Dogrun

by Arthur Nersesian

  “Trust me.”

  I could still hear the printer laughing at me from the next room. It came down to a single question: Was I going to let him see my tits in exchange for getting my stories in a ridiculous contest? I would have said no if it was really a matter of choice. I had to submit. Besides, Tattoo Man was not a lech. I knew he was interested in me, but I sensed his altruism, and if he was hiding some incidental horniness, good for him. I grabbed a towel from the bathroom, laid it on the floor, pulled down my slip, baring my breasts, and quickly lay facedown on a towel. He rubbed his hands together, presumably heating them up.

  He massaged my lower back, which didn’t feel so bad. Yet with each hand press I couldn’t stop thinking how pathetic I was, compromising myself for this tawdry collection of stories. Slowly I started boiling, until I finally decided, enough!

  Jumping up, I pulled my slip back up over my shoulders.

  “Great,” I said miraculously. Even though the slow-mo printer was still p-r-i-n-t-i-n-g, I didn’t care any longer. When I checked, I discovered that it was spewing out blank pages. The book had finished printing at least ten minutes ago. I probably didn’t even need to take off my slip. In self-disgust, I shoved the pages into a large envelope and brought it out to Howard.

  “Thanks so much for fixing my back,” I said to him robotically.

  “I can stay longer,” he volunteered kindly.

  “You have an appointment, and I have to run to my gynecologist.”

  “I understand.” He pulled his shoes on and took the manuscript. Before walking out the door, he turned and politely said, “You’ve got a great body.”

  I assured him that I knew, thanked him, closed the door, and collapsed into a short but troubled sleep. After an hour, Sue called and asked where the hell was I.

  “Aren’t we meeting at seven?” I asked groggily.

  “I said we’re all supposed to be at my house at six-thirty. We’re supposed to load in before the first band plays at seven-thirty.”

  I told her I was on my way.

  She asked me what I was planning on wearing. Clothes, I replied.

  “What clothes?”

  Without going into detail, I assured her they would be sexy, but not tasteless.

  “I’d prefer if they were tasteless,” she said and explained that she had hired a woman named Pearl who had a van and was supposed to move our instruments to the club. She had arrived earlier and, seeing no one else was there, had driven off to dinner but was coming back at seven-thirty. I washed up, took doggie out, grabbed a spring roll at the Vietnamese dive, and dashed over to Sue’s place on Twelfth between First and Second Avenues. To my delight and astonishment, I arrived just as Marilyn was walking up with Norma in tow. I rang Sue’s bell.

  “Don’t go up,” Marilyn warned as Sue rang back.

  “Why not?”

  “’Cause the place is a mess,” Norma said.

  “That’s not why, it’s ’cause we’ll never get out in time.” Marilyn sounded like the voice of experience. Norma, who didn’t look well, concurred with a nod.

  “Will one of you bitches please get your fat asses up here and help me with this shit?” Sue snarled down to us over the intercom.

  Marilyn stood next to our instruments, and Norma seemed permanently immobilized, so I headed up the three flights. Sue was waiting in the hallway with her guitar on a small aluminum fold-up hand truck, and a knapsack over her shoulder. She was saying good-bye to her child, who was standing in the crack of the door wearing his cute, little PJs.

  “Now take care of Auntie Jane. She’s not feeling well tonight.”

  “Yes, Mommy,” said the adorable Primo love-child. Sue hugged and kissed him.

  “What’s the matter with Auntie Jane?” I inquired as Sue closed the door.

  “She’s passed out in front of the TV,” Sue said and asked, “Is Pearl out front?”

  “Not as far as I saw.”

  “She’s probably gobbling down dinner.”

  “Where are the amps?” I asked.

  “We’re using Rent Control’s amps. They’re the first band in the lineup.”

  “That’s good.”

  “Good, hell, I have to pay them.”

  Sue instructed me to grab the bottom of the light hand truck, and together we carried her instrument and supplies down the stairs. Out front the other two were waiting.

  “Where’s Pearl?” Marilyn asked, staring east down Twelfth Street. People were exiting the theater across the street.

