road makers that we’ve all been paired with in the intertwining years between the cradle of civilization and the first decade of the twenty-first century. Looking backwards, what was the likelihood that my fathers branched from their fathers, or in generat
ions yet to come, that my sons and daughters would peel garments with their sons and daughters to adjoin at the hip?
“Someday,” Alex gazed over the passing current of people like a king in his own right. “I’m gonna be like them. I’m gonna come out here, buy a high rise, and rule this town…. like them, like your Cousin Joe.”
“Not as a photographer, you won’t – unless you’re speaking poetically of its nine million inhabitants co-signing human ownership. Otherwise, it’s not too late to become a banker… and a republican.”
“I’m in this to get famous. Bankers don’t get famous and republicans are ruining it for everybody. So maybe it wasn’t my time in music. But one way or another, I’m gonna be recognized.”
“Are you looking to get rich or worshiped?”
“No, of course not. Just famous…and rich.”
“Not as a photographer, you won’t.”
“What are you talking about? You’re not like the others. You know what it’s like to have people recognize your talents. I know you crave praise and recognition.”
“It’s my personal belief that the days of celebrity artists, like Picasso or Degas, or poets like Whitman and Frost, or photographers like Ansel Adams or Ira Chamberlain, the household names that we grew up with, are over. Sure, there’ll be popular people within the field, there’s certainly room for an exception or two, and I admit I raise some heads among certain photographers and brides-to-be, but the names of celebrity artists popping up at the American dinner table, like potentially my own, will never likely happen again.”
“Doesn’t that bother you?”
“What…that I won’t be recognized walking down the street?”
“Yes. Why else are you in this, if not for fame and fortune?”
“When Rockefeller died, a reporter asked his secretary how much money he left behind.”
“Oh boy, sounds like a parable.”
“She told him he left all of it. Come to think of it, I’ve never seen a Hearst pulling a U-Haul trailer.”
“Exactly.” Alex pointed his finger at me. “That’s why my philosophy is straightforward and simple. Make as much as you can and spend it while you’ve got it.”
“Why focus strictly on material wealth when you can acquire eternal riches?”
“Now you’re sounding like an Egyptian.”
“The Egyptian Orthodox Church. I’ve met a few of them. Nice people.”
“That’s not what I meant.”
“Your value isn’t in the money that you make or the kind of job that you hold or the envy that others project on it, but the very fact that you’re created in God’s image. We work because God has given us the desire for work, and as a result, how we manage our talents do matter.”
“Don’t get all self-righteous with me,” he finally said. “Last night you went off to screw around with that flight attendant and now you’re wearing that wedding ring just to cover up the guilt.”
Well, he had me there.
11
“I’m exhausted!” I shouted the best I could through the impregnable wall of the DJ’s throbbing trance into Cousin Joe’s ears. “Really, what time is it, like eleven at night or something?”
We were cramped shoulder-to-shoulder with hundreds of other New Yorkers somewhere within the sweaty bowels of the meatpacking district, a club called Tonic Suede. I’d lost sight of Alex some time ago. Hopefully he wasn’t trampled on. Cousin Joe extended his arms over his head, formed fists and recklessly pumped.
“Nonsense! It’s not even midnight yet! What are you now, like thirty?”
“Twenty-seven!”
“I can’t hear you! Thirty-seven? You can’t be thirty-seven because I’m thirty-seven! You don’t look a day over thirty.”
“I’m twenty-seven!”
“You’re just a baby! Come on, you’re in New York, Joshi-boy! I can keep this party going all night long, sunset till sunrise!”
A man suddenly galloped off the center floor, violently pushed dancers aside and knocked my shoulders en route to the bathroom door. He tumbled over and puked across the floor.
“See Joshi-boy? What did I tell you?” Cousin Joe booty-bumped two women on either side of him like a sexual pendulum. “You come here to visit Cousin Joe, and Cousin Joe takes you around to all the best clubs in town!”
“I’d really like to be asleep in bed soon! I have a wedding to photograph tomorrow!”
“WHAT? Did you say you wanted another shot of Glup?” He signaled the fleshy waitress strapped in leather to hand me another vial of green alcoholic and potentially primordial soup from her tray.
“Hey Joe, isn’t that Lindsay Duggan?” I directed his attention to the redheaded celebrity dancing several shoulders away from us. She had started out as a child star in several family comedies during the late nineties, then suddenly grew a pair of breasts over the weekend and quickly became the star of every gossip column in America for the next several years. She was chugging a vial of Glup down her throat as I spoke.
