In the soul more solely smitten!
One dare not think of worst!
Beyond the raging and raving
Hell of the physical craving,
Lies, in the brain benumbed,
At the end of time and space,
An abyss, unmeasured plumbed—
The haunt of a face!
This did not warm my heart. When I saw the subtitle, “Learning to Love It,” I sensed I was in for a rough ride. Yet in the course of the past eight years of living in the East Village, I’d met girls who were strippers, prostitutes, and drug addicts. Girls who had done things that I regarded as unimaginable. If I couldn’t just read a sicko novel for fifty bucks, I was pretty gutless.
“You can take a couple of days with this one,” Tattoo Man explained. “I don’t have any other books left.”
“How did you get into this crap anyway?” I asked.
“What crap?”
“Doing reader reports for weird-ass novels.”
“Believe me, these are better than coffee-table books.” He shuddered at his own remark.
“Ever read one of these books”—I held up Stark—“and wonder if it’s true?”
“A few years back. I read a mystery novel about a guy who kills and cooks his roommate, and then that guy on Ninth Street did exactly that. I completely freaked.”
“A Hannibal Lecter type, huh?”
“No, killers are usually morons. If they were smart, they would just get their anger out by writing crappy novels.”
“Christ, I hope that’s not why I write.” Tattoo Man had a meeting uptown, and since he couldn’t handle the subway, and couldn’t afford a cab, he had to start out early for the long walk. He said it took him forty seconds per New York block, so he could estimate distance pretty easily.
I didn’t want to read the manuscript at home, so I headed back to Alt.café, slightly hopeful that maybe Tech would show up so that I could compliment her on her odd opus and apologize for being rude. En route I heard someone behind me yelling, “You there! Pardon! Hello there! Primo’s executrix!”
I turned to see Helga Elfman hailing me from the backseat of a passing Lincoln Town Car that was being driven by a Russian immigrant in a suit. She made him pull over.
“Hi,” I said, sauntering to the side of the car. I reflexively looked inside to see if there was either a bar or a television. There wasn’t.
“You know” she said, dispensing with salutations, “I meant to tell Primo about this from years ago, but I think he was ripped off.”
“What do you mean?”
“He did this terrific sequence of paintings he called the Age of Dissolution, that he said was a visualization of his disillusionment. It was a series of paintings of decadent technology that embodied this age, but with really weird twists—like flip phones that turned into bats and ATMs with tongues. He actually did an incredible visualization of the Internet that looked like the different rooms of a haunted house.”
“So?” I wasn’t in the mood to discuss modern art.
“They were engaging, passionate, original, thoroughly worked out.”
“Could I see them?”
“Well, that’s the thing—the collection was broken apart and sold off to private collectors. But I saw two of them being resold at the Erasce Gallery. The kicker is, they weren’t attributed to him. That Sue Wott creature’s name was scrawled at the bottom. She must have sold them as her own.”
“I wonder how much she got for them,” I pondered aloud.
“The two I saw were being resold for a thousand apiece.”
“Did you know that she had a child by him?”
“Primo had a child?” She was astonished. “Wow, I could hardly believe he’d have the sperm count.”
“Well, if she did get money out of him, she probably deserved it,” I said in her defense. “And I know she’s struggling now.”
“Aren’t we all,” Helga concluded, utterly unforgiving toward the former lover.
Without a farewell, she instructed her driver to depart. I continued on to Alt.café. Gilda was behind the counter with a prepubescent supervisor looking over her shoulder. I knew enough to pass and wait until he was gone. Then I returned to the front counter, and she poured me coffee in an old mug and tossed me a colorless, odorless brownie. As I poured skim milk in my cup, she went on about her latest dance project with some vanguard group at the Ontological Theater at Saint Mark’s Church. She talked about her latest difficulties as I scrutinized the rim-chipped mug, trying to find a clean place to land my lips. She was in a chatty mood, so I stood hostage to her freebies while she ventilated. Soon, thankfully, a busload of fools came pouring in, overwhelming her with cutesy orders. I slipped away into the recesses of the place to get down to work.
