Night Terrors

by Ashley Cardiff

  Not only all of that but the whole mundane hassle of securing an abortion appalled me: I hate phone calls, for one. I hate waiting rooms. I hate waiting at all because I’m naturally very punctual. I hate Highlights magazine and I hate co-pays. I hated every conceivable thing about the idea of scheduling and procuring an abortion, hiding it from his parents, living with no small guilt—or it least the nagging recognition of it—forever, but maybe more than anything, I hated having to suffer the bottomless indignity of staring at Jennifer Aniston’s fucking face from the cover of a celebrity weekly while under oppressive fluorescent light in some cold, unfeeling anteroom as I waited to have my insides scraped out by a stranger while I remained awake.

  I looked at the plastic in my hands and thought to myself, Well, I hope I don’t have to do this.

  It was then, before I even took the test, that I came to terms with how I actually felt about abortion: I abandoned every argument and affectation and faux-provocative stance I’d ever had because the truth of the matter was I would get one, too, if I needed it. Suddenly those anonymous, irresponsible sluts looked a lot like me—those straw women who appear in punditspeak, lying back on the operating table with the same blank indifference they’d wear while lying back to be inseminated. I hoped with every fiber of my stupid forgetful being that I was not pregnant. Then I took the test and I wasn’t. Because I was lucky.

  It’s worth noting that my then-boyfriend, who flatly dismissed the idea of raising our hypothetical unwanted child, would years later sit in a bar among a group of male friends and declare that abortion is “not a constitutional right.” I’d like to underscore the menacing ease of his morality. This is a convenient stance when one has never had to look at a pregnancy test and wonder what it will say.

  —

  I probably would have met Phillip’s bizarre intrusion with a bit more sympathy, had my own scare happened just two months before. Even though I still would have found it absurd to use abortions offensively (like a potato gun), I at least would have understood that look on his face. I managed to go from pretty flippant about something to pretty intimately aware of the purpose it serves. It needs to exist, for a litany of reasons, not the least of which is that ladies are human beings and not just incubators you can fuck.

  Even though my pregnancy scare revealed to me how I felt about abortion, I’m still pretty ambivalent about Phillip. What happened to him was terrible; what happened to the girl he slept with was terrible. But I feel no guilt, as I imagine Axl Rose does not. Maybe I feel no guilt because there were hundreds of condoms enveloping campus that night and I just happened to be handed a defective one. Maybe I feel no guilt because the condom was perfectly fine until he slipped it on wrong and it ripped. Maybe because he was dumb, drunk, eighteen and about to have sex for the first time and didn’t know what he was doing but he was sure as hell doing it. Maybe because I don’t believe others can ever be held accountable for the actions of a free-thinking adult individual. Maybe I feel no guilt because I’m a bad person. Or maybe I just think of it as an ethical wash because I made sixty dollars and could buy groceries, meaning one human life was extinguished so another could burn that much brighter. I guess we’ll never know.

  LIFE IS AN EVIL

  I moved to New York a month after college. I wanted to go there my whole life. Growing up, New Agey Californians would regard my black clothes and tightly wound disposition and tell me I belonged in New York City. It always flattered me.

  The thing about this city, though, is it corrupts your understanding of what’s normal and what’s acceptable. There’s the obvious sense, that people dress like fashion victims or feel comfortable expressing their sexuality or that we’re all spoiled, entitled elitists all the time, such that the second you get out of New York, all you do is complain about the lack of restaurants, cheap and efficient public transportation, museums and live shows, and what time the bars close—all the stuff you take for granted when you live in New York, where anything is actually possible and eventually you can network your way into a book deal. But it does age you; it grinds you down. They say if you want to love New York, you have to leave it a lot. On the bright side, the longer you live here, the better you can play Have You Ever Fucked a Famous Person?

