Dogrun

by Arthur Nersesian

  I was awakened by Carolina and her gay boyfriend, Dorn, opening the front door. This caused the dog to spring to his feet, which somehow incited the phone to ring. I answered. Alphonso invited me for a walk. I told him I couldn’t; I had work to do. Besides, our last episode had freaked me out, and I had decided not to see him again.

  “Can’t I drop by your home?” he asked.

  “I’m just walking out the door.”

  “Where to?” he pressed, unable to get the hint.

  “Some coffee shop in the area, probably,” I said, free as a condor.

  “How about dinner?” he cut ahead.

  “I’m already booked,” I explained.

  He finally took the clue and said that he hoped we could get together again soon. Hastily I threw on a blue shirt and a black skirt, pulled on my pair of Kenneth Cole shoes, and went out to read the manuscript. Initially, I headed down to the Cobalt Colt, but dreaded the idea of bumping into Zoë. I couldn’t get over what a hypocrite she was, dating that bore Jeff, repressing her wonderfully assertive nature.

  I deviated to Limbo on A. Feeling rich from the manuscript money I was about to earn, I ordered a latte and started reading. Within five minutes though, a fortyish, sinewy blond woman stopped before me. Her tightly defined muscles looked like thick branches of ivy swirling around the trellis of her tall, bony body. She was holding a cup to go.

  “You’re not the Mary Bellanova who dated Primo Schultz, are you?” she asked stylishly.

  I virtually dropped the manuscript I was reading. Anonymity was all I really had. “How did you know?”

  “It’s on your shirt.” I looked down and realized that, without thinking, I had thrown on the stupid Kinko’s shirt, complete with my name tag pinned to it. In other Kinko’s stores, employees only had to display their first name, but Jeff, going over the top in his quest for managerial posterity, made us list our full name, which left us vulnerable to obscene phone calls from disgruntled customers.

  “I’m Lydia. We spoke.” This was Minnie Belle’s friend, the tiny-brained dancer who initially gave me Sue Wott’s number.

  “Hi,” I said, instead of shoo!

  “You’re so pretty, which I have to confess is not what I expected from our conversation.”

  “How kind.” Sarcasm.

  “Did you scatter Primo’s ashes yet?”

  “I’m still conducting my investigation,” I replied without even thinking about what I was saying.

  “Did you ever speak to Sue Wott?”

  “In fact, I did,” I said, wishing I could delete all files of my existence from this person’s cerebral hard drive.

  “You know I meant to call and tell you, you should speak to Norma,” Lydia advised.

  “Who the hell is Norma?” The flow of girls never ended.

  “They played together in a band.”

  “Wait a second, is she a tall girl?” I felt myself freeze.

  “Yeah, short-cropped hair with leopard spots.” It was definitely Norma the comatose drummer. With my joining, Sue should just rename the band Primo’s Exes.

  “They were married for about a day.”

  “Norma and Primo were married!”

  “Sure, Primo was married like four times.”

  “WHAT!”

  “I think only one of them was love.”

  “What about the other three?”

  “One was green card. One was to get out of Bali.”

  “Bali, the island?”

  “Yeah, I don’t understand it. Oh! I think one of his wives was a lesbian.”

  “He married a lesbian?”

  “Yeah, a modern downtown performance artist. He did it as a favor. So she could get an inheritance. Her grandfather’s will specified marriage.”

  “And why did he get married to get out of Bali?”

  “I don’t know.” She smiled. “When are you consigning him to the four winds?”

  “I should be ready to spread him in the next week or so.”

  “Call me when you do,” she twittered and departed.

  I tried to start reading The Manstrument again, but it was too difficult. I tore through a copy of Jane and kept thinking about all those matrimonial relapses when Primo said, “I do.”