I took my seat, sipped the java, lit a cigarette, and began reading the Stark novel. Set in the late 1960s, it begins with a young parish priest, Father Harry Stark, who is giving a sermon in Pikers Island. Although the priest is fresh out of the seminary, he is as tough as nails, reminiscent of Pat O’Brien in the old clerical collar dramas.
“Here’s the bottom line,” he says to the flock of cons. “We are tested here by God himself. That’s what life is, boys, and if God gave you a tough start, handing you rotten parents or lousy living conditions, then your reward will be that much higher in the end.”
The reverend is soon appointed to a large, crumbling church in a poor, inner-city parish. At first all is fine—baptisms, weddings, funerals, masses, things grow a bit monotonous. But the confessions are interesting. In one scene, a serial Casanova confesses his seduction of various women: housewives, coeds, and shop girls. Immediately afterward an elderly gentleman pops in and confesses a trite act of impatience at a persistent beggar.
Over time, while he’s asleep, Stark’s dreams twist into a painful montage of the sins he has forgiven. Soon his daydreams turn as well. He ponders a series of questions that echo down to the core of his faith: Does confession truly absolve sin or merely alleviate the soul? Is recollecting someone else’s sin a sin? Is the enjoyment of misery a sin?
Eventually Stark finds himself fantasizing about acts of petty thievery and minor cruelty. For the first time in his life, he has sexual stirrings. With these new fantasies comes a tremendous guilt. He soon goes medieval, punishing himself with petty acts of self-mutilation, branding his arms with cigarette burns and lacerating his fingers with paper cuts.
By the novel’s end, the author completely derails the story. Stark uses the votive candles to set the church on fire. Though he dies in the process, he is righteous and rises directly to heaven.
I thanked Gilda for the freebies and headed home to write my report while it was still fresh in my head. As I zipped down First Avenue, I thought it was a shame. Stark wasn’t bad. But the ending was too abrupt. As I opened the door, the phone rang.
I beat the machine to it. Jeff asked if I could come in to work at Kinko’s right now, because Lionel had showed up dead drunk.
“No way,” I shot back. “I didn’t know you worked tonight.” He was usually on in the daytime.
“I’m not working, but I’m trying to help Scotty find someone.” Scotty was the night manager.
“Is Zoë there?” I asked.
“Yeah, but don’t talk too long, I still got to find someone.” A moment later Zoë got on the line.
“Hey,” she said remotely.
“Hey,” I returned. “Sorry about yesterday.”
“No biggie.”
“Well, you were trying to be nice,” I reminded.
“I guess you were just trying to watch out for me,” she replied.
“Well, I was,” I replied sincerely, “but I guess I didn’t have to be an idiot about it, did I?”
She made a remark about how we were going through an unusual Zodiac period. We were both Libras, and she avidly read the New York DePress’s astrological predictions and reported them to me.
“So, you don’t want to go on
a double date with us and Jeff’s roomie, do you?”
“Thanks, but the idea of going on a date with a guy named Psycho—”
“Not Psycho! Sako,” she corrected. “He’s Japanese!”
“Ohhhhh.” That changed almost everything.
“He’s a really nice guy. I swear it.”
“What’s he look like?” I asked.
“You know the actor Jackie Chan?”
“Yeah.” I’d heard of him.
“He’s like a younger Japanese Jackie Chan without the karate.” There was a dearth of Asian-American actors for comparisons.
“I’m still mourning Primo, not right now.” I paused, and then, to give her hope, I added, “Later, okay?”
We chatted about this and that, and she told me how much she was in love with Jeff, but of course, she had to say that because he was right there.
“He doesn’t seem a bit … distant, does he?” I asked, politely.
“Yeah,” she said immediately. “But they’re all that way.”