  New York isn’t special because of all the things about it that have eroded or are eroding as the influx of people like me (and presumably you) continues; what’s special about New York is you will see things there, things you could never have imagined. Unspeakable things. Not the man in Union Square dressed as Boba Fett playing the accordion or the man peeling carrots in a three-piece suit in hundred-degree heat (RIP). Not the man who walks around the Village with the cat sitting on his head or the man who drives through Williamsburg in a Subaru, aimlessly and for hours, with all his windows rolled down as he sings Bobby Darin or Frank Sinatra at the top of his lungs. Every weekend. These things are all wonderful but extremely commonplace. I’m talking about the dark stuff.

  As you know, New York consists of five boroughs: Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens, the Bronx and Staten Island. Many would call that order of importance. I live in Brooklyn, for lack of imagination and love of small batches, but also (I’m being serious) I very much dislike crowds. Manhattanites like to hate on Brooklyn because the legacy of New York as we know it was shaped primarily in Manhattan. Of course, what they’re ignoring is that everything that makes New York City great is slowly migrating outward in tandem with rising rents. You can’t really fall back on the legacy of Max’s Kansas City, the Velvet Underground, sixties Bohemianism, punk and Patti Smith, hip-hop and Rothko and The Recognitions, New Wave and the Harlem Renaissance, queer culture and Woody Allen and Some Girls, five-for-a-dollar dumplings and every band you care about and Harper’s Magazine, club comics and Andy Warhol and falafel and getting murdered—all that stuff could never have happened with Manhattan costing as much as it does now.

  Also, the argument is invalid for this simple reason: Manhattan is not “more” New York than any other borough because, by that logic, some shitty trust-fund kid who lives in a gaudy palace on the Upper East Side would then be considered “more” New York than an aging teamster from Queens (reductio ad absurdum). Further, the Wu-Tang Clan is from Staten Island, Run-DMC and A Tribe Called Quest are from Queens, and MCA and Biggie were from Brooklyn.

  What I’m trying to say is that every borough of New York has amazing things to offer (or, at least, I’ve heard that there’s a really good Indian restaurant in Staten Island) and they all need to accept that. I don’t think any one borough has more than the others and I think pitting them against each other is stupid—especially when all the good Thai food is in Queens—but what I will say is this: you see way more exposed genitals in Manhattan than anywhere else. As much as people like to say that Manhattan is the civilized, wealthy borough—the gated community of New York’s art-buying, garage-having elite—I have seen one hundred percent of my pre–nine a.m. dicks on the streets of Manhattan. And if I have learned anything from walking around the island it’s this: if you see a person who seems like he’s got his dick in his hands or has something crazy issuing from his nose or face, don’t look closer.

  The absolute most horrifying thing I have ever seen in New York—and everyone has their story—occurred on a little tree-lined street in the Greenpoint neighborhood of Brooklyn, a quiet, clean street that would probably be very appealing to people with kids if all the houses weren’t covered in vinyl siding.

  It must have been about eight in the morning and I was walking to work. So it happened that I was ambling down this little street, worrying about stupid work things, and ahead of me, about two-thirds of the way up the block, I saw this guy lying on his back. His knees were bent and in the air, he had his toes just touching the edge of the sidewalk. From where I was, I could just make out that he was holding something up to his face.

  I figured, There he is under a tree, in front of a car, maybe he’s trying t
o take photos from extreme angles of his Corolla.

  Nothing yet seemed out of the ordinary. People like sharing banalities on the Internet and taking photographs of lame shit so people with whom they attended second grade can see the lame shit they’re currently looking at.

  But I kept walking closer and began to think to myself, That guy has a pretty intense blowout! He looks like he’s on a reality television show about people who get into fistfights. He was wearing one of those silly shirts that horrible men wear that have tattoos and flair built into them because I guess getting actual barbwire tattoos is too much of a commitment but you still want the look. I’m also pretty sure he was wearing snap-away pants, which are acceptable only if you are ten years old and in the nineties, walking onto a kickball field and the world is moving in lushly hallucinogenic slow motion around you. He looked like he’d been out all night before, knocking back sixteen-dollar-a-pop rail vodka Red Bull at some awful club, which is to say definitely not a homeless person. At this point I could see that he wasn’t holding a camera and his hands were not steady like someone taking pictures, but bouncing up and down over his mouth.

