“How’s it hanging?” he clung tensely to dated clichés.
“Fine, how are you, Scott?”
“Just fine” he said sweetly, slipping his hands into his pockets.
I did likewise, where I found some gum. When I offered him a stick, he blankly responded, “I’d prefer not.”
This remark reminded me of the Melville short story “Bartleby the Scrivener.” Before the days of carbon papers and Xerox machines, scriveners copied documents by hand. This story is set in Wall Street offices of the 1850s. Bartleby is a quiet, hardworking copyist. One day, when told to do a transcription, he responds like Scotty, “I’d prefer not.”
For Bartleby, this is a passive act of rebellion—he is a man, not a machine. His employer tries to understand his reluctance but cannot. When Bartleby is fired and told to leave the premises, he refrains, “I’d prefer not to.”
He is eventually arrested and sent to jail. In the final scene, when his employer discovers him dead in the prison yard, he tells the prison guard, “He’s asleep with counselors and kings.”
My story would be a modern-day homage to Melville set in Kinko’s, based on Scotty, a human Xerox machine who wants to work. He grows jealous and subsequently sabotages the newer automated machines.
“What’s the matter?” he asked, seeing me smile uncontrollably, my eyes full of twinkles.
“Can I kiss you?” I asked in appreciation of his automatism.
“Sure,” he said, baffled. I grabbed him and gave him a big lip-smacking kiss.
“Well, okay,” he said, his head filling with blood. He must have figured his age-worn salutations sounded like love poems when he said them. With a new dose of confidence, he dashed back to the counter to attend an awaiting customer.
A group of skinny chicks who were waiting to have their dance cards Xeroxed seemed to disturb Zoë. I think their thinness compelled her to ask, “Want to go for a run?”
“Sure,” I replied, feeling elated that I knew what I was going to write about. We agreed to go to our respective homes, squeeze into our gym gear, and then she would pick me up. Numb gave me an uncomplimentary look as I pulled on my jogging bra, T-shirt, and leggings and waited for Zoë. During the last New Year’s hangover, we both tiredly resolved and joined health clubs. But that was months ago, and to my knowledge, neither of us had gone.
“I have a guest pass, so let’s go to mine,” she said, which was fine. I was glad to go to another club first to lose a little weight before heading to my own gym.
Both of us were wearing trench coats and sunglasses over our getups as we walked the few blocks. When we arrived, the clerk looked at Zoë’s ID and summoned up her computer file. It turned out she only had a week left on her three-month membership. A muscular, ponytailed, polo-shirted sales stud hoofed over with a clipboard and tried lassoing us fillies into renewing with him. No thanks. We escaped to the women’s locker room downstairs, where we hung up our coats. Self-consciously we entered the large open area where men and women on black rectangular mats stretched their rubbery, slippery bodies. Zoë smiled, took a mat, and did something like a sit-up. I feebly followed her lead. We each did about ten of them before we just lay on our backs making groaning noises.
“Let’s get our fat butts upstairs on that terrible treadmill before we have a coronary down here on the mats,” she huffed. She was right. It looked less pathetic to die up there.
Tiredly we struggled up the stairs. Although there were no manstruments to mount, we had the good luck of finding adjacent machines in front of the ceiling-suspended television set. Neither of us had remembered to bring our headphones to hear the TVs, so we were only able to watch the music videos. Initially, ambitiously, we both plugged 6 m.p.h. as our running speed. After a few optimistic minutes, I almost slipped and was terrified of being dragged to death on one of those stationary devices. Zoë too was winded. The speed mysteriously slipped down to 4 m.p.h., and we both felt ourselves on a mechanical forced march clutching the front grip bar for dear life.
“What are you up to later?” Zoë said, grasping and gasping.
“Nothing,” I huffed back, dripping. After ten minutes, Zoë jumped off her torture machine. I punched the pause button and—eureka! We were slim.
We both went back downstairs and put our old trench coats back on. Though we were sweaty, we both preferred to shower at home.