  “Mar-e-e-e-e!” called out a shrill female voice that sounded almost like a drag queen. It was from a phony from way back, a scary Gila monster named Lianna, who was actually friends with Delphi, my triple ex-boyfriend, pre-Greg. I cringed as I smiled, and tried to let all my muscles go limp. It was moments like this when I couldn’t resist slipping into the world of wild exaggeration. I casually mentioned that I was secretly engaged to a Scandinavian and I had finally finished writing my working-class novel, which was under consideration at Pelican Publications. It was all about making Delphi rue the day he ever dumped me.

  After Lianna slithered away, I gathered my things and hastened out. I never had luck in Limbo. I was always intercepted by limp people. I headed up A, into the grungier Alt.café on Ninth Street. There, to my surprise, was Gilda, a modern dancer I worked with a few months back at the Astor Place Starbucks, while writing “The Coffee Wars.” She was tall, clever, and strong. Guys would line up like bowling pins, and she would knock them down with her contemptuous insults. Working with her was always a blast because she used the customers as butts for her jokes, and most of them never even knew it.

  “My God! I can’t believe it’s really you!” She was in the throes of steaming up a mocha latte. Without finishing the task, she grabbed my hand over the counter and complimented me on how good I looked. To the dismay of the awaiting customer, I did likewise. She came from around the counter and gave me a spine-crunching hug.

  “I don’t want to be rude—” the caffeine-starved patron began after a few seconds.

  “Which you are being,” Gilda finished his statement with a professional smile. She went back and served the guy his coffee, and then told me I could have anything I wanted, which meant two sugar-free brownies—one now and one for later—and a decaf cappuccino. We hacked up old times, carped about some of the twits that we used to work with, and snickered at pranks that we played on perfect strangers.

  “Hey, are you still dating creepo?” she asked with her trademark candor. “You know, he came on to me.”

  “No, creepo died,” I replied. It had to be Primo.

  “Died!” She couldn’t believe it. “No one ever dies anymore.”

  “Well, he did.”

  “Wait—I take that back. Someone overdosed here a while back,” she remembered.

  “Where?”

  “In the bathroom,” she replied, pointing to the back of the joint. I made a mental note not to pee there.

  A clutch of heavy-footed out-of-towners tumbled in, each requesting ridiculously overpriced cappuccinos with special additions. I retreated into the insulated, overly air-conditioned back room, where I took a seat in one of the sunken leisure chairs, which looked as though it had been reclaimed several times from the sidewalk. I took out the manuscript and made another stab at reading the weird quasi-horror mystery called The Manstrument. Considering the amount of money I was getting paid, it would only be profitable if I could get through it quickly.

  It began: “Beatrus was not a pretty girl. As a child she was small and hunched up like a lady bug. Her little face was hidden behind folds of puffy pink flesh, and dotted with a galapagos of ever-shrinking moles like a series of still-forming planets.”

  Beatrus grows up, does well in school, graduates in the top of her college class, and is accepted to an Ivy League law school. Upon graduation, she is snatched up by a corporate law firm, where she quickly moves up the ranks.

  “Excuse me,” someone asked, compelling me to toss a flurry of pages into the air. It was a slight Asian girl.

  “What!” I shouted back angrily. The book was pissing me off.

  “Nothing,” she replied, dashing out.

  Eventually, while assessing the estate value of one client—a freshly
dead matron named Else Lancet—Beatrus wanders through the many floors and labyrinthine rooms in her gothic mansion. One hundred and seventy-seven pages into the tedious book, she finally stumbles across the goddamned “manstrument.”

  Under a tarp and layers of dust, Beatrus finds an object that sounds like the torture device in Kafka’s “Penal Colony.” It appears to be an old armchair, but underneath it has a series of coils that finger out like knuckles loosely coordinated to parts of the body, including a strange cap that pulls over the head. What the manstrument does is still unclear.

  Since it was a quarter to eight and I was due to meet Joey for dinner, I skipped ahead and found that after many pointless pages, she finally sits her ass down and uses the “manstrument.”

  “Hello, Mary,” said a familiar male voice. It was Alphonso, local man of mystery.