In a softer tone, she added that she couldn’t really go into it. But if she could, I knew she’d let him off somehow: girlfriends were always revising and rationalizing their defective boyfriends. I heard Jeff asking her to get off the phone so that he could find a replacement. Conversation over.
I got on the keyboard and thrashed out the reader’s report. After a reread and a spell-check, I printed it up and called Tattoo Man. As I heard his phone ringing, I spotted Primo’s porn novel propped on a box in the corner.
The painted man’s machine came on. I left the message that I had finished the reader’s report for the second book and wanted to drop it off. I concluded with my euphemism for getting together with Howard at the dogrun: “Numb needs to take a dump.”
chapter 13
While watching TV, I flipped through the novel Cuming Attractions by “Primo Teev,” leafing through its stiff, stale onionthin pages, glancing at all the typos, misspellings, lazy clichés and incorrect syntax. I was absolutely amazed that it went on for hundreds of pages. The older I got, the harder it was to even scribble out a shopping list.
To judge by the crooked yet deeply embedded type, it looked as though each letter was nailed deep onto the page. It was probably pounded out on some mad heroin rush. Another fly-by-night, get-rich-quick scheme. I remembered Primo telling me about an old friend of his who had worked in a porn-writing mill run by some freak who was later rubbed out by Sammy “the Bull” Gravano. Primo described how young kids, fresh out of NYU, anxious to see anything in print, even under a pseudonym, wrote the lewd crap standing up, typing it out on filing cabinets because they didn’t have desks or chairs to sit in.
But that’s not how I pictured this manuscript’s conception. I could almost look through those sperm-tinted pages and picture Primo twenty years earlier, sitting naked, sweating, and trembling, a strict two-finger typist, punching the keys on some ancient Underwood reclaimed from the street. A ribbon and life desperately in need of a change.
Porn novels are no different from Harlequin romances, crime thrillers, or any other genre novels. The characters are usually stock and formulaic: the virgin, the seducer, the villain, the hero. Instead of romantic encounters or murders, they have their quota of sex scenes. It was easy to see why Primo was never able to sell it. Not only was it idiotic and loaded with errors, there were only four lame sex scenes in the entire book.
The phone rang. I picked up to hear breathing. I knew it wasn’t obscene, but I gave the caller the benefit of the doubt.
“Mary.”
“Joey?”
“Yeah, I’m sorry, I just ran up the stairs. Listen, I met a real sweet old guy looking for a dog.” He had recalled me bitching about getting stuck with Numb.
“I should take you up on it. I can’t afford him, and I’m never with him enough. I always feel guilty.”
“So what’s the problem?”
“I’ve bonded with him.”
“So unbond.”
“It might be a female thing, but once you’ve bonded, you can’t unbond.” My call-waiting beeped. I excused myself and clicked over to Tattoo Man. I told him to wait a sec and clicked back over to Joey. As though a thought was escaping, I heard him whisper, “But I don’t bond.” I wondered if he was thinking about his wife and kid.
“Joe,” I said loudly, letting him know I was there.
“Oh, I got to run.” He sounded embarrassed.
“You know my band is playing in a few weeks. If you want to come and see me perform, you’re invited.”
“Are you ever going to scatter Primo’s ashes, or did you bond with them too?” he asked, slightly impatient. I was amazed how many unfinished details of my life he had retained.
“I just want to let enough time go by so that if this isn’t him, someone will call me.”
“Listen,” he said in a calmer tone, “I’m going to be away for a few weeks, I’m traveling out West. I’ll call you when I get back.”
“Where are you going?”
“California, Vegas. Around. Business.”
“We’ll go for dinner when you get back. That way I can get my gift.”
“What gift?”
“The gift you’re going to buy me on your trip.” That was my way of saying good-bye. I clicked back over to Howard, and we agreed to meet at the usual place. I collected the canine and the manuscript and bought a cup of coffee en route.
As I got into the inner gate of doggie hell, I saw him waiting for me, playing fetch with Fedora.
