“Exactly what rent do you pay?”
“A hundred and twenty-eight fifty a month.” I tied a tourniquet about my bobbing reagan to keep the little heathen still.
“Perfect! I’ll be under the big brass clock in Grand Central at 5:30.”
“The old four-faced clock on top of the Info Center?” I asked desperately.
“No, the big Merrill Lynch clock.”
“But they removed that clock.”
“Meet me under where it used to be. I commute from Westchester, but I’ve had it with commuting. In order to squeeze out more productivity hours, I need a place in the city.” Suddenly, without a farewell, the line went dead. I thought maybe she’d hit the red button again, and was ingesting more facts on me. But after an eternity of holding the phone to my ear, a dial tone broke through.
I was pleased with the conversation. I really couldn’t win her with my charm or accomplishments. The only strategy that ever really worked for me was pity. But never in the 250,000 years since the earth engendered homo sapiens had there been such a hot babe!
I got a little sleep, which after so many hours awake only made me sleepier. I took a cold shower, had about a gallon of coffee, and sat on the toilet for around twenty minutes, without yield. Then I put on a new T-shirt which I’d won the last year from WFUK for being the eighty-fourth caller, and I played some records to get the decibel level of my confidence up. I emptied the stuff from my pockets that usually makes my pants droop. I had no roll-ons or aerosol crap, so I smeared some natural maple syrup on my neck and chest. It felt sticky, and I smelled like sap, but I realized I had no time for a shower.
I quickly went to the hiding place in the bathroom. I never had anything valuable but I was a great believer in hiding places and all their implications. When UFOs finally get around to squashing all mankind like bugs on their windshield and turning the earth into a big service station, if they fast-forward through the remains of our cultural history they might think—by our literature, arts, and music—that our planet was one great love-in. In point of fact, the gnarled imprint of guilt, shame, and distrust are on everything. The hiding place in the toilet underscored this. I only wished I could curl up in there. I took a twenty out of it, in case she wanted to go for drinks.
I squeezed into a rush hour subway. Three-and-a-half million people joined me. As we rode the number six to Forty-Second, we vied for seats and gripping bars. Like a dividing vacuum, whites exiting the subway were sucked into a pinpoint zero gravity center, apparently located somewhere in Grand Central. Blacks tended to stay on the subway.
Once up and out in that cathedral of commuters, I was locked in the density level of all these men in trench coats. I shoved until I could shove no more and, looking up between bobbing heads and entombing shoulders, I saw her. She seemed to be at the hub of a galaxy of people. She was truly statuesque. She seemed to be standing on a pedestal, a Goddess Diana in her modern-day temple of Ephesus.
Drones don’t approach the queen. A small shell of space surrounded her. With this advantage, she was able to survey the panic-stricken faces of trapped and orbiting commuters. Light seemed to be striking her at such an angle that it lent her a marble texture. I tried calling to her, but my voice couldn’t compete with the din of the crowd; I tried waving to her, but my arms were wedged at my sides. Whenever I tried moving toward her, the crowd looped me further away. It was the spin-dry stage of rush hour. All I could do was stand there and wait until she spotted me. By that time I had to go to the bathroom something awful. All those people sucked the limited supply of oxygen. Others, somewhere on the outer edge of the city, were pushing in toward me. Everyone in the entire City of New York was at that moment contributing some inward pressure toward me.
The pounds per square centimeter on my rib cage and vital organs were immeasurable. Soon, I could hold no longer. I started farting incredibly. I literally felt as if I were deflating with flatulence: the odor of a million burning tires. Soon I started inhaling, gagging on my flatulence; I could feel that crap-gas filling my lungs, asphyxiating me! Businessmen started retching on the rising brown fog. A nucleation occurred.
After sitting stagnant for hours, stewing in acidically-reduced cold-cut sandwiches and pounds of slaw, my intestines must have resembled a two-ply garbage bag—the manswarm scrambled away from me at all costs. It was during this ripple in the crowd that enough of a space opened to individualize me. She looked down at the gap in the crowd and saw my wiggling shock of unwashed hair. She took giant steps, her stiletto heels seemed to be six feet tall. A giant Fay Wray seizing her chimp Kong, she rescued me to a place of calm.
“You’re eight minutes late!” she yelled. “Do you know what my time is worth? Do you know what I would do to you if you worked for me?”
“I tried…I swear I tried…” It was difficult to speak, and I started hyperventilating as she continued yelling at me.
“Do you realize that because of you I will now be eight minutes late throughout my entire life. I’ll never, ever be able to regain that lost time. You KILLED eight minutes of my life!” The crowd, the lack of sleep, the fact that the woman who I wanted to be mine—my lady—was infuriated with me—I was overwhelmed and I started weeping. Soon, it was uncontrollable.
“That’s enough of that,” she said, but I couldn’t stop.
“That’s more than enough of that!” But I only cried the more.
“That is quite ample,” and, “here, here” and, “there, there” and, “that certainly fills the quota,” all followed.
But I only cried the harder. It was all too much. A monsoon of coffee had burst the dam of my nerves, flooding me into a neurotic state. I started twitching and hiccupping through the tears. But the dam, as it turned out, had not completely broken until it happened. Both commuters and homeless alike watched in disbelief.
I involuntarily peed in my pants. A thick trickle ran down my right leg, along the marble floor, into a large, yellow puddle. It soon trailed off into some drain, connecting me to other bodies of foul waters.
She looked pityingly on me. “Every man I’ve met has been weak in some way…but you are the sniveling weakest.” I sniffled more.
“Man is unrivaled,” she proclaimed to an older group who had not evacuated the city in their mobile years and, by default, became native New Yorkers. “Man revels in weakness….” She paused; something must have clicked. I guess she extrapolated: Man equals weakness; I’m the weakest; ergo, I’m the most manly. I conclude this because of her next execution. She reached down, grabbed me, and pressed me so tightly against her breast that she actually lifted me about a foot off the ground. I felt like a saline implant. Rocking me back and forth, she started repeating over and over, “There, there,” pause, “here, here.”
I regained my composure slowly. Even though my feet couldn’t reach the ground, my confidence was returning to me. Still whimpering so that she would continue holding me, I snaked my right hand carefully along the tight space between our bodies, gently placing the open palm against the invitation of her right breast, a da Vinci shape molded in heaven’s own marble.
Dropping me, she emitted a high-pitched shriek that only dogs, I, and burly men who hate little people could hear. Pow! She whacked me with the back of her hand across my nose. Pow! A burly man who spends his life keeping an eye on little guys like me punched me deep in my stomach. Like a puck, I plopped to my hands and knees in pee. He kicked me in the stomach. Splash: goal! He disappeared into the crowd.
“Serves you right,” she said as I gasped for breath, trying to prevent myself from vomiting. I could see drops of blood from my nose drip and disperse in the pond of urine.
“Now, let’s see this apartment and get down to the nitty gritty,” she said, and made her way out of the large building with the pretty ceiling. I couldn’t believe that she could be attracted to me after that. I struggled to my feet and raced outside just in time to see her climb into a cab. Never had a woman—especially one in the presence o
f whom I’d lost my bladder control—wanted to just have me. I shoved in the taxi after her. She pushed into a corner, away from my salty dampness.
She wanted it bad. I wanted it bad. Apparently the cab driver wanted it bad, too, because he zoomed a hundred miles an hour to a red light five feet in front of us. In a moment the light changed, and the driver put the pedal to the metal.
“Where to?” the cabby inquired.
Feeling prosaic, I said: “To paraphrase E.B. White, I live twenty-two blocks from where Rudolph Valentino once lay in state, eight blocks from where Nathan Hale was executed, five blocks from where Hemingway punched out Max Eastman, four miles from where Whitman wrote editorials for the Brooklyn Eagle…” He screeched to a halt.
Because my arms were too short to brace myself against the front seat, and my legs didn’t reach the floor, I fell into the leg area of the cab. She looked down at me and I smiled up at her meekly.
“Tell the chauffeur where we’re going, you grinning idiot!”
I gave him my address as I tried to pry my waist loose from that dead zone. We moved like a high-speed checker piece, crisscrossing the bumpy board of Manhattan. The opponents were traffic lights, jay-walkers, and endless bike messengers who kept banging against the outer shell of our cab.
“We’re not in a rush,” I barked through the bullet holes in the Plexiglass divider.
“Time and tide wait for no man,” the fanatic behind the wheel replied in broken English. I longed for the day that they empty Manhattan of all meddling pedestrians and make it strictly vehicular.
When we finally came to my place, the curb was on my side, the traffic on hers. She opened my door and shoved me out on my ass. Throwing a crumpled bill into the front seat, she stepped over me.
“Off the ground, mole, I’ve got an appointment in Westchester at 7:38.”
I rose and huffed and puffed, trying to keep up with her. Each big step she took translated into a hundred little chihuahua steps for me. The fifty-plus hours of sleep deprivation were catching up with me. Sweat trickled down my brow. I was unable to concentrate or focus my pupils. It was like being in college all over again.
Finally, up some flights of stairs, we reached my floor. She threw open the door, shoving me out of the way, and stepped in. Taking it all in at once—the centerfolds on the wall, the large plastic garbage bags of undisposed trash, the stacks of books, the oddities, the curios, the knickknacks that I’d found in the street, and the light streaming along the columns of dust in the middle of the living room—she looked at me. I was very proud of my place. She silently walked around the apartment. Reaching into a box, she pulled out the brown bag that Whitlock gave to me containing my transcripts and other papers from my graduate program.
“What’s hiding under this rock?” she muttered, and pulled out something I had never seen before—a copy of my birth certificate.
“Where did you find that?”
“You were born in Japan?” she asked, reading it. Looking under her shoulder, I saw that on some sundry vital statistic, under “Place of Birth,” it said, Tokyo, Japan.
“I never knew that!” I replied.
Her response was a fit of gracious sneezes from her cute little nose. I located a slightly used napkin from the recesses of my pocket and offered it to her.
“This place is a pigsty.” Sneeze.
“Judge not least ye be…”
“It’s a filthy mess!” Sneeze.
“I don’t deny that it can use some work. But a new broom sweeps clean.”
“You need a new tractor.” Sneeze, sneeze, sneeze.
“Come on in, I’ve got some Yodels and other Hostess pastries in the pantry…”
“I’m going to break out in hives if I stay here much longer. I’m allergic to this room.” She retreated into the hall.
“Well, you cunt…”
“What?”
“Do you want to go to a motel or something?” I asked, hoping that she missed my slip.
“A motel? What in the world for?” she asked with a coy indignation.
“For the same purpose that we came here,” I sneered.
She gave me an unusual look and replied, “There are no high-ceilinged motels that I can rent in Midtown Manhattan for less than two hundred bucks a month, even with a simian sleazebag as a roommate.” And then she began departing down the stairs.
“WHAT!” I said, after a momentary lapse into utter disbelief. I raced down the steps, catching her as she was hailing a cab on Third Avenue.
“I’ll have to send some people over to help clear out my room, and then we’ll need to sit down and draw up a sublease agreement. I might also bring in some carpenters to throw up some partition thing, maybe just a free-standing divider in the middle. I want you to call my office and tell my secretary when you’ll be home. Do you understand?”
I automatically nodded yes.
“Are you going to forget?” I shook my head no.
“Damn, look at you. ‘Course you’ll forget.” I promised her I wouldn’t.
“I just need a place for two months until something else comes along. I’ll return to you a renovated place and a year’s rent. Fair enough?”
I automatically nodded yes again.
She hailed, and a cab screeched sideways to a halt. She got in, slammed the door behind her, and disappeared into that maze of moving metal that imperils the tortured people of this shaky city. Why in the hell would she want to live with me? She could buy and sell little people like me ten times over. What the hell was this all about?
With my last calories, I crawled up the stairs. Like someone with diarrