I Shudder

by Paul Rudnick

  I had never spent time around a world-class, drain-the-keg madman before. Nicol belonged to a boisterous, selfish, elite cadre of mostly British actors, the Angry Young Men of the 1950s and sixties. They were the working-class blokes who’d banished the decorum of Gielgud and Olivier; they were brawlers who went for birds and lager and, at least onstage, a grittier realism. This reckless brotherhood included Richard Burton, Richard Harris, and Peter O’Toole, all of whom binged their way to the top. But Nicol had been denied the leading-man screen stardom, and the eventual knighthood, that his peers had won, and this can’t have pleased him.

  Nicol believed, I think, that if he could just get to the theater, if he could only step onstage, he’d be fine. Some nights, he’d saunter in at five, even ten minutes after eight, knowing that we’d hold the curtain. But there was one performance when he’d overslept, or passed out in his apartment, and his understudy had gone on. Although we hadn’t spoken in weeks, the next day Nicol called me, assuring me that everything was fine, and that he’d be on that evening. Then he abruptly hung up. For the first time, he’d sounded shaken.

  After the final performance, I had no intention of talking to Nicol. I was still too angry. As I was heading upstairs, to bid farewell to the more lucid actors, the door to Nicol’s dressing room swung open. He stood there, a soused, lunatic, fifty-two-year-old Hamlet. We stared at each other as if we were miles apart and might wave. Nicol finally spoke, and his tone was both kind and accusing. He said, “You knew this was going to happen.” And then he smiled and shut the door.

  I Shudder:

  An Excerpt from the Most Deeply Intimate and Personal Diary of One Elyot Vionnet

  Good and Evil

  1.

  I have known a goodness so radiantly pure that it has literally transported me, and I have witnessed the most malignant evil, a dark force of such soul-churning horror that it can only be called Susan Marie Henkelman.

  How have I experienced these two most opposite poles of the known moral universe? Like all towering, indisputable truths, the answer is simple: I take cabs.

  As a substitute teacher, I subsist on the most laughable and precariously meager income. I have lived in the same rent-controlled studio apartment for my entire adult life, and I haven’t purchased an item of clothing in almost as long, although happily, my wardrobe is of such an enduring quality that only minor repairs have been necessary. And because, as a reader of low and explicit interests, you’re wondering about my underwear, I will explain: my intimate apparel is manufactured from a Swiss cotton of such whisper-soft resilience that it is normally used only to wrap the painfully sensitive faces of the world’s wealthiest women as they recuperate from their acid peels in private clinics. Unlike these women’s jowls and browlines, however, my undergarments require mending only once per decade, when I mail them to a Long Island convent, where the nuns compete to gently darn and patch my private attire, because, as Sister Herbert Elizabeth once wrote to me, in her own blood, “Mr. Vionnet, your boxer shorts and undershirts do not merely speak to me. They sing.”

  And so I continue in borderline poverty, save for my one indulgence, no, my single absolute necessity: I take cabs. Yes, on occasion, when I wish to see what people with unpleasant skin conditions are wearing, I do take the subway. I have never, I am proud to say, taken the bus, because people who take the bus have given up. They have said, I am nothing, I will never know a second’s joy or even the most minuscule accomplishment, I am a rotting fleshbag rolling toward my squalid garden apartment in one of those fictional neighborhoods, such as Inwood or Yorkville. I am not living, I am simply waiting to be recycled; instead of a soul, I own a Naugahyde briefcase or a clear plastic rain bonnet, I am God’s mucus, and therefore—I take the bus.

  But a taxi! I leave my home, and for a moment I am lost, disoriented, unsure of my destination, my purpose, my next breath, and then—a cab appears! And behind the wheel—an angel! God has provided these holy messengers, and crowned them with turbans and tweed caps and the most superbly petrified hairpieces, toupees which resemble nothing so much as some ancient seagull trapped forever in an Alaskan oil spill, and dusted with volcanic ash. God has anointed these charioteers, He has commanded His minions to travel the earth, assisting His human creations, He has said, ferry Mr. Vionnet, cushion him, swaddle him in pine-scented, Plexiglas-partitioned, limited-leg-room love!

