“Wait a second, what are we…”
“That’s right.”
“Huh?”
“That’s right.”
“Really?”
“Absolutely.”
“Do you think…”
“Positively.”
“Have you ever…”
“Who hasn’t?”
“We’re not talking about…”
“The exact same thing.”
“Huh?”
“Huh, crap. You know exactly what I’m talking about.”
“I don’t.”
“I think you do.”
“You’re disgusting,” I said, which was followed by rigid stalactites of laughter. I hung up the phone and went to wash my hands. His implications made me feel dirty. The phone rang. I lifted it and hung up, and then washed my face. Again, the phone rang. I hung up again, unplugged the phone, and cleaned it. Then I brushed my teeth, gargled. For some intuitive reason, I scrubbed my reagan. The next day, I plugged the phone into the wall outlet, and it rang immediately. I picked it up.
“Take it easy now, son.”
I hung up and unplugged the phone again, then went to work at the Strand. After work that night, I came home, ate a banana, and read The Prophet Unarmed on the toilet (took a dump that resembled a deer’s hoof). Soon it was 3:00 a.m. I plugged the phone into the wall outlet; it rang. I picked it up.
“Just listen to me a minute,” Whitlock said. “I want to help you if you just let me.” I hung up. It rang again. I picked it up and hung it up. It rang again. I picked it and hung up. It rang again. I picked and hung up, it rang again. I picked it and hung, rang again. I picked it hung, rung. I hung it rung…I rung, it hung…. Finally, I unplugged the phone, whanked off, and fell asleep with a gob of goo on my lower belly and a cockroach staring at me from a distant wall, befuddled.
About a week later, while sitting on some boxes in the Strand Bookstore, inspecting some “art-photography” books (thank god for the First Amendment!), I was called to the manager’s office.
“Today, Joseph, this gentlemen has purchased your loyalty.” He pointed to Whitlock, who was standing there dressed in military regalia.
“Hold it a second, I’m not a slave!” I hollered.
“No, but you are no longer employed with us,” he explained. The manager left the room, and I was alone with the necro-bag.
“Now look what you did!”
“Do you know,” he said nonchalantly, “that I could have you snuffed, no problem? But I’m not mad at you or anything.”
“What do you want?”
“I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have said that. The truth is I like you. But that incident left me a little twisted. I still have to work it out. You have to help me here.”
“What are you, some kind of freak? This state has anti-stalker laws, you know.”
“Relax. You’re kind of my responsibility. I mean, you were living off my family award. You’re an investment.”
“Let’s quit clowning around. You leave me alone, and I’ll leave you alone.”
“Come on, let’s put it behind us and be best buddies.” He extended his hand.
“Fuck you. Fuck the award. I got you real good. I’ll always remember humiliating you, making you into a loopy sap. That’ll be my contribution to humanity.”
“You’re right, this isn’t over yet, is it?”
“It is for me.”
“But don’t you want your reward?”
“What reward?”
“The proofreading job. It’s a piece of cake. Do it.” He gave me the name and address of a law firm.
“Why are you doing this for me?” I asked.
“Two reasons. The first is you might learn something. You might begin to understand.”
“Understand what?”
“Contracts, stipulations, riders, waivers.”
“What about contracts?”
“Did you know everything can be reduced to contracts? Why, your life is a contract between two parent corporations.”
“Don’t include me in your scheme; I’m adopted.”
“Then you were a contract unkept.”
“What do you want from me?”
“I want to keep an eye on you. Maybe in a couple years, or whenever I feel you’ve served out your sentence, I’ll have the Dean lift your restriction. Who knows? Maybe I’ll even reinstate your award.”
“Fuck you, fuck the job, fuck the award. I got you real good. I’ll quit with that.”
I could see a glint of insanity in his right eye, like a cat with distemper. Then, he snickered and spoke, “You did that, m’boy. You did that. But are you a gambler?”
“What do you mean, a gambler?”
“I mean, would you like to continue this little contest, see who wins?”