“Oh,” Zoë said, instantly excited. “We’re meeting with Sako tonight, before the party. You’ve got to come.”
“I have to write tonight.”
“Just for thirty minutes, so you can meet him and he can call you. I’m telling you, you’re going to be so happy that I set you up.”
“I don’t want to be rude, Zoë, but if he’s anything like Jeff—”
“I know you don’t like Jeff. He’s everything Jeff is not. You’ll love him!”
I repeated that tonight was emphatically out of the question because I had to write. I couldn’t tell her that I also had band practice.
“Come on, you need to eat anyway. It’s not going to kill you.”
“I’m going to be really tense tonight.”
“All the better. Guys love a bitch. And this guy likes you. If you like him, you got a shot at something.”
Probably as a subconscious form of sabotaging my literary submission, I consented to join them for a quick double dinner—ten P.M. at the yuppie Italian restaurant on the corner of Fourth and Second. Eat and retreat, I reiterated. She assured me that was fine.
It was seven by the time I got home. In addition to a hangup call, I had two messages on my machine. The first was from Helga Elfman, who said that she had learned that Sue Wott had earned roughly three thousand dollars from the paintings Primo painted.
“With paintings that only a white man could paint and get nothing for,” she said testily. “An Asian woman ends up making a bundle—that’s the damned art world for you.”
Numb was doing jumping jacks, giving me that fish-eyed look that said, if you don’t get me the hell out of here and drain me, I’m going to piss on your shoes. So I forsook the shower and nap I desperately needed, leashed him, and gave him his ten minutes in the prison yard.
Before I got stuck owning a dog, I used to be pissed whenever I recovered a newspaper from a garbage can that had the pungent surprise of some pet’s scoopings. Now I was the one always searching out a periodical to pick up Numb’s gratitude whenever we went on walks. After he emptied himself, I took him back to his cell upstairs. It was time for rehearsal. I grabbed the bass and headed out. En route, I noticed the various peeled and bubbled flyers announcing the performances of East Village bands glued or wheat-pasted to buildings, street signs, and lampposts. Strange little phraseplays that at best made one smile: Zodiac Love Group, New Wet Kojak, Napolean Blown Aparts, and Mobile Homos were among the few.
“Early,” Sue Wott observed with disbelief when she saw me. “You must be nervous about tomorrow’s show.”
“Actually it skipped my mind, but thanks for reminding me. I was looking for something to fret about.” As we went upstairs together, I assured her that my being early was an unfortunate accident.
“I hope Norma comes soon,” she responded, adding, “I usually pick her up on my way here. She’s really bad with appointments.”
When we got access to our tiny studio, we made small talk as Sue gathered the half-filled Styrofoam cups, paper dishes, and pizza crusts that had accumulated in the course of the rehearsal day.
“So how old is your son?” I began.
“Five,” she responded. This surprised me; I was under the impression she had had her falling-out with Primo by then.
“I don’t see a wedding ring,” I said, hoping not to sound too much like my mother.
“You want to marry me?” she shot back. The girl was a land mine of domestic sensitivities.
“I was just wondering if you were a single parent.”
“I’m half a parent,” she replied without humor. “I have an e
xtremely dysfunctional roommate, Jane, who—despite the fact that it’s her apartment—pays off her half of the rent by babysitting.”
“That doesn’t sound too bad.”
“It doesn’t, does it? And yet, as it just turned out, over the past five months the fucking idiot has been living off the rent money instead of giving it to the landlord—surprise!”
“What does that mean?”
“You want to hear my whole crummy irritating story?”
“You can just cut to the chase, if there is one.”
“The chase: Jane and I have an appearance in landlordtenant court in a few days. At that point, if the landlord fights us we could be homeless.”
“So Primo is not your son’s father?” I asked, deciding to bull her entire china shop.
“You leave no stone unturned, do you?” she asked with a smile. “Actually, yes, he is the father, but that never bothered me.”
“Why not?” I asked, since that was the question that had been pestering me above all else.