Turning his head for a better look at her, the accused, as she would later be referred to in the next day’s gossip columns, slapped another woman across the jaw. A cat fight started between them (which included the pulling of hair) and a riot broke loose.
“See, what did I tell you?” Cousin Joe screamed into my only ear left without a static ring to it. “If Lindsay Duggan punches another woman in the face, you know this place is good!”
12
After the riot, thank you Lindsay Duggan for getting me out of there, Cousin Joe directed us down the street to Cain. It was the hippest club, he said, this side of Chelsea. Most of the crowd was headed there anyhow, just not Lindsay Duggan, who was being escorted to the back of a cop car. I protested on account of that high-end wedding I’d come here to photograph in the morning, but succumbed to pressure in the end with the compromise that I’d be on my way within the hour.
Alex was already drunk on Glup by the time we’d arrived, and he didn’t stay long. He met a young NYU student at the bar with a petite frame and a stunning head of hair, barely a day over twenty-one. After a couple of drinks they were arm-in-arm and out the door. I apprehended them in the street.
“Alex, I need you in good health for the wedding tomorrow.”
“Uh oh.” The NYU student laid her index finger on his lips. “You’re not getting married tomorrow, are you, you dirty boy?”
“No baby, he is.” He pointed at me. “Can you believe it? It’s my last night on earth before my yearlong mission to Mars, and I’m seeing to it that he finally gets laid.” He then tried to whisper in her ear but I overheard him. “He’s still a virgin, you know. That was my only desire, before leaving to travel into the lonely cosmos, that I’d finally get him laid.”
“Wow.” She flexed her face in such a strange and dizzy manner I was afraid she might throw up right there. “You’re such a kind and generous friend.” She turned to stare at me with eyes that declared I couldn’t possibly be a man yet, seeing as how I’d never actually been inside of a woman, and then glazed her dilated eyes back on the most stunning catch in New York, an actual astronaut – and can you believe it, the first manned trip to Mars. “I think you need to be rewarded, Mister.” She tapped her finger on his lips for both syllables in Mister, sounding very much like Marilyn Monroe now. “My dorm mate is probably sleeping. We could try not to wake her or we could put a couple of earmuffs over her head.”
“Alex, before flying to the planet of the apes…”
“Mars.” He was quick to correct me.
“Same difference. Are you going to be in good health for the wedding tomorrow?”
“Hey man, you know me.” He staggered in her arms. I watched them teeter down the sidewalk together. Halfway across the street he turned around. “Tell me where the wedding is again?”
I returned to the bar and slumped down in the last available stool. I signaled the bartender, asked for a Johnnie Walker Red Label, and watched people of the opposite sex chat
it up with people of my sex, what I figured to be the early stages of the mating ritual. I was so very alone and miserable. It had been two weeks since the wedding in Boston. Why hadn’t Leah Bishop called? I pulled my cell phone out of my pocket just to make sure. Nope, she hadn’t called. I was in a city of nine million people and the very thought that she was one of them was invigorating. I considered the pleasant unlikelihood that I might bump into her. It wasn’t fare that Alex could go off and have the time of his life with random bimbos while his wife sat at home waiting for his return. Why did I have to remain pure? What would it gain me? And why hadn’t I the courage to go all the way with Delilah?
I reminded myself how relieved I was when I walked away from her door. I sipped on my Johnnie Walker Red Label convincing myself that I’d done the right thing. I took another long pull of my Scotch whiskey. If I did the right thing, then why was I so very alone and miserable? I needed sex. That, and another Johnnie Walker Red Label.
“Actually, bartender,” I said, “Make it a Black Label.”
Maybe Alex was right. God did design an exterior aggressive organ that needed release – a daily release. Sometimes men just needed a release. How long had it been? I couldn’t be sure. Elise was thousands of miles away, probably bopping some other guy. It wasn’t fair. I pulled my marriage band off and slipped it in my pocket.
And then it occurred to me, how do you even pick up a stranger? Now that I thought about it, I’d never actually attempted it before. It couldn’t be that hard, right? All I had to do was find a single attractive woman and say hello. Conversation would naturally follow. I approached the first female I could find and spurted out the only pick-up line that came to mind.
Wrong Flight Home (Wrong Flight Home, #1) Page 30