“You might extract pain and suffering from me, but you’ll never be able to do to me what I did to you.”
“Come out to the car a minute. I want you to meet somebody, a friend of mine.” I followed him out to his hearse. Standing in front of it, he said, “I want you to know that what I’m going to show you isn’t personal. It’s just something that kind of evens the score. If you want that proofreading position, it’s still yours.” I couldn’t see in through the tinted glass of the car windows. He opened the door. Veronica was sitting there watching the compact TV and holding a frozen, lime-colored drink with a small parasol in it.
“Get out of the car, Ronnie. There’s a friend here I’d like you to meet,” he said.
“What, dear?”
“You have good taste, if you get my drift,” Whitlock said to me. Veronica got out. Whitlock got in and drove off.
“How could you?” I smelled his drift.
“How could I what?” she asked.
“Associate with that Robert Chambers…that Joel Rifkin…that no good Buttafuoco.” I plunged up all the slime of the age. “He’s sleaze and strangle, he’s…”
“He picks up his phone. I’ve been trying to call you every day for the past week since you were on that horrible stage, and your phone just rang and rang. I felt very depressed about what I saw. I liked you.”
“I liked you, too…” I began.
“He came up to me at work and said he was your best buddy, and told me that you had a girlfriend and behaved that way because you were embarrassed to see me.”
“He said that?!”
“I felt like such an idiot. I felt like I had been dumped.”
“I’m sorry, but he was pestering me with phone calls so I had to…”
“Over the course of the week,” she interrupted, “he consoled me. The Dean even let me take the day off.”
“What?”
“Last night, he took me out for dinner, and we had some drinks, but even then I tried to call you. As usual, your phone just rang. I didn’t know what to think.”
“Honey,” I said, and reached over to impart affection. Wham! She gave me a karate chop to my xiphoid process.
“Don’t touch me again! I was in the Israeli army!”
“I was trying to comfort you,” I said through gasps of pain.
“Yeah, by bargaining your way into my pants.” As she left, I thought, there goes the only girl who ever really knew me well enough to not have anything to do with me. And certainly the only one that ever treated me exactly as I should have been treated, not much better or worse.
CHAPTER FOUR
WHEN CABS COLLIDE
If you can’t kill a mad dog, train and domesticate him. That apparently was the Whitlock policy. I felt like an Arab shopkeeper on the West bank, a Catholic merchant in Northern Ireland, a performance artist with an NEA grant.
At first I didn’t take the proofreading job Whitlock offered, but after several weeks went by, I found myself sinking into debt. Finally, I broke down and called the number he had given me. I was immediately employed as a freelance proofreader. This essentially entailed reading particular legal documents, comparing them with their prototypes, and
making sure that the slight variations from one draft were carried over to the other. Soon enough, things became comfortable. The days fell like dominos.
Other than spending some of my newly-earned salary check furnishing my apartment, there was little excitement or deviation from monotony, until the day that she stole my heart.
After two months of working at the firm of Reigert & Mortimer, I became fascinated by her. Although she was a young associate, she was already on her way to being the youngest partner in the firm’s history. What was this magical gift of hers? Negotiation. She was regarded as the Rambo of negotiators.
When a deal became thick with qualifiers, proxy battlers, options, offers, proposals, alternatives of all varieties, and the vision blurred as to which direction was forward, she’d be called in to commandeer the Big Push. She’d research an issue from every side, refine the corporate strategy, anticipate opponents and obstacles, figure how to handle different personalities, when to advance, when to retreat, but always to a victory. I would hear her from adjacent rooms; proofread documents that she had just thrashed out; see her passing in corridors flanked by aides, aerobicized in arguments.