  I’ll come clean, in case anyone is unsure of the true reason I hoard my pennies and often dine for weeks at a time on only saltines and Hershey’s Kisses, to underwrite my taxi habit. I take cabs because, when I board the subway, I’m off to work; but when I hail a cab, I can picture any destination, from the Bowery to the Seychelles to a Romanian bakery to Vatican City for the election of a new pope—I always like to yell “NOPE!” at the losers. Cabs promise glamour and fantasy, along with a certain solitude, which are all I ask of any religious experience. Mass transit is a constant reminder of a crowded, halting, sloppy existence, reeking of a fellow passenger’s take-out taco or teen-stud body spray. A cab, to a truly unfettered imagination, is a time machine or a spaceship or a chauffeured buttery yellow Bentley. A cab can go anywhere.

  Certainly, there have been squabbles, the occasional cab-related misstep. For a time, as the meter clicked on, the recorded voice of a local celebrity urged the rider to use his or her seat belt. This irritating reminder not only caused every passenger to defiantly ignore all forms of safety, but eventually an angry mob tracked down these celebrities, forced them to kneel in a public square and apologize, and then all of these celebrities were hanged, using seat-belt webbing, from sturdy lampposts in Times Square, as the mob chanted, “Buckle up! It’s the law!”

  The latest taxi deformity is the touch screen, a computerized video panel which allows riders to laboriously pay the fare using a credit card. People who use credit cards in cabs, or to purchase small plastic packages of breath mints in drug stores, such people are lower than Judas. They are, in fact, Satan’s army, and I can prove it. When standing behind someone using their credit card to pay for an item under ten dollars, use this test while you’re waiting: take a match or a cigarette lighter, and set the person using the credit card on fire. I guarantee that such demonic cretins will relish the flames, they will bask in them, as they idly pluck a tabloid from a nearby wire rack and scan the cover story, titled “Best Celebrity Beach Bodies—and the Worst!”

  Lower than even those who use credit cards in cabs are undoubtedly the newscasters who appear in the video clips on the backseat screens, underscored with pounding Action News theme music. If a rider acts instantly, he or she can halt these mini-newscasts and weather updates, by touching an always difficult to locate, microscopic video dot, but this is not always possible. Sometimes the off button is broken, and the babbling newsperson joins you, unbidden, unwanted, and unstoppable, for the duration of your journey.

  This happened to me just last week. I entered a cab, and lunged to jab at the microdot before a chubby, bright-smiled weatherperson could begin his forecast for the Texas panhandle. It was no use, as the more I jabbed, the louder and more repellent the forecast became. I asked my driver, “But can’t something be done? Can’t we get rid of these touch screens, and this blathering weather shill?” The driver, my companion in misery, gestured helplessly, and together we hatched a remedy.

  The driver brought me to the midtown TV studio where the weatherman’s morning news show was under way. A customary, adoring crowd was gathered in the street outside the studio, watching the broadcast through a bulletproof plate-glass window. I left the cab, carrying a hefty chunk of ragged cinderblock which I’d acquired from a nearby construction site. As I heard the weatherman begin to ask one of the show’s pathologically upbeat cohosts about her plans for the weekend, I shouldered my cinderblock and heaved it high over the mob and through the massive barrier window, which was blessedly not Vionnet-proof. As I headed back toward my cab, I heard the glass shatter and the weatherman scream and fall to the studio
floor, his neck completely severed, with his now decapitated head rolling across the studio floor, directly onto the left foot of a cohost, who shrieked because her shoes were both open-toed and brand-new. The fans cheered and rushed even closer to the TV cameras, raising their homemade placards, which read “Hi From Ohio!” and “I’m 41 Today and I’m Standing Outside Watching a TV Show!!!”

  Back in my taxi, the touch screen had gone black, and the grateful driver promised me that, upon my death, I would be greeted in the next world not by a measly thousand dark-eyed virgins but by a billion applauding cabdrivers.

  My communion with this driver is only one example of the divinity, and the ethereal goodness of the Manhattan taxi. Which brings us to its opposite, to the unspeakable, and to the woman who can only be called Satan’s less-attractive sister.