  “What are you doing here?” I asked, but knew the answer; he was stalking me.

  “Just passing by.”

  “Well, coincidentally, I am passing out,” I responded. I hastily packed up my papers and raced out. Gilda, under siege by bistro-maniacs, shouted ciao as I raced past her with Alphonso at my heels.

  “So are you pissed about our last meeting?” He got right to it as we headed down Avenue A.

  “A bit.”

  “You have to understand, it was so sudden for me, and I like you a whole lot,” he unraveled. “You’re really smart and clever. You think I don’t pick up on that, but I do. I appreciate you.”

  “Well, thank you.”

  “So, don’t guys like me get a second chance with ladies like you?”

  “What do you mean, guys like you?”

  “You know, guys who fuck up a bit.”

  “You frightened me.”

  “What did I do?” He sounded tense. “I didn’t do nothing.”

  “Coming up to me in there.” I indicated the Alt.café. “That alone freaked me out.”

  “Hey come on, it’s a public place.”

  “But something tells me you weren’t just passing through.”

  “So I’ll admit I had my periscope up for you. What’s wrong with that?”

  I shrugged and nodded.

  “You got into my head.”

  He reminded me of Travis Bickle out of Taxi Driver with a trust fund, but telling him that would not be constructive, so I kept up my walking pace.

  “You know,” he went on, “I know I got problems with control, but the only control I ever wanted to exert with you was self-control because you are so foxy.”

  Thankfully, as I stepped up on the curb of Sixth Street and A, I spotted Joey waiting out in front of Opaline for our dinner date.

  “Hi, Joe,” I called to him in a help-me-please tone. “This is Alphonso.”

  “Hi there,” Joey said, extending his hand.

  “Who the hell are you?” Alphonso said, immediately threatened.

  “Who the hell am I?” Joey said in a breezy easy tone. “I’m the guy who rips you a new asshole if you so much as go near this young lady again. That’s who I am.” Joey smiled. Alphonso smiled back. Then I realized they were connected. Joey was still holding Alphonso’s hand.

  “We have to run,” I said, trying to gracefully separate them.

  “How long you in for, buddy?” Joey asked Alphonso.

  “What the fuck are you talking about?!” Alphonso yelled. He tried to jerk his hand away, but Joey grabbed his forearm and pulled the younger man closer. In a low tone, he explained, “I don’t even want to see you near her again. Do you understand?” He released Alphonso.

  “What the fuck are you going to do?”

  Joey didn’t respond; he just gave a look that made me wonder who he really was.

  Alphonso turned to me and said, “FUCK YOU, BITCH!” And he dashed off.

  I felt my heart racing as Joey asked me, “Are you okay?”

  “Yeah.”

  “You didn’t know him very well, did you?”

  “No.”

  “Were you intimate with him?” he asked calmly.

  “It’s none of your fucking business,” I shot back, still trembling.

  “I don’t mean to pry, it’s just that that man was in Rikers.”

  “How do you know?”

  “You didn’t see his prison tattoos, his mannerism?”

  “Were you in prison?”

  “I’m a retired corrections officer” he disclosed for the first time. I stared at him in shock. I vaguely recollected him in a uniform when I was younger. “He’s not going to bother you again. Once you got their numbers, these guys are cowards.”

  I nodded my head limply and thought about the evening I was alone in my apartment with Alphonso. He could have raped me.

  “If you’re not feeling well—” Joey said.

  “No, I’m okay,” I interrupted. I was really hungry and had been looking forward to a classy meal all day.

  “Come on.” He led the way. “Tell me about this band business.”

  Opaline restaurant was down a flight of stairs into what looked like a basement. Walking through a narrow lounging corridor, we emerged into a large room with a mezzanine against the far wall and a luxurious bar to the right. A line of overhead wooden fans slowly turned by a network of belts and pulleys gave the space a tropical, colonial feel. A glass skylight looked out under the starless New York sky.

