Dogrun

by Arthur Nersesian

  We were early as we walked down Mercer Street, so, passing a used bookstore we slipped in to waste some time before the film began. Howard looked under Literary Criticism, as I veered through Fiction, hoping to distract myself from Joey’s false identity. While browsing a small shelf entitled Erotica, I spotted a collection of six pornographic paperbacks, all with lime green covers, published by Journey Men Press. They had funny titles: Billy Club Cops, A Finger in the Dyke … Before my brain completely registered it, I let out a howl: Cuming Attractions, by Primitivo Schultz.

  “Oh, fuck!” I wailed. The notion that Primo’s offensive drivel had actually made it into print, and I couldn’t even get a story in a decent literary magazine, filled me with a great and sudden rage. I snatched it from the shelf and opened the pages.

  “What’s the matter?” Howard called out. It was his book all right. Before I could even think about it, I tore the paperback down its aged spine.

  “What the hell’s going on?” the clerk called out. Howard came right over.

  “Nothing, I’m sorry,” I said, suddenly realizing what I had done, trying to link the two parts together.

  The clerk came over and, yanking the two torn halves out of my hands, he charged, “This book was part of a set! We had the entire collection, do you realize that?”

  “It’s disgusting porno,” I replied, sounding like some puritan.

  “Look, we have a First Amendment, lady.”

  “No, I didn’t mean that. It’s just that this book is so badly written—”

  “Hey, I don’t give a fuck what you think!” The clerk was obviously enraged.

  “How much does it cost?” Howard asked meekly, before the situation could spiral out of control.

  “Twenty-five dollars,” he shot back, quoting the price from nothing other than some internal system of outrage. I had eighteen dollars, Howard added seven others.

  “I’ll pay you back,” I assured him. He shrugged.

  “And don’t come back!” the clerk shouted as we were leaving.

  We walked silently to the corner. Howard softly asked, “Who is Polly?”

  I looked over and saw that he was reading the dedication page of the novel.

  “Another nitwit like me,” I said, feeling like a total idiot.

  “Do you want the book?”

  “No, thanks,” I said and asked, “Would you mind if we skipped the film?”

  “No,” he replied and slipped the torn paperback into his pocket.

  “I feel like such an idiot,” I said, after a few minutes of silence. “I really have an awful temper.”

  “You were probably pissed about the whole Joey thing.”

  “That doesn’t excuse what I did,” I said. “Primo didn’t do anything wrong. And nothing is worse than destroying a book.”

  “He could have told you he wrote it.”

  “He told me he was a writer. And I found the fucking manuscript. Hell, I read it. It was awful. There weren’t enough sex scenes and … I just assumed it was rejected.”

  The evening ended with us both walking our dogs. When I returned to my apartment, Sako was smearing another message on my message tape, begging me for a second date.

  I picked up and thanked him for the experimental evening of sensual pleasures, but I simply couldn’t risk it again.

  “Why?” he asked, “If I acted a bit disorderly—”

  “Actually, you gave me a bad case of athlete’s foot,” I lied. He apologized, recommending I use Dr. Scholl’s powder, and hung up.

  I went to bed and tried to sleep, but Joey’s identity had worked its way back into my head. I finally decided to try something that Zoë told me she had once done in discovering a boyfriend was cheating on her. I called Joey, and when his machine picked up, I plugged in a series of unsystematic permutations in an effort to crack his three-digit code. The first several times, it was to no avail; I was automatically hung up on. It wasn’t until the fourth attempt that I got a strange beep and the sudden swish of the tape rewinding. Finally the swishing ceased, and it began to replay, “Hey, Rudy, did you or did you not say Aqueduct at ten? I’m waiting for you, you fucking gumba.”—beep—“Goddamn it, Staf, I hear you dislocated Jimbo’s arm. I fucking tole you, if he can’t work, he can’t pay you.”—beep—“Hey, Mister Stafiglianno, I was hoping if you didn’t mind, maybe I could pay you just two hundred this week and the rest next week.”—beep. The messages unraveled.

