Manhattan Loverboy

by Arthur Nersesian

  “Hi, guys,” I said.

  “That’s him,” a deep bellow of masculinity made identification. My eyes and ears instantly adjusted. I realized that before me was Whitlock the Goliath, whom I had brought down just yesterday. If this meeting had taken place in the subway or on the street, I’m sure they would’ve beaten the shit out of me. But in such a nice room, with pipe smoke and heavy brocade drapes, they’d no doubt elect to go through legal channels.

  “First of all,” I began my defense, “I didn’t do anything.”

  “I never said you did,” Whitlock replied calmly.

  “You fell down of your own volition. Admit it! You panicked on your own! Admit it!”

  “So I did.”

  “When you chased me into Rizzoli’s, you scared me; don’t deny it ‘cause you did.”

  “I probably did,” he conceded.

  “No judge or jury would ever believe a tiny person like me would try to accost a tall, Olympian like you.”

  “Absolutely.”

  “You’re a witness! You’re a witness!” I exclaimed to the Dean.

  “Have a good day, Mr. Aeiou,” replied the Dean.

  “May I ask who the hell you are?” I said to the Dean.

  “A dean; now leave my office,” he said very calmly.

  I walked back to Professor Flesh’s office to try and work something out tuition-wise. But when I entered Flesh’s office, he said he’d just received a phone call ordering him to bar me from the building. Furthermore, all my academic records with the university were seized, pulled, and probably shredded. That included my baccalaureate transcripts, so I couldn’t even transfer to another school.

  “That’s illegal!” I hollered.

  “I was only following orders,” replied the history professor.

  I dashed back to Butler and past Veronica into the Office of the Dean of Covert Operations. They were both still there, bathed in shadows, hushed tones, phlegmatic laughter, and facelifts.

  “Please, Mr. Whitlock.” I threw myself to the ground. “I’m sorry for what I did, I beg you to have mercy.”

  “Notify campus security,” the Dean said to Veronica, who entered behind me. She nodded with a smirk and left the room.

  “Let me clarify something,” he said. “I’m doing you a favor.”

  “What?”

  “I could hurt you a lot more.”

  I kept begging, but the man kept ignoring me. He was talented at it. Arrogantly, he inspected a gilded portrait of some rich cocksucker. Soon the campus security, the large dumb animal in a uniform, grabbed me and forced both my hands behind my back. He pushed me out. As the security guard walked me past Veronica, she murmured, “Call me.”

  He took me to the phony-marble steps and let me calmly return to my decimated life. I walked down the steps and took a seat on a marble bench near the small, dry, penis-shaped fountain donated by alumna Margaret Dodge.

  What the hell, I thought. Ever since I’d entered the graduate program I had pondered over a subject for a thesis. I was supposed to write one this semester and I had neither the subject nor the inclination; it was a good time to be thrown out of school. What was I going to do with a masters, except bullshit around academia? Maybe try for a teaching spot in some exclusive Alpine girls school, like Sly Stallone in his pre-Rocky days, and try to do as many of the religiously crippled virgins as possible? Be that as it may, this expulsion put some new possibilities into what otherwise might have been a life of joy and waste. As I passed through the gates donated by alumnus George Delacorte, I thought to myself, I can’t let all this go. I mustn’t. I took the subway downtown to Whitlock’s office and waited outside of his glass-and-steel castle. An hour passed and then another, just like the first. A succession of limos came and went, until finally the door of one opened, and he got out.

  “I beg you, Mr. Whitlock,” I said, running up to him. His driver walked in interference between him and me.

  “I only meant to appeal to you, but you kept walking away,” I shouted around the stocky driver. But Whitlock walked toward the rhombus-shaped building and wouldn’t even look at me.

  “Please, Mr. Whitlock, you are obviously a very powerful man, but don’t you agree that, in the words of that innovative financier Michael Milken, ‘with power comes the veneer of responsibility’”—Milken, who used three-card monte as a model for the investment banking industry, never said any such thing, but I figured that Whitlock might respect one of his own—“For a miscalculation on my part, you’re sentencing my whole life to incompletion! I beg you…I had no preconceived plan, and whatever embarrassment or damage I might have caused you was, ironically, only self-inflicted by your humongous ego.”