  I got about ten feet away and I heard a noise, a shrill smacking noise. It was very loud. I started getting curious about what this guy lying on the sidewalk at eight in the morning was doing.

  Maybe he’s eating ribs?

  Illogical.

  . . . Breakfast ribs?

  Even though this was a small, quiet, mostly residential neighborhood in North Brooklyn, the morning commute had long begun and people were coming down their stoops and shutting car doors and talking on cell phones around cigarettes, I could barely hear any of it. It was all drowned out by this full wet smacking noise.

  My common sense usually kicks in, now that I’ve lived in New York for a couple years, but this time it just fucking abandoned me. About two feet away, I glanced down against my better judgment.

  It was right then I finally saw what he was holding: the body of a dead baby bird. His hands were about three or four inches apart and I could see its sad little unformed wings spread between them. He was jangling it over his mouth.

  Breakfast ribs were pretty much out at this point. So I thought, Perhaps he is trying to resuscitate that dead baby bird in a strikingly unsanitary fashion?

  Just as I was walking over him, I saw the dead baby bird’s head lolling around uselessly. I guess it was the sight of its shriveled little face that made it all dawn on me. The jangling of its body fell into terrible, gruesome step with the noisy smacking sound he was making with his mouth and I knew in this clear moment on this bright morning, rushing to the subway but paused there and captivated—he was sucking on its butt.

  It was as though I became separate from myself, like in moments of trauma when people see their bodies from above. I looked down and I understood and I kept moving because that’s the survival instinct New York crushes into you, even if you’re a fearful kid from Wine Country. I looked down and I saw what I saw and my quiet reaction was equivalent to thinking to myself, Huh.

  It wasn’t until about an hour later that the truth of the matter all dawned on me. It wasn’t even when I was on the subway. It wasn’t until I got to work and sat down in front of my computer and saw my own reflection in the darkened screen that it hit me: That guy with the stiff blowout is lying on the sidewalk trying to orally pleasure a dead baby bird.

  Only in New York!

  PORN STAR PROBLEMS

  I moved to New York in the death throes of a bad relationship. That pregnancy scare didn’t help. He was my college boyfriend after the Mormon and we met and started dating when I was twenty. He was really charismatic and outspoken, he seemed smart and he was really, really tall. In addition to all that, he could dress himself competently so I pretty much thought he was perfect. As I matured a little, I realized the things you like in college (or on “asshole vacation,” as I like to call it) shouldn’t be the things you like as an independent, free-thinking adult with a real-life job and real-life responsibilities. Or, at least, they shouldn’t be if you plan on doing any developing as a person.

  At about twenty-two, I noticed that he told a lot of lies about himself to seem less boring and cowardly. He lied about people he’d been with; he lied about drugs; he lied about getting into an Ivy League school (and going there, becoming addicted to painkillers and dropping out). Moreover, I realized that he made all those racist jokes because he was actually a racist and not, I guess, the cute college kind? A polo racist? I figure you don’t really understand that people can be evil in college—or that you can only know in a limited way—because it’s such a contained little terrarium where everyone is entitled and depraved and self-involved. While we were in college, a lot of the things he said just made him seem provocative and unapologetic, but then two years later I had graduated and moved to the city to follow my dreams and I had an actual job, and I’m spending my Saturdays at Laundromats and fretting over bills and the stove’s broken again and there’s no heat until the fifth and on top of that, I’m commuting every morning with someone who’ll scream, “Go back to Mexico!” at a woman whose stroller happens to be in his way and then in a terrible moment of clarity you realize it’s not edgy anymore.