Although I could never confess it to her, I was mercilessly in love (adversarial polarity). I would find exceptionally minute and fine-point ways of individualizing myself in her mind: lingering a moment longer than most when asked to give her some statistic or interest rate, paper-clipping a document at an arrogant angle, clearing my throat when encased with her in silence on a packed elevator. Perhaps it was all unnecessary. She might have recognized me because I was everything she wasn’t: she was gorgeous, I left much to be desired; she was healthy, I was prone; she was youthful and tight-skinned, I was prematurely aged by excessive worry; she was snow white in the winter and tandoori tanned in the summer, I was perennially jaundice-yellow due to mushroom-like habits (not to mention loose and hairy skin—likely due to sedentary habits and fast foods); she was rich, I unrich; she had meaning, value, importance, was well-dressed, sweetly fragranced, sensual, yea-saying, clear-thinking, impeccable in periodontal care, incapable of shooting a political misleader, certainly unable ever to be rounded up as either a homeless person or an illegal alien…I… well, I’ve had problems in those areas.
Anyway, one night during the strung-out, final forty-first hour of an exceptionally long shift when I was all wired and frazzled, while slugging my umpteenth debenture, I noticed a complicated and abstract pattern of recurrent letters beginning each of the words on the left margin. The Cabala had convinced me that there were no such things as accidents (although the Koran implies it’s all an accident). It was one of those White Album-esque kind of patterns that, in logical terms, I might be able to explain to maybe just a couple of geeks, or savants like Bobby Fisher, Alan Turing, or Stephen Hawkings. I carefully jotted down this obscure letter pattern. Upon arriving home that night, instead of showering in sleep, I downed about a quart of coffee and remained awake for an additional fifteen hours, poring over some deservedly rare books, piecing together a code. I erected a complex theory around the belief that Amy was trying to make contact. But she wanted proof of high intelligence, so I held on tight to that clerical Excalibur, trying to wrestle it from the rhetorical stone. The only man for her would notice this obscure code mummified in dead languages. He’d translate it as some kind of RSVP. The message I finally deciphered out of the code was approximate. Conjunctions and prepositions were inserted. It went: “Cupcakes of mid-November, voluminous looms of flying zinc and Betty…” It went on. In retrospect, I needed more time.
In prospect, though, it didn’t matter. She’d recognize the effort. By the time I got that far, I realized that she was probably at her desk. She had recently returned from a big business deal in Europe, and I decided to use that as a springboard for conversation. Dialing her extension, I listened to her repeat hiccups of hyper hellos.
“Hi, this is Joseph.” I carefully read her the encrypted “Cupcakes” message that I had decoded. She hung up. I called her back and tried a different approach.
“Hi, this is Joseph. I deciphered your code and decided to call you. How was your hop across the pond? Did you see the Louvre? I found Europe to be overrun with an American merchandising mono-culture that smothers the flavor of the locals. We’re no longer the land of great trees, no sir. Franchises. Trademarks everywhere. You’re corporate, am I right? So am I. We’re not Americans. We’re corporate. See my point? And now over there. In Greece, for instance, I couldn’t find a single guy in a white skirt. In Italy, not a single Renaissancian figure. The Common Market is just another lame attempt at annihilating locality. Corporate consolidation is just a commercial attempt at old fashion Bukharin collectivizing, which we so roundly condemned in the…”
“Who is this?”
“Joseph, the proofreader. I deciphered your cryptogram. Did you get to southern Europe? I find the people to be less educated but truer to life, more sensual, uncircumcised, single-seasoned. Hello, Dionysus! And the economy is more inclined toward barter. Whereas, in the north, the earth seems more paved, but the people all seem to speak flawless English. Well, that’s not true, but the girls are more repressed, hairless, and…”
“Who is this?”
“Joe. Remember, I passed you in the hall of Reigert &Mortimer? How long were you in Europe? Hey! What’s the exchange rate? In 1980, there were six francs to the dollar, four hundred lire to the dollar, twelve pesetas to the dollar, two hundred drachmas…”
“Who is this?!” her voice roared with education, command, Napoleonic destiny. What a lady!
“Joseph, the proofreader. Were you in Amsterdam or…”
“Did Bart put you up to this?”
“Who?”
“What do you look like?”