  “She came on time,” Sue said, contrasting her with the rest of us. “She’ll be back soon.”

  We waited for ten minutes before Sue announced, “Hell with this, let’s grab a cab.”

  We tried hailing for another ten minutes before Sue snapped, “We’re going to miss our time slot. Let’s get down there on foot.”

  Our muddled crew silently headed down Twelfth Street, constantly looking behind for a possible taxi. After five tired minutes of lugging our instruments like a hip group of Kosovar refugees, we caught a cab and headed down Avenue A to Houston; the Mercury Lounge. Sue paid the fare, and we struggled out.

  Independently we all knew Bobby Sox, the bouncer standing in front of the place. He turned to me and said, “I didn’t know you were with them.”

  “Neither did I.”

  We moved past the tight, narrow bar, where the chubby-armed manager, Gary, commented that we were supposed to load in at six. We all apologized. The lead singer of the Deltoids, the band before us, gave us a fuck-you expression as we struggled past during their last song, getting everything down the stairs. Two members of Rent Control were still hanging around. Sue slipped them twenty bucks for use of their amps.

  When the other girls took off their overcoats, I was shocked to see how skimpy and revealing their outfits were. Sue wore stockings and garters. Norma had a tight green tank top over a sheer push-up bra. To my mild embarrassment, I was the most conservatively dressed with my simple sleeveless black turtleneck and relatively tight blue jeans.

  “What did you think this was, a Gap ad?” Sue shot out.

  In the audience we spotted a few people we knew. I didn’t know about my bandmates, but I made a point of not inviting anyone. Hell, I still hadn’t told anyone I was even in the band. As we were setting up and plugging in, with Sue screaming instructions to us above the prickliness of miscellaneous chatter, I heard, “Holy shit, is that you, Bellanova?”

  In the drunken dimness I could make out the shimmering dirty blond hair of Emily, with her mismatched gang. At first I tried not to notice, but she kept screaming at me, “That was my college roommate!”

  “Hi, Em,” I called out to her.

  “You didn’t tell me you were in this band!” She muscled her way to the front of the cramped stage.

  “Can we talk about it later?” I screamed back, not good at hiding my performance anxiety.

  “You know I’m playing at Brownie’s in four days,” she advertised.

  “Yeah, I know.”

  “You’re coming, right?”

  “Yeah, I’ll bring Zoë.”

  She backed her way into the squirming crowd. We took our positions and tested our instruments. The sound man made some adjustments. One of the amps was all treble and no bass. Two of the guitar cables worked intermittently and had to be replaced. Sue tested her vocals in the PA, then gave her nod. “Colder Than a Witch’s Tit” roared out of her lungs and our fingers. She was putting that anger to good use. All of them really cranked it up. I never saw Norma so alive. Marilyn too. Even though it was not my style, I tried to keep up with them. “Fuck You ’Cause You Can’t” was next on our jukebox. One by one the songs punched out of the large amps, and remarkably, the music didn’t suck. Some of the more provocative songs earned a “Do it, honey” and other complimentary catcalls. With each song we all took our little spills, missing occasional beats, strings, and words, but each mistake was one at a time, so that the others covered. Finally at the end of the last
song, exhausted and covered with sweat, we heard some claps, stomps, hoots, and even a “Show your tits!” We packed up our instruments as the next band, Sloppy Seconds, started up.

  “You guys are hot!” their lead singer, Hooch, said. Too bad he looked like an manatee covered with hair. On our way out Bobby Sox asked, “Hey, where’s Zoë?”

  “She couldn’t make it,” I said with a smile.

  “I didn’t even know you were in a band.”

  “It’s just a lark,” I replied and said good night. I knew that Zoë’d feel betrayed if she found out about this from anyone but me. I had to tell her soon.

  Sue screamed at me to join the rest of them squeezing into a cab. Marilyn said we should all go somewhere for drinks, but Norma said she was already drunk, and Sue had to get back to her kid. As our cab approached Fourth and First, I told the driver to pull over and offered Sue two bucks.