  The maître d’ showed us to a booth on the upper mezzanine. We both took off our coats and sat across from each other. Joey positioned the candle on the table before me. I thought he was looking at my Kinko’s shirt, but then I realized he was studying my face.

  “What drinks can I get you folks?” an overly-friendly waiter asked.

  “Johnnie Walker Black, straight up,” Joey said, and looked at me.

  “I have to stay up late tonight—just water.”

  “You sure?” Joey asked.

  I nodded yes. “Band rehearsal,” I explained.

  “Which is possibly the only thing worse than dating an excon,” he concluded.

  “I initially did it to tell this girl that Primo died. She was his ex-wife.”

  “Right, so where is this heading? Are you a stalker?”

  “Not really.” The waiter came back, surrendered the menus, and placed a goblet of water before me. “Well, maybe just a bit.” I smiled.

  “How long ago did Primo break up with her?” Joey asked.

  “About ten years ago.”

  “So why are you even bothering?” he said, exasperated, as the waiter set down his Johnnie Walker. Joey took a quick sip off the top.

  “Well, when I went out to Primo’s mother’s house in Brooklyn, I found a published love poem, which was touching. But I also found a hate poem after she dumped him, which demonstrated beyond all doubts that he loved her deeply. Deeper than he ever loved me. She was the love of his life. I suppose my vanity insisted that I find out why.” I closed my eyes to hold back a tear.

  “So I return to the original question,” he said coolly. “Why did you join this band?”

  “Well, I didn’t mean to. I kind of got sucked into the audition, and then I started playing with them”—I took a sip of my water—“and liked it.”

  “What does your mother say about this?”

  “She doesn’t know.” I smiled just at the thought of her hearing the news. It was almost worth telling her, but not quite.

  “Look, if you’re doing it because you like the process, that’s fine. But every clown and his brother is in a band. It requires a hell of a lot of time, hours that you can be working on something with a better return.”

  “Like what?”

  “Like your writing,” he replied. He swallowed the remainder of the scotch and added, “Look, I don’t want to piss on anyone’s parade, I just want to be helpful.”

  “I appreciate the advice, but I kind of know it. It’s just a lark for the time being. I know I’m either going to get sick of it or get into a fight with warring Sue Wott. I’m just enjoying it for the moment.�
��

  “You’re a lot steadier and smarter than I was when I was your age,” Joey assured me with a smile. When the waiter came back, we both ordered fish. Joey got the broiled salmon; I ordered the seared tuna. Joey also requested a second Black Label and asked again if I wanted a drink. I declined. He stared at me with a weird smile.

  I assumed that he was amused by the fact that I was in a rock band.

  “I remember when you got that.” He touched a point on my forehead. I knew he was referring to a tiny scar that I got as a little girl. In the dim room, I knew one could only see it if one knew it was there.

  “I was about three.” I had fallen down a flight of stairs and cut myself.

  “It was a week after your fifth birthday,” he corrected. “I went to the hospital with you.”

  “You went to the hospital?” I said mildly astounded.

  “Well, maybe not to the hospital,” he recanted. “But I remember you going to the hospital.” The waiter brought his second drink.

  The dinner with its surprisingly large portions went down too quickly. I kept forgetting to take smaller bites and chew at a more leisurely pace, something I intended to do when the entrées were over fifteen bucks. Usually the more pretentious the restaurant, the larger the plate and the smaller the amount on it. It wasn’t just the food I was there for but the entire royal treatment. It was an event, like going to the theater without having to suffer through two hours of boring nonsense. I loved being served and attended to like I was a celebrity. The waiter took our large white plates away. Joe, under the age-old impression that coffee was the cure for drunkenness, ordered a cup. Since I still had to be awake for rehearsal, I got one too. We split a slice of chocolate cake that was rich enough to kill a diabetic.

  “What do you got there?” Joey said, referring to the unfinished Manstrument manuscript I placed on the empty seat next to me.

  “A horrible horror novel. I am supposed to write a reader’s report for it.”

  “You’re getting paid?”