“Kind of a cross between Jim Morrison and Val Kilmer…”
“I notice bodies, not faces.”
“I’m medium height, I have a husky frame.”
“Medium height. What’s that, five-feet-eleven?”
“Well…not quite.”
“What’s your height and weight?”
“In America, don’t you agree that they place way too much emphasis on standardization and externals? I mean, life is an automatic process. We’re born and we go through the assembly line. Our days are given and automated. But we were once people of the valley without the valley, no? People of the mountain without the mountains, no? People of the…”
“Weight and Height?!”
“I really don’t know. Economy size, if I must be marketed.”
“In short, you’re short…Weight!”
“Let’s put it this way, whenever I sit on one of those orange, scooped-out subway seats, my cheek climbs over the side into the next seat. Those seats don’t even have drainage holes. If someone urinates in them…”
“I remember you—the chubby dwarf.”
“That’s not technically true. There’s a precise anatomical definition for a dwarf regarding the limbs-to-torso ratio—a definition that I exceed by ounces and inches.”
“Okay, you’re short and fat. Hold on, I got another call.” She pushed the red, putting my life on hold.
What a broad! What pursuit of unbridled honesty! Now I wouldn’t have to wear the corset or the lifts in my shoes. But more important, she cut right through the fat into the bone; she thought like an obnoxious male. She probably had a slide rule or something that could calculate the size of a man’s reagan by just listening to the tone of his voice. In another moment, she was back on the phone speaking:
“You’re Joseph Aeiou. You’re twenty-three years old. You live a lonely life in a two-bedroom apartment on the upper East Side. You graduated Columbia on a Knights of Pythias scholarship, dropped out of an exclusive masters program to pursue a career as a stand-up comic.”
“That’s not entirely true.” Whitlock had taken some liberties filling out my employment history, but I didn’t want to identify him and this whole falcon-and-falconer relationship we wer
e having.
“You’ve been a mediocre proofreader for several months now.”
“Facts shade the truth!”
“You probably drink a lot of coffee and beer, have a lot of books and records, take a lot of drugs, compulsively masturbate, TV always on…”
“Let me remind you that Hugh Hefner was a twenty-seven-year-old using his kitchen table as a desk when he put out his first historic issue, which…”
“That’s how you see yourself, isn’t it?” she said knowingly.
“Actually, no.” Although I presumed I had the same sleaze-capacity as Hef, I lacked the slick veneer. I was more of an Al Goldstein type.
“I’m curious about your apartment.” She brushed me aside and took off. I had fumbled the puck, and now she was skating with it. “Do you live in a railroad flat?”
“No, I have two large bedrooms…”
“Tell me about the floors in your bedrooms.”
“The floors?”
“What are they made of?”
“Wood.”
“Buckled? Splintery? Lacquered?”
“Both are polished parquet.”
“Tell me the measurements.”
The apartment had been in my adoptive family for at least one generation. It was large, rent-controlled, and well-situated. I gave her more facts—about the recently installed crappy intercom that sucked in all the street noise, the fall-apart aluminum storm windows (a Mafia-landlord racket), and the width and height of door frames—and figures; I provided the average utility rates as well as the rate of increase per annum and the weight/stress ratio per square foot. I’d retained these housing details after getting stoned one day and deciding that I wanted to be a slumlord. But after a few hours, after coming down, I decided to be a warrior for the people, and then I got stoned again.
The rapidly fired questions unfolded into greater, more precise questions. We exchanged details faster and faster like machines until the pitch of our voices got insect-high. We abbreviated terms, more data per breathful, like seasoned catholics doing the rosary. At first, I sensed she was drawing a two-dimensional diagram. But as the questions got more minute, I realized it was lifting off the page into a three-dimensional model, complete with a small replica of me looking something like a demon spawn of the Pillsbury Doughboy and the Michelin Man. But it didn’t really matter; I was utterly infatuated with that hot little voice. Looking down at my trusty reagan, I realized that I was in an achingly turgid state.
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