  I hung up and called him back: “You cocksucking coward, if you ever call me or see me again, I’ll fucking kill you!” I slammed the phone down and started weeping. I didn’t care that he was some kind of strong-arm. Rudolph Stafiglianno, who I always thought was dead, was my father.

  chapter 18

  Half a revolution of the earth later, around noon the next day, the phone rang, waking me up. Howard was telling my machine that they had selected a book for the contest.

  “Which one?” I picked up.

  “Stark, the one about the priest. The author sent in an alternate ending in which the cleric gets caught in a scandal and is ostracized by the parish.”

  The new ending sounded like the conclusion of the movie Priest, but if the publisher didn’t see the film, that was his problem. I still couldn’t believe that Primo had gotten a novel published, and I hadn’t.

  “But hey,” Howard said. “I have some good news. You were in the finals, and I think I can get you an agent.”

  “That would be great,” I said, still facedown on my pillow.

  “Do you have anything else you’re working on?”

  “Yeah, I’m about a quarter through a novel about a group of cleaning ladies.”

  “Who pull a caper in their office?” He anticipated the ending for me.

  “No.”

  “Any sex scenes with their boss?”

  “No.”

  “Do they shoot their boss?”

  “Tell you what,” I compromised, “if I have them screw the boss, I’ll be sure to have them shoot the guy.”

  He gave me a Midtown address and phone number. “Tell him I recommended you.”

  “I appreciate it” I said glumly.

  “Are you walking your dog?”

  “Later. I have to run now.” Aside from the joblessness, I had to find a roommate. The echo from the empty room sounded like a forlorn future. In the bathroom, a baby cockroach crawled up to me and stopped. By not killing it, I figured I had done something good. I didn’t need to do anything else that day. I rustled through my pockets and my purse but found no cigarettes, no chewing gum, no TicTacs. I turned the TV on, picked up the telephone, and called Zoë at work.

  “What’s up?” she asked in that edgy, flighty tone that told me she was being loosely supervised.

  “Yesterday, while in a Mercer Street bookstore, I found a copy of Cuming Attractions, a porn novel by Primo that was published.”

  “So what? He told me he wrote,” she said tiredly.

  “I just went nuts. I ripped the book to shreds. I didn’t even know I was doing it.”

  “Are you kidding?” she murmured.

  “Why would I be kidding?”

  “You’ve been at this long enough. Don’t you think it’s time to scatter him both figuratively and literally?” She hung up; the prison matron must have passed her cell. I didn’t even have time to tell her the most painful news about Joey.

  She was right. It was high time to dispose of the ashes and finally forget about the liar, the cheat, and the fraud who slept with me for six months and one day died.

  Looking through my phone book, I located Helga Elfman’s business card and dialed. A perky receptionist answered, “Barbarosian Gallery.”

  “Ms. Elfman, please.”

  “Whom should I say is calling?”

  “Primo’s girlfriend,” I replied, half enjoying the trashy sound of it.

  “Even dead, that man has a girlfriend,” Helga said by way of a greeting.

  I’m sorry for calling you in the middle o
f the day like this, but you asked me to inform you of the scattering.”

  “When and where, quick?” No mincing words with her. From silence equals death to time equals money.

  “Tonight,” I decided right then and there. “In Tompkins Square Park.”

  “Tonight might be a problem,” she replied.

  “Well, problem or not, I’m done. I’ll wait until seven. No later. I want to get rid of all the shitty men in my life tonight.”

  “Where exactly should I meet you?” She sounded as though she were holding pen to appointment book.

  “Do you know the Horseshoe Bar?” I asked.

  “I’ll try,” she said and hung up.

  I called the other quasi-ex-girlfriend, Lydia. She didn’t pick up, so I put the information on her machine. I thought about calling Norma but didn’t want to get her in trouble with Sue. Last, I called Zoë back at work and announced that tonight was the fateful night of the long-overdue scattering.

  “I’m so glad,” she said and hung up. I called several of Primo’s male friends, leaving messages on their machines about that night’s service. Then I realized that by being on the telephone while the TV was on, I was being rude to the picture box, so I watched it uninterrupted.