  Susan Marie Henkelman had moved into my building earlier this year, and I first encountered her a few days later, on the sidewalk outside our building’s front entrance. It was Sunday, and I was en route to St. Patrick’s Cathedral, where I like to linger in a rear pew, on the aisle, and suggest possible prayers to other parishioners on their way to take Communion. I offer thoughts like, “Ask the Lord about that ketchup stain,” “Beg Jesus to forgive you for imagining that you are one of the three people on the planet who can wear a beret” and “Tell God that you’re sorry about having sex with your cousin, on his wedding day, and, by the way, everyone knows.”

  I was eager to arrive at the cathedral, so I raised my hand to heaven, in the familiar cab-hailing Manhattan salute. After fifteen seconds, I heard a voice which was both petulant and abrasive, insisting, “Excuse me! Excuse me! I get the first cab!”

  Have you ever noticed that when the words “Excuse me!” are shouted, they no longer serve as a form of polite behavior but as a threat?

  I turned to see what I can only call a raging asparagus. Susan Marie Henkelman was tall and rangy, with angry, sticklike, thrashing arms, a face squeezed into an accordion of feverish self-importance, topped by a hairdo of rigidly stalklike shafts frosted with quivering curls; her hair was like a mushroom cloud, or the cacophony of drunken bluebirds and wobbly exclamation points which hovers over the cranium of a comic-strip drunk. Susan looked to be somewhere in her thirties, which is not a good neighborhood for a single mom in Manhattan, and her sleeves and slacks seemed too short and too tight, as if her limbs were expanding with ire, and sprouting with vengeance. Her shoes were square and cheap and sensible, like something a pilgrim would buy on sale, and she was carrying a baby across her body in a Norwegian-designed, Chinese-manufactured, and American-discounted sling.

  “I get the first cab!” Susan repeated, her body coming to a halt mere inches from my own, as if her leash had been fortuitously yanked.

  “I beg your pardon,” I said, not wishing for a squabble, “but I was here first.”

  “I have a sick baby!” said Susan, thrusting out her chest, causing her infant to lurch toward me.

  “Prove it,” I said.

  “What is wrong with you, my baby is very sick!” said Susan, as the baby began to squall obligingly.

  “Stop twisting that baby’s ankle,” I suggested.

  “I’m not twisting it. I’m massaging it.”

  “Then why is the baby crying and trying to pull its leg away?”

  “She has…an ankle rash!”

  “Is that even really your baby? Or do you just keep it stashed with the extra umbrellas behind the front desk, and use it to hail cabs?”

  “How dare you! I am a mother with a sick child!”

  “I’ll give you five dollars, for the baby and the first cab.”

  “What?” said Susan, with unparalleled outrage, and a smidgen of interest; I could sense her calculating an instantaneous list of pros and cons, with the “pros” list beginning, “I could probably talk him up to ten, and I’m still young, I can have another baby.” “No!” she decided. “You are disgusting! And I am taking my baby…to the baby hospital!”

  It was then that a cab pulled up, only a few feet from our fracas.

  “That’s my cab! My cab!” shouted Susan, trying to shove past me. As the cab honked, to encourage a decision, Susan grabbed her baby and held the child out in front of her, like a talisman, or a bargaining chip.

  “Tell my baby,” said Susan, “tell him to his face that you won’t let us go to the baby hospital.”

  “I thought your baby was a girl.”

  “She is, but I’m not going to label her. Tell her!”

  I placed my hands over Susan’s, so that we were now both holding the baby, and I spoke to the infant with a firm tenderness.

  “Baby,” I said, “I realize that you’re only an innocent pawn, but your mother is not only a bully and a hysteric, she is a criminal.”

  The baby gave a tiny snort, as if replying, “Tell me something I don’t know.”

  “Cabs are sacred sedans,” I continued. “A cab must be earned and deserved. A cab should never become a battleground for petty feuds. And your mother has betrayed the bounty of God, because your mother…”

  I raised my chin an eighth of an inch, and the baby raised hers.

  “Your mother—is a cab jumper.”

  As the baby’s eyes widened, and her innocence fell away, I heard a whoosh, as if someone had used a razor to slice cleanly through a sheet of paper, or had broken the sound barrier. I stepped back. Susan had somehow moved past me, and was now seated in the backseat of the cab, as if she’d mastered the art of time travel, or had become a vapor. The baby looked at me helplessly, imprisoned on her mother’s chest.