  “It’s okay, you already paid,” she explained, adding that we had got 10 percent of the door, which came to a total of twenty bucks, or five dollars per girl.

  Rehearsal was tomorrow at ten, she concluded. I went upstairs, grabbed Numb, and tiredly walked the dog, then headed back upstairs, where I stripped and lay in bed. I felt half exhausted and half crazed about the two half-baked offerings of the day: a rushed submission to a literary contest and my first public concert without nearly enough practice or talent. I felt good.

  chapter 16

  I dreamed I was rising from great oceanic depths, through many atmospheres of pressure. My body floated up through the greenish waters toward the faint light. When I bolted up in a panic, I realized I was late. As soon as I showed up at Kinko’s for work, Jeff marched over to me and asked why I had taken yesterday off. Scott couldn’t get a replacement.

  “I felt nauseous,” I explained, and deciding to be clever, I suggestively twisted the blame to him. “You didn’t have any stomach problems after eating at that Italian place?”

  “No, but whatever it was must not have been too bad.”

  “Why is that?”

  “Well,” he replied with a frigid smile. “From what I hear, you performed pretty well with Sako and even better at the Mercury Lounge last night.” I guess I couldn’t blame Sako for toe-sucking and telling, but how did he find out about the performance?

  “You’re not just a liar,” he went on, “but you have the nerve to blame me for a bogus food poisoning after I was kind enough to treat you to dinner.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said sincerely.

  “You think it’s all funny and you can just apologize your way out of things like some child, but you can’t.”

  “Look, you’re right. I’m really sorry.”

  He walked away from me, giving me a good old-fashioned shunning. What worried me most was that if he knew about all my secret adventures, Zoë must have heard, and I knew she’d be pissed I hadn’t told her. During my lunch break I gave her a call. She wasn’t in. I left a message, and over time more messages—all without a response.

  That afternoon, the neglect ended. Jeff returned as a sadistic prison guard. He timed my one bathroom break and noticed that some of my accessories, particularly a tiny smiley-face button on my apron, were not part of the official Kinko’s uniform. Next, he rewrote my schedule for the upcoming week, giving me night shifts that he knew would fuck up my life.

  I went home and burned a tray of frozen Tater Tots that I was making for dinner. Then I grabbed my pile of filthy clothes, took them to the laundry, and dumped them into a machine. While waiting for the wash, I found a paper and read an article about some guy who spent years working at a Fotomat out on the Island. While developing people’s film, whenever he came across a picture of a nude woman, he would make an extra copy of it for himself. Eventually he discovered an added source of income: he would send his nude snapshots to a skin magazine that paid fifty bucks per photo. When one husband discovered his wife au naturel in a magazine, he called the police. They were able to catch the clerk. I tore the article out of the paper. Even though The Book of Jobs was already under submission, this story would be a perfect addition. I already had the title—“The Fotomat Junkie.”

  As I pulled my wet clothes out of the laundry machine, I discovered that I had accidentally destroyed the only cashmere in my wardrobe, a Bendel’s three-quarter-sleeve boatneck sweater that had cost me over three hundred bucks. I glumly waited for the dryer, folded everything else, and brought it home. Then I took Numb out for the first time in eight hours. He whiffed every contour of earth without pissing once, filling me with anxiety that he would pee as soon as I left him alone.

  That night at rehearsal, Sue produced a list of all the errors each of us had made during our performance.

  “This is all routine,” she scolded. “We all play the same notes and sing the same songs over and over and over!”

  To her credit, she first reviewed the few lines she dropped and thoroughly castigated herself in the process. Then she took turns yelling at each of us. When it was my turn, she had me play as she sang one of her Fuck songs.

  “Now, why couldn’t you do that last night?” she asked.

  “I don’t know, Sue, but I can’t deal with this right now!”

  “Oh, you can’t?”

  “No, I’m afraid I can’t,” I proclaimed, and tossing the bass in the case and grabbing my jacket, I stormed out into the hallway.