  It was five o’clock when Oprah was done. Both I and the dog were stir-crazy. Another day was shot out of the sky without sunlight or forward motion. I left a message on my outgoing machine: “In case anyone should call, Primo’s ash toss will be at seven-fifteen tonight at the dogrun in Tompkins Square Park.”

  I dressed, grabbed the dog, located the Primo box, and headed out to the park. While I passed through the housing complex between First Avenue and A, I felt my pockets for a cigarette and found an envelope of blue, diamond-shaped pills instead. I remembered that I had found them in Primo’s banana box some time ago. As I came out on Fifth Street, I went to the corner pharmacy across the street for smokes. I purchased a pack from the pharmacist himself.

  “Excuse me,” I asked him, a bespectacled man in his sixties. “You couldn’t tell me what these are?” I handed him the packet.

  He took one and held it up in the light. “You really have to go to a laboratory to find out something like that. But by just looking at the shape, size, and color—” He paused, went to a shelf in the back, and muttered, “Yep, just as I thought.” He returned into view. “I don’t know the strength, but these are Viagra.”

  “Viagra!” I could hardly believe it. At first I laughed. The fucker was taking Viagra. Even with them, the sex was crappy. Buying my first cup of coffee of the day at the Koreans’, I headed north to Tompkins Square, where I lit a cigarette, swilled down my coffee, and watched the dogs run. It was only about five-thirty, but the day looked combed-over and double-chinned, prematurely old. I had an hour and a half to kill before meeting my fellow mourners.

  “Hey,” I heard. Looking up with a start, I half expected to see the demon dad standing over me. It was Howard.

  “How you doing?” I asked and stubbed my ciggy.

  “You look philosophically preoccupied.”

  “I’m scattering Primo’s ashes at seven.”

  “Good.” He leaned forward. “Is that the only problem?”

  “Hell, if my problems were beads, I would have the longest necklace in the neighborhood,” I quipped, but it was now only one problem, and I felt too ashamed to talk about my undead father. I hated the fact that this man, my utterly despicable cocreator, had spread through my life like a cancer. Tattoo Man stood alongside me, silently sensing that I was in a pensive mood. I lit another cigarette and tried not to think that one out of every seven Americans will come down with cancer.

  “If you need money, I can loan you some,” Howard offered, kind as usual.

  “I’m just worried about work in general.” He sat down next to me on the bench and endured my anxious smoky belches. I felt like crying. I kept trying to imagine what it must have been like for my mother nearly thirty years ago. It made my problems seem so minuscule. The idea of my mother going out clubbing at night, swinging from temp job to temp job, and boyfriend to boyfriend was unthinkable. The societal notion of happiness that she bought into as a young woman was so convoluted—a husband and child before thirty—that she unwittingly ended up sacrificing true happiness in the process. The difficulty of raising me with a cheating, lying, abandoning deadbeat of a husband was unthinkable.

  Here I was living in the hedonistic East Village and I wasn’t happy either. I didn’t even have a kid to show for my frustrations. A green, shit-eating fly landed on my arm, compelling me to jump forward.

  “Sorry,” Tattoo Man said, he was stroking my back.

  “It’s okay,” I replied.

  “You know, this isn’t easy for me to say,” he began. “I’ve been hoping to tell you that I like you.” His voice took on an achy, itchy tone.

  “You were, huh?” I lit up another smoke and remembered that I also needed a new roommate.

  “I really like you.” He caught himself. “And I know this sounds odd, but I really want to get to know you better.”

  I sucked hard on my cigarette and tried to repress a yelp. An unwanted “get to know you better” still lost out to a flush of hatred for an undesirable father.

  “Have you ever cheated on a girlfriend?” I asked him boldly.

  “Never.”

  “Have you ever freeloaded off one?”

  “Absolutely not. In fact, just the opposite,” he added.

  “Have you ever taken Viagra?”

  “Not knowingly.” He laughed.

  “Have you ever hit a girlfriend, or dumped her with a love child, or lied about your age, or pretended to be someone else, or … or dumped your dog on her?”

  “No, to all the above,” he said.

  I actually didn’t mind about the dog—that had turned out to be the only nice thing. Perhaps sensing that pain was festering just under my epiderm, he gave me a sympathetic little smile and put his hand gently on mine.

  “I have no job, no skill, no money, nothing to offer. You can do a lot better, even with all those ridiculous self-hating tattoos.”

  “I don’t think so,” he replied after a chuckle. “You’re witty and intelligent, you’re kind in a cruel way and beautiful, and any man who is with you would be very, very lucky.”

  “What exactly do you want?” I asked him with narrowed eyes.

  “Well,” he replied and let loose a nervous sigh. “For starters.” He leaned forward, opening his mouth as though I were going to pull his molar. I opened mine a crack, which was enough for him to slip his tongue in. I let him kiss me.

  As we kissed, his hands collaterally moved up along the large of my back, around my shoulders, and to the sides of my breasts.

  “Want to go to my place?” he asked simply.

  I just felt empty. I wanted to withdraw from life, move to Montana, and take on a new identity. But that wasn’t an option. I wasn’t tired, but I couldn’t stay awake.

  “I live right over there.” He pointed just north of the park.

  I never agreed. I just didn’t have the energy to resist. He collected me, leashed both our dogs, and walked me out of the park. We headed up to Tenth Street between A and B. It was a lopsided old brownstone with a long, polished, tonguelike banister that took us up several flights. Each floor had two apartments. He must have moved here in the early eighties, because that was the last time you could get a half-floor apartment adjacent to the park without paying a small fortune. He opened a door on the third floor. I barely had time to survey the place. He switched on the light. It seemed to make me move in slow motion and accelerate him. He unbuttoned my blouse, unhooked my bra, and began sucking my nipples.

  Although I was attracted to him, I felt emotionally and physically anesthetized. But I desperately wanted to feel more as he unclasped my belt, unbuttoned the jeans, and slipped his hand into my torn panties.

  In another second he was naked, and we were two forms on his mattress. He put a
rubber on, slipping himself inside of me slowly at first, then moving quickly. Humping, banging, bumping away. Not looking at my face, not kissing me, hiding his face in my neck. Finally he jerked forward, wresting some kind of demon out and expelling it deep inside of me.

  He rolled over moist and zonked, trying to catch his breath. At last I had an opportunity to check out the room. It was a civilized East Village apartment; white walls, high ceilings, rough wood floors. Three large windows revealed a wonderful view of the park. The overcast sky was smooth, the color of skim milk. In a metal frame above his desk he had a large photograph of the well-known misogynist Friedrich Nietzsche. Upon another wall was that tired New Yorker poster that shows New York City next to the rest of the culturally dwarfed country. Although it was meant as a joke, it wasn’t. Everyone who lives here thinks the city is such hot shit. New York just sucks you in with all its coolness. But the Empire City has no clothes. It was buzz, spin, and hype without any substance.

  “Want something to drink?” he asked, helping himself to a glass of water. I said no. “How about a shower?”

  That sounded good, but when I rose, I saw his VCR—it was 7:23.

  “Oh, shit!” I exclaimed. “Primo’s ash toss! I’m supposed to meet everyone at seven at the Horseshoe.”

  Both of us frantically pulled on our clothing. As I was leashing Numb to bring him along, Howard suggested, “Leave the dog here. It will be easier.”

  Numb and Fedora were happily licking each other’s privates, so I accepted his offer. I grabbed Primo’s ashes, and together we dashed out and down Avenue B, along the park over to the Horseshoe. Looking pale, Zoë was sitting alone in the dark.

  “Where were you?” she yelled as soon as she saw me.

  “It was my fault,” deflected Howard kindly. Then he went over to order drinks at the bar.

  “That Hell-ga person just left,” Zoë said, staring nervously at Howard, who was talking to the bartender. “Oh, God, you guys weren’t having sex, were you?”