  “The Lovely Lady Nail Salon and Day Spa, at Forty-fifth and Madison,” Susan hissed to the driver as the cab sped away.

  2.

  Our next confrontation occurred two days later. I stepped from my building, headed for the Forty-second Street Library, where I like to leave detailed, bogus, and therefore delectably frustrating treasure maps in the pages of dusty atlases. As I raised my arm, I heard, “Excuse me! Excuse me!”

  I turned, as Susan came hurtling down the street toward me, pushing a double stroller the size of a tank, only far more destructive and less visually distinguished. The stroller held two infants, and was piled with a canvas tote, a clutch of plastic grocery bags, a quilted vinyl duffel, and a net sack bulging with grimy, neon-colored toys, a Tupperware container filled with crackers shaped like tiny, eyeless fish, a jar of what was either organic baby food or raw sewage, and at least five of those miniature bottles of vodka found in hotel room refrigerators.

  “That’s my cab! Don’t take my cab!” Susan bellowed, heading right toward me, her open beige trench coat exposing her beige safari-style pantsuit and her beige imitation-python fanny pack. Susan was dressed for an expedition, as if seeking a Mommy & Me gymnastics class somewhere on the Serengeti.

  “I get the first cab!” Susan declared. “We’ve already established the pecking order! Don’t give me any trouble!”

  “I beg your pardon,” I said evenly, “but I was here first. And this time you’re not getting past me.”

  “He’s trying to steal my babies!” Susan now announced, rotating so that everyone passing by, on either side of the street, could hear her plaintive wail. “This man is trying to kidnap my babies! Help, please, somebody, help!”

  A suspicious crowd began to form around us.

  “What’s the problem?” asked an older man, the operator of a nearby newsstand.

  “Do you need help?” a woman asked Susan, a woman who looked and sounded almost exactly like Susan. “I have a great pediatrician, and a killer divorce lawyer.”

  “Is this joker bothering you?” asked a younger man, whose hugely muscled forearms and glassy eyes indicated that he’d just been tossed out of the police academy, before lunch, on his first day.

  “I’m not bothering her,” I explained patiently. “I was simply standing here, attempting to hail a cab, when this woman came running toward me, claiming for some absurd reason that she d
eserved the cab more than me. This woman…”

  I stood tall, and used my hailing arm as if it were a dowsing rod, pointing not to subterranean water but to unmitigated gall.

  “This woman,” I said, my rigid index finger now an inch from Susan’s vibrating button nose, “this woman is a cab jumper!”

  There was a collective gasp, and Susan’s face twitched, as she rethought her game plan. Her shoulders slumped, her chin drooped, and her gait became pigeon-toed. “I’m sorry,” she said, in a whispery, bedraggled voice, to the crowd. “I should never have asked for the cab. I’m just…another, totally average, out-of-my-mind working mom. No, it’s fine. No special favors. It’s just, oh, I shouldn’t be bothering you, any of you, with my ridiculous problems, especially not such an older and well-dressed fellow, like this fine gentleman.”

  She gestured to me, and continued: “But, you see, my husband dumped me, an hour ago. And he said, ‘Susan, I’m leaving you, and I’m leaving you with nothing, except for two kids, a mortgage, and a mountain of bills.’ And then he shoved a full-color picture in my face, of his new twenty-two-year-old girlfriend in a string bikini, and she was holding a picture of me, and she’d drawn a Ghostbusters symbol over my face, and she was laughing. But when I heard our front door slam, I fell to my knees, and I raised my fist and I swore to Our Lord that I would keep going, that I would work double shifts, that I would do whatever I have to, just to take care of my babies, just so that Eliza and Trad can have at least one hot meal per week and a roof over their heads. And even if I have to sell my body, or pieces of it, well, that’s what I’m going to do. And just now I was bringing my babies to our local shelter for homeless families, because that’s the only place where we can all stay together. But no, please, really, I’m fine.”

  She turned to me and said, “Please, I insist. You take the first cab.”

  As one, the crowd shifted its penetrating, accusatory glare to me as a cab pulled up to the curb, and I fought the most insistent urge I’d ever known, to blurt out, “Trad? You named your baby Trad?”