“Those idiots wouldn’t let me in,” Marilyn interrupted as she entered our chamber of horrors, shattering our gradual and fragile intimacy. As Sue and Marilyn chatted about this and that, I dipped out and went to the bathroom.
Norma showed up a bit late, which for her was early, and we got started. We’d made a habit of working on about half a dozen songs over and over during each rehearsal. All of them had vaguely the same riff constituted roughly by the same beat and a loosely similar melody. Norma, who seemed slightly feverish, kept overbeating or underbeating her drums.
“My nerves are bad tonight,” she kept saying as she repeatedly dropped her fat chopsticks. She would take the opportunity to tighten one of the shiny lug nuts surrounding her drum, as if that was somehow the cause of her slippings.
While playing the last song in the round up, “Fuck You!”—the third song by Sue that had the word fuck in it—Marilyn broke a guitar string, and since she had replacements for every string but that one, we stopped fifteen minutes before the end of our session. Sue gathered us together to talk about tomorrow’s show.
“We’ve all done this before,” Sue explained to me. “I know this is your first show, but everything will be fine.”
“Im glad you have confidence in me,” I replied, perhaps not sarcastically enough.
“She has it with good reason,” Marilyn joined in. “You’re a successful person.”
“A successful person?” It was the nastiest thing anyone had said about me in hours.
“Sure, you haven’t missed a single rehearsal. And you’re not insane,” she said sincerely.
“You didn’t get stuck with a kid you can’t afford,” Sue tossed in.
“You don’t drink, take drugs, or need some guy treating you like shit.” Norma plopped her comments into this stone soup.
“Nowadays,” Marilyn concluded, “that means you’re a success.”
An age of lowered expectations came with some ready-made benefits. Nowadays the standards had plummeted so far that I failed even at being a failure. I silently packed up. Nothing else was left. They had even robbed me of self-pity.
chapter 14
As Norma and I tramped up Avenue A, I commented how the alphabetized streets always struck me as temporary titles, as though some city planner had run out of names of statesmen and admirals.
“I once figured that they were named that way so that turn-of-the-century immigrants could learn the alphabet.” The genesis of such things was a mystery: we just accepted what was there and worked with it.
By the time I got home, I was starving. It was ten-fifteen, and I remembered that Zoë and her trapezoidal boyfriend were dining down the block. With them was that Psycho guy, who had a mysterious crush on me. Even though I still had to write the Kinko’s story, I decided to go—a free dinner was waiting, if nothing else. I brushed the city out of my hair, washed it off my face, pulled on some clothes that exuded happiness, and headed out.
The three of them were flickering under a candle, ensconced at a corner table. Jeff was yakking away as usual when I approached. Zoë was listening with an adoring smile, and this cute little Japanese man sat there making an attempt at not appearing bored, a detail that immediately charmed me.
“Sako, this is Mary. Mary, this is Sako,” said Zoë, all of her real spirit flattened in girlfriendly servitude. I shook his hand, and as if I had pulled a chain, his entire face lit up. He looked adorable, so small and controlled, but I couldn’t imagine ever sleeping with him.
“She thought your name was Psycho,” Jeff teased.
“Like the Hitchcock movie,” Sako said, and laughed.
“Sako is an interesting name,” I stated, trying to white out Jeff’s existence.
“It means William,” Sako said calmly.
“William?” I repeated, unable to figure how he could extract a Western name from an Eastern one. He nodded.
When the large Egyptian waiter finally brought me a menu, everyone had already decided exactly what they wanted. As they listed their drinks and entrées, skipping appetizers, my eyes juggled through different dishes and finally dropped down on the eggplant parmesan, which I requested without cheese or oil. I didn’t even want the eggplant, but I wasn’t in the mood for meat.
“You know, just below this place is a gay porn theater,” Jeff divulged. I had little doubt that he had frequented it in his spare time.
“Sako is getting his master’s in film,” Zoë volunteered, trying to normalize the conversation.
“At NYU?” I asked, smiling at him.