  I graduated college in Maryland and moved to New York and really, to this guy’s credit, I doubt I would have had the backbone to move to New York by myself because I was a coward, too, and that might have had something to do with our initial attraction. We found a place in Brooklyn and moved in with a mutual friend so we could split a little two-bedroom between three people. It was pretty run-down but the rent was cheap and it was on a busy street, which was important because I’m from Northern California and thus afraid of my own shadow.

  —

  I moved to New York thinking I was going to land a publishing job right away and then pretty soon I’d be going up and down escalators in Rockefeller Center wearing smart skirt suits, performing cryptic operations on my smart phone and making deals and drinking martinis at lunch and in my spare time I’d write important literary novels. Within a few years we’d land an apartment with exposed brick and exposed wooden beams and anything that could be exposed would be exposed because that’s how you know you’ve made it and maybe I’d have a kid or something but I’d also be rich enough to have a personal trainer and private chef so the kid wouldn’t ruin my body. Then I’d work from home and make a living off serious novels, while freelancing a bit in independent literary journals for the prestige. This was my two-year plan. Which is to say, the great lyric justice awaiting college students is that when reality eviscerates them, it’s pretty much their own fault.

  Before I knew it, I was waiting tables again, much as I’d hated doing so in college. Conveniently, I found a popular bar/restaurant near my apartment. Sadly, the owner was a coked-up psychopath who used the restaurant’s large party spaces to conspicuously cheat on his very pregnant wife. The owner wasn’t around so often, thankfully, but the restaurant’s general manager was even more loathsome: this guy, Ian, was a repulsive toad with a heaving gut who wore tight leather vests and had a wallet chain despite being lodged somewhere in his forties. He looked like the sort of guy whose penis had a wallet chain. He was bald and so clung relentlessly to his verdant soul patch, which he cultivated with such adoration you’d think it was some kind of virility god to which he made BBQ sauce sacrifices.

  Once, Ian told me without prompting about a time he went to Vegas with his girlfriend and made a few grand gambling and so procured a prostitute from one of Vegas’s many prostitute stables. The telling of the story culminated with him suddenly donning a blissful faraway expression and saying of the occasion, “I didn’t touch. I just enjoyed.” I would have thrown up in his face were I not so perplexed by the fact he had a girlfriend. Honestly, though, self-esteem being what it is, men like this will always be able to find people who seek their validation. When I say “men like this,” I mean you
could smell his perineum through his jeans.

  I worked and I got my ass and ego handed to me every day, as being a waiter is basically eating shit professionally. I had no real “in” to the publishing industry and my months of waiting tables in that hellish place were occasionally interrupted by applying to any job in the industry regardless of its appeal. Life was pretty bad as, I mentioned, I was too cowardly to leave a relationship that was long sour, too poor to support myself if I did, too tired and lazy when I got home from my shitty job to commit to finding a way out. Finally, months later, through a miraculous and ultimately irrelevant chain of events, I was offered an interview at a major publishing house. It was in editorial (what I wanted), however it was in the children’s department. But I figured more absurd things had happened.

  I was so excited and so certain that it would finally be my foot in salvation’s door, my rescue from the constant sexual harassment and emotional degradation at the restaurant. I’d never have to watch the owner grope the pairs of Wild Turkey “promo sluts” (his term) in fishnets and knee-high boots and denim miniskirts who’d sit in his lap at the bar and do shots while he held their hands behind their backs and his hugely pregnant wife looked at paint swatches for the nursery in their apartment directly above. Really, the owner’s tableau of coke and ego-induced self-destruction paled in comparison to being within fifty feet of Ian as he ate his nightly pulled pork sandwich, during which he spent most of the consuming part trying to extract the juice and gristle from under his permanently dirty fingernails and I swear to God the whole spectacle was so repulsive it almost made me a celibate vegetarian. Then I would go home and my unemployed live-in boyfriend would tell me how much he hated Polish people and wonder why I didn’t want to sleep with him.