“You really go through these pages quickly.” He flipped through Stark.
“They’re actually great therapy,” I confided. “When I see how bad everyone else’s writing is, my own self-confidence increases.”
“Everyone says that at first. But after you’ve finished your first ten manuscripts, and realize your writing still stinks, you’ll get over that.” He sounded as though he were speaking from personal experience. I handed him the reader’s report. He gave me two twenties and a ten. Opening the envelope, he glanced at my report.
“Are there any new manuscripts?” I asked.
“No, thank God. We’re all done.”
“Done? I thought publishers were always looking for works?”
“Well, this is a contest for new works.”
“A contest!”
“Yeah, the DLP Organization was left some money to set up a memorial contest. They put out calls for manuscripts in a bunch of journals and writing programs around the country and got about fifty submissions.”
“What category?”
“It’s wide open. It just has to be a first-time author submitting a manuscript-length work, around fifty thousand words. In addition to getting published, the author gets a five-thousand-dollar award.”
“Holy shit.” That should cancel both my credit card debt and the balance of my defaulted student loan. There was nothing like being broke.
“I got suckered into this insipid readers’ project at a bulk fee. I needed cash bad,” he explained. “Now it’s over, and I’m free. And you know, you’re lucky, the two manuscripts you got were among the better ones in the stack.”
“So one of those two is going to get published?”
“Well, there were others, but they’re about the same.”
“Suppose I wanted to enter this contest?” I heard myself saying.
“It’s too late,” he replied. “Deadline was a month ago.”
“There’s no way you could slip a late manuscript in?”
“You have it now?” he asked.
“I can have it ready in a few days,” I said hastily. I was one story short of being finished.
“Let me get this straight. You’re going to spend the next three days writing a fifty-thousand-word novel?”
“Of course not. It’s a collection of stories, I already wrote them,” I revealed.
“I have to turn in these last two manuscripts tomorrow before five o’clock. Give it to me by then, and I’ll
say it got lost and I’m submitting it late.”
“Tomorrow!”
“Hey, you’re already four weeks behind the deadline.”
“Shit.” I thought about it and remembered reading in the Paris Review Writer’s Interview series how French mystery writer Georges Simenon—who published over four hundred novels—had batted out his fastest potboiler in twenty-six hours. I had a little more time than that to write just one story—my Kinko’s installment. It sounded so thrillingly impossible, I told him I’d have it ready for him.
Then, as I dashed home, I realized that I had band practice tonight, and our big show at Mercury Lounge was tomorrow, on top of everything else.
I lit a cigarette, turned on the TV, and for the first time I played with Numb. There were just too many distractions at home. I threw on my clothes, grabbed a pen and notepad, and dashed out the door. Alt.café was too grungy, Starbucks too crisp. Limbo too cool, the Cobalt Colt was just right. When I walked through the door of the place, though, I heard a female voice declare, “Oh shit, well look what the colt dragged in.”
I did not need to look up to know it was Zoë holding an espresso. She was having a smoke, not a good sign. She responded to my cigarette radar by saying, “This is medicinal.”
Without a word she pushed back the chair across from her. I sat down and pointed out, “You’re not allowed to smoke here.”
“These are dietary.”
Since I was an occasional sneak smoker myself, I restrained myself from saying that the weight slings right back afterward, plus you get a side order of cancer.
“How’s the great love?” I queried.
“Still humming along,” she replied with an unenthusiastic smile. The honeymoon looked to be over.
“How’s doggie woggie?” she replied.
“He left me for another bitch.”
We talked for another five minutes until she was done with her demitasse, and together we rose and exited. It wasn’t until I was outside that I remembered the whole point in going there was to write a story. Other than setting it in Kinko’s, I didn’t have a clue what it was going to be about, so I was grateful to procrastinate.
We chatted our way up to Houston and over to Kinko’s, our common link and sore point. She peeked in to see if Jeff was about, I waved to Scott the über-copier. He dashed over between customers.
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