“Yes,” he smiled back. “Actually, I just decided on a thesis.”
“What’s it on?”
“Teenage American films of the 1980s.”
“Like John Hughes?” I sneered unintentionally.
“You know the works of Mr. Hughes?” He seemed genuinely astounded by my erudition. I smiled noncommittally.
“You should do a documentary on taking out the garbage,” Jeff kidded shrilly, reminding me of the way dolphins balance briefly on their tail before flopping back into water.
“So do you like the program?” I asked, trying not to sound fatuous.
“You know another film you could do?” Jeff said to his own unclear amusement. “Do one on feet.”
“Jeff dear,” Zoë demurred with a tactful smile, instead of, Shut the fuck up!
Soon after everyone had drunk down the first carafe of wine and the second carafe was ordered, the bread basket arrived; slightly reheated day-old buns and a small dipping saucer filled with medium-grade motor oil. Sako didn’t touch it, going right for the wine. I nibbled slightly at the edge of one roll like a mouse. Zoë and Jeff gobbled down the rest. As the dinner unfolded, the conversation was a ridiculous montage of Jeff making grand declarations, which were usually obnoxious, Zoë politely trying to silence him, and Sako and I trying our best at navigating around both of them.
With every new word he said, with every understated gesture and demure facial expression, I liked Sako more and more. He was a proud little man, and that contrast turned me on. Yet despite his ingratiating mannerisms, his love of Americana made me wonder where things could really go. After we passed on the overpriced dessert tray, Sako asked, “So you’re a writer of fiction?” reminding me that I was quite late for my rendezvous with my word processor.
“Actually, she’s an employee at Kinko’s, but who’s counting?” Jeff joked.
“Go fuck yourself,” I rejoined. It was time to write, and this was a superb opportunity to act insulted. I shoved my chair back so ferociously it fell dramatically to the floor, then stormed out. I had dashed across Second Avenue when I heard the faint mewings of someone behind me, “Mary! Mary!”
I turned to see Sako catching up to me.
“I am sorry, he is such an idiot,” he struggled to say, referring to Jeff.
“I should just get used to it,” I said. We walked in the street around a half-completed construction site.
“W
hat are they building here?” He looked up at the still unfinished building on the south side of Fourth between First and Second avenues.
“These are the new efficiency apartments that’ll turn this neighborhood into another one,” I replied and decided to impart some trivia that Primo had once told me. “This used to be the Andersen Theater. It was one of the old Yiddish theaters that lined Second Avenue back around the turn of the century. During the sixites it became a rock-and-roll palace.”
“Rock and roll?” That caught his interest.
“Yeah, this was where Janis Joplin first played in New York.”
“This, here!” he said in amazement.
“Yes.”
He paused a moment in reverence. Then we resumed walking, and as we passed by the Sushi Garage, he asked, “Would you like to go for saki?”
“I can’t stand saki,” I said, still associating the place with Alphonso.
“Me neither,” he agreed with a smirk.
“You know, I really don’t have time to hang out tonight. I have to submit a collection of stories by tomorrow.”
“Can’t we spend a small portion of time together?” His eyes squinted ferociously at me, as though he were looking at the glinting snows of Mount Fuji.
“Well, maybe just a small portion of time then.” I was about to suggest that we could sit on the dark benches of the housing project across the street from my house when he looked up and said, “We can go up to your roof, no?”
That was really a location for a second or even a third date, but the red wine from the restaurant had gotten to my head, and we had to go somewhere: “Let’s go.”
“How about we get a beer first?” He was a sly one.
“I can’t drink any more tonight.” I needed to think clearly for the writing.
“No, no.” He pretended to misunderstand. “My treat.”
“Okay, just one can of beer.” I knew I could handle that much.
He dashed into the Arab deli on the southwest corner, raced to the reach-in fridges that lined the right side of the place, and returned to the counter where I was waiting. There I discovered that he had pulled another slick move, selecting two of those oil drums of Fosters Lager.
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