  As I waited for the elevator, she approached from behind. I decided that if she said a word, I would quit right there. Surprisingly, she put her hands on my shoulder and began rubbing my upper back. “I’m sorry. Go ahead home. Take it easy. If you’re having a hard time, all you got to do is tell me.”

  When the elevator door opened, she said, “You played fine last night.”

  The next day at work, Jeff hovered over me, watching for mistakes. He deliberately embarrassed me in front of a really cute guy—“She’s bungling it up again!”

  All the while, he kept up his grudge with a smile, refusing to forgive, even after I apologized a few more times for taking the crucial day off. Over the next few days, he didn’t let up. Jeff seemed to prefer humiliating me to firing me. I waited for his mood to blow over, but his storm system was stalled over me. Meanwhile Zoë refused to return my calls; I assumed she was doubly pissed at me. To make matters worse, Howard was not in the dogrun. I figured that it was his nonconfrontational way of saying that I had lost the contest.

  The withdrawal of social life became an opportunity to write. This was the one real benefit to hacking out the collection of stories. After years of malingering, it put me back into the literary groove.

  I was ready to undertake my great proletariat novel. Throughout the years of living in this city, while working in offices or waiting for trains, I would catch sight of them at the opening flaps and closing hatches of the day. Small, hard-edged women, usually immigrants, who held the million little thankless jobs that glued this city together: waitresses, cashiers, seamstresses, day-care workers. Before my mother went back to school and got her teaching credentials, shortly after my father left her, she was one of these menial laborers. Without ever intending to, I had collected endless observations about them.

  During my hitch at a corporate law firm, I talked at length to a battery of females—young, old, Latin, Russian, African American, Asian. I loosely plotted a novel on this group of evening cleaning ladies. Some had children to support, others were sole providers. Some lived alone. Few used moisturizers. Instead of a line of beauty products, Clinique was a place they’d take their feverish children to in the middle of the night.

  The next day I cut my hair shorter and in a more practical style than ever before.

  It wasn’t until four days later, at eight in the morning, just as I was heading to Kinko’s, that Zoë finally called me. In a cold, decimated voice, she apologized that she hadn’t returned my messages, but she had been out of town. She further explained that during the past week, after a steady run of knock-down, drag-outs, Jeff had fina
lly accused her of sleeping with another and slapped her—that had occurred the day I played the Mercury Lounge. Poor Zoë was back in Singlesville.

  “That fucker!” I said. He was a typical woman beater.

  “I kind of initiated the hitting,” she conceded.

  “That’s no excuse.”

  “I should have expected this. You warned me,” she said, instantly choking back tears.

  “I’m sorry for storming out after that dinner with Sako.” It was the last time I had seen her.

  “He wanted me to break off my friendship with you,” she revealed.

  “I can’t believe this!”

  “He kept saying he did you this big favor getting you a job, and you made a joke of him.”

  “Did he tell you anything about my missing work a few days ago?”

  “I haven’t spoken to him in a while.” She didn’t know about my being in a band.

  “I’ve got some news to tell you,” I began in my slow stammer.

  “I got to run off to work now. Are we meeting tonight?” she asked, sensing my long delivery.

  “Tonight?” There was no rehearsal tonight, so it was possible.

  “Emily’s playing at Brownies.” I had completely forgotten about it.

  I had to run to get abused by her ex at Kinko’s, so we agreed to meet and talk later.

  The bottom line was Jeff was pissed at Zoë and was using me as his whipping girl. I had to bail out of this awful job. This was a damn shame, because I was just making strides. Every time I had the freedom to just sit down and write, fate interrupted me like a needy, whiny child. The last time I had a good writing day, Gregor left me for Gwyneth Paltrow.

  When I arrived six minutes late for work, Jeff waded right in with the remark, “It’s coming out of your paycheck.” He said this in front of three coworkers and about a half dozen customers.

  “You know, you’re a nasty little prick,” I decided to tell him, in case he didn’t know.

  “And you’re an ungrateful bitch! I got you this job, and you backstabbed me. You think just because I slept with that slut friend of yours, you get to do whatever you want around here!”