  But Whitlock entered his palace without acknowledging my words.

  Upon my entering the building, security blocked my entrance. I took position across the street and waited out of view, watching covertly. Another hour came and went before Whitlock exited the building. I raced over. This time, his driver grabbed me and cranked his arm back, about to punch.

  “No!” said Whitlock.

  “Mr. Whitlock, I am not going away. I will be here every day, every waking hour, until you rethink this!”

  “I am warning you. Leave me alone.”

  “I can’t. You hold my future. I will be here every day, I warn you. Mr. Whitlock, Andrew, if I may call you that, the worst thing you can do to a person is to empower him and then knock that power away.”

  “You think so?” he asked matter-of-factly, and for the first time, he seemed to really hear me.

  “Yes sir, absolutely.” He smiled, got into his car, and drove away.

  A tall order of sleep was the prescription. But New York was an awful city for sleep. Added to which, sleep had a bad rap. People who slept were assumed to be lazy. But sleep was the seat of man’s power. His prophesies, his fantasies, his visitations to death, his real confrontations, his magical strength—all arose from sleep. And it was in sleep that I saw them: farmers in black pajamas, Asiatics racing around on a battlefield, scurrying into a myriad of tunnels, submerged under rice paddies. Learning the lesson of Vietnam, these pajama farmers defeated our mega-tech GIs. I realized a nothing-to-lose, grassroots guerilla operation was the only way to combat this.

  It was morning of the next day, a good time to prepare for my Tet Offensive. I collected some of my late, unknown uncle’s camping gear from around the house: a pup tent, a sleeping bag, a transistor radio, and a book on how to hold together under interrogation.

  Manhattan on a map hangs like an old sock into the Narrows. I hopped on a bus to the big toe. Stopping by a Korean grocer, I acquired food staples, a cup of coffee, a black magic marker, and some cardboard boxes. Then I set up base camp on the sidewalk across from the rhombus building—Whitlock Incorporated.

  I broke open the boxes and created instant placards (I love that word—placards). Using the magic markers, I scribbled my message to the world:

  ANDREW WHITLOCK, WHO WORKS ACROSS THE STREET, USED HIS POWERFUL POST TO RUIN MY LIFE, BECAUSE HE THOUGHT I WAS GOING TO MUG HIM. ASK ME ABOUT IT. DONATIONS ENCOURAGED!

  I put down a donation cup and set up the cardboard signs so any passerby could see them. For the first couple of minutes, I considered other fronts to fight on: The media eats up shit like this. If I could write a press release and fax it around, I was sure they’d send out one of those vans with the satellite dish on the roof. Then there were the talk show circuits; I could easily get on Jerry Springer. If I handled it right, I could even work my way down to Geraldo.

  After fifteen minutes, I considered the possibility of writing a book proposal. This could be for me what the NEA grant-yanking had been for Karen Finley and the “defunded four.” I pitched out a working title: Let Me Learn in Peace! The Joe Aeiou Story.

  After twenty minutes, I started getting cold, and I realized that no one had stopped to even glance at my signs. My signs needed spicing up, so I scribbled, “Whitlock killed JFK!”

  I un
rolled the pup tent and decided to let time do its work. I cocooned myself within, plugging my transistor radio into my head, trying to find WBAI to hear the latest development of the war against the rich. Soon, though, I wound my way to the magical kingdom of sleep until the baton of one of New York’s Finest woke me up by patting along the ribs of the tent, ergo my ribs (New York’s Finest what?).

  I felt an increasing frustration as I broke camp. When I was folded and packed, I bee-lined to the nearest payphone. I didn’t know Whitlock’s number offhand, and probably wouldn’t be able to get him to come to the phone, so I decided to call that Dean and tell him that I wouldn’t attend his flea-ass, matchbook school if he sucked a token out of my turnstile. But as soon as I heard the juicy voice of his secretary, Veronica, my heart started farting, and my eyes palpitated.

  “Is that you, AEIOU?” She pronounced my name lovingly.

  “Hi, I was just wondering…”

  “You little sex pod.”

  “I thought maybe…”

  “Where do you want to meet?”

  “Well, I figured…”

  “Tower Books on Lafayette Street and Fourth at 6:00. Till then, you little love ghoul.” Click. She must have been in season. I wasted no time in getting up there. I hung out for six hours, browsing through their anything-goes porn/zine section.

  “Joseph!” she surprised me suddenly, sending that month’s issue of Tattooed Cycle Sluts whizzing through the air. I grabbed an over-testosteroned copy of World Wrestling Federation Magazine.

  “I wasn’t looking at nothing!”

  “I don’t care,” she said. But they really do: They want boys sanitized, slim, silent, and smiling.

  We ended up going to some pretentious over-priced bistro where we sipped teeny demitasses of “micrappacini.” She talked a storm, and although I understood every word she said, I couldn’t piece them into sentences. I nodded a lot, smiled a lot, and kept looking for excuses to accidentally touch her body parts. When we finished our drinks, we walked around the skeletal remains of the once-exciting Village. By nightfall, we wound up kissing in Washington Square Park. I tried to feel her boobs, but…

  “I have to know you better first,” said she.

  “Why? Even if I turn out to be a mass murderer, it’ll still be me.”

  She said she would let me feel the outlying parts of one breast, but no nipple. I asked her if I could trade it to feel her Golan Heights, just a couple upper lockets. I had just read The Art of the Deal, and this is how The Don made it.

  “I’ll let you feel my armpits,” she cleverly countered.

  “Both pits?” I raised the ante.

  “I suppose,” she said, after a limited reluctance.

  “Can I trade one of those pits for a Gaza Strip?”

  “This is crazy!” Suddenly angry, she dashed out of the park via the walkway where five people had been killed by that runaway car. As I raced up University Place to catch up to her…

  “Aeiou,” I suddenly heard someone slide down the circular vowel congregation of my last name. Whitlock was waving at me from a slowly cruising limo.

  “Come with me,” he summoned.

  “I’m on a date, sir,” I replied to the deus ex limo.

  “We have an understanding,” Whitlock said. I wasn’t certain if he was talking to me or Veronica, but she insisted that she had to go home now anyway and wanted to walk there alone.

  “But I’m obliged to walk you home,” I explained to her.

  “This could be your reinstatement,” she whispered, pushing me toward his tacky-ass batmobile.

  He threw open the door. I assumed a seat next to him and unsuccessfully tried to evict a fart. Without a word, he took out a pocket cassette and replayed the conversation we had had in the Dean’s office earlier that day, right down to my “ooofff” sound when the security guard yanked my arms behind my back. The limo made a right on Waverly Place and drove down Broadway as he spoke.

  “What you don’t understand, Aeiou, is that I am both judge and jury.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Your little appeal was quite persuasive. It touched me.”

  “Thank you.” The false Milken quote must’ve worked.

  “I’m referring to your encampment. I saw you outside my office today. I had the cop scare you off.”

  “Oh?”

  “If you had held your ground, I would’ve respected you more.”

  “But…”

  “But I give you credit. You scared me more than I’ve ever been scared before, and that touched me. It says a lot for you.”

  “Sure.”

  “See, usually I have at least one bodyguard with me, and that was the one day that I decided to try and go for a walk. So you can understand when I heard you behind me, I assumed it was someone who had deep access to my schedule, someone with true econ-political motives.”

  “I didn’t…”

  “Real revenge takes time, planning. You have to study someone to really hurt them.”

  “Oh, I know.”

  “I was certain I was dead when I realized you were following me. I mean I was never more afraid in all my life. And for that I want to thank you.” He took my hand and shook it.

  “You’re welcome.”

  “You blasted away all the calcification that comes with cash. I actually forgot terror, fear. Began to think of myself as a god. You made me mortal again. Returned death to me. So anyway, I’ve reconsidered several rulings.” I prayed as he spoke.

  “I pieced together that you learned of my identity and resented my rescinding the family grant.” He took out a small notebook as he spoke: “Fifteen hundred hours (3:00 p.m.): You called my secretary pretending to be a bike messenger.”

  Again he flipped through his Day Timer and checked the military-timed schedule of that misbegotten day.

  “Around sixteen hundred (4:00 p.m.), you arrived claiming you were a cousin from England.” 1588 was the destruction of the Spanish Armada.

  “You spotted me when I came out to the waiting area. Yes or no?” I didn’t remember anything but decided to plead guilty and rely on his mercy.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Then you followed me when I left my office sometime between seventeen hundred (5:00 p.m.) and seventeen thirty (5:30 p.m.). Perhaps you didn’t mean to scare me. It is frankly a sensation that I hadn’t experienced since the last great market correction. It’s usually a role I put others in. This was like a jolt, quite traumatizing. You were very fortunate; I used to carry a Glöck. Is there anything further you want to tell me in your defense?”

  “Just that I was desperate, and did something out of character, and am more than willing to pay any kind of penance.”

  “Anything else?” He wanted more.

  “I’m very delicate, I have a weak heart.”

  “Yes.”

  “And…and you’re very mighty and will live long, and I might have subconsciously resented that.”

  “Perhaps.” He thought a moment before speaking. “Well, maybe I was a bit too harsh in condemning you. But I can’t simply reinstate you. You did do an injustice to me and you do deserve punishment.” He paused again and finally issued, “No, I can’t let you back into my college.”

  “But what will I do, sir?”

  “You have a part-time job at the Strand Bookstore, don’t you?”

  “Yes, but it’s only for added indulgences. It’s not enough to live on. My existence was founded on your stipend.”

  “Is that your girlfriend?” Whitlock pointed into the distance, referring to Veronica.

  “No, I just bumped into her.” I didn’t want to expose Veronica to anyone other than myself.

  “She certainly knows how to manipulate information.”

  “Pardon?”

  “Relatives?”

  “No, I’m adopted.”

  “Well,” he paused and looked silently, directly into my eyes for so long I thought he was going to kiss me. “Who said that the cruelest punishment is
actually the finest rehabilitation?” Not the same person who said that to err is human and to forgive is divine, I thought.

  “It’s time you worked in the real world. Ever read Thoreau? Self-reliance—that’s the key.”

  It was funny he should use that phrase; Mr. Ngm via Mrs. Ngm had been throwing that phrase in my face for a long time. “What’s it the key to?”

  “We have to consider your aptitudes and altitudes.”

  Although I had never given him my number, he called me at home later that night.

  “What are you doing tomorrow?” he said without introduction.

  “The usual. Who is this please?”

  “I want you to call in sick, and come by my little shop tomorrow. Don’t come later than, oh, say nine hundred hours. I want to hire your services, my boy.” And he hung up without saying goodbye.

  The next day, I somehow succeeded in waking before noon and grabbed a train downtown. It was back to the rhombus building.

  I sped up to the horse-eyed secretary and gave my name. By the jaundiced expression, it was safe to assume that she recognized me. Before letting me enter Whitlock’s office, she pointed me to an empty conference room. “In the closet of that conference room are three suits. Mr. Whitlock wants you to put on the one that fits best. Then report to him. And you better hurry up, he’s going to be taking off in twenty-five minutes.”

  Although I tried on all three garments, they didn’t vary much in tightness-of-torso or floppiness-of-extremities. I put on the one that best complimented my butt, but had to leave my waist unbuttoned and roll up the sleeves and cuffs.

  The horse-eyed secretary pulled out a Polaroid camera and inexplicably took a flash photo of me. Then she shoved me toward his office door. “Quickly, he’s waiting for you.”

  I entered a room with a dozen men and women seated at a conference table. A magic marker board was vibrating with multi-colored arrows and notes. Prospectuses and presentations were spiral-bound before everyone.

  Whitlock was sitting at the helm of the table, facing away from all, staring out on that fabulous view of the East River bracketed by the Brooklyn and Manhattan Bridges. The FDR vanished at his feet. I noticed a refreshment table, complete with coffee, a plate of bagels, bialys, lox, cream cheese, donuts, and so forth. I quickly went over, poured myself a coffee, and started stuffing donuts and other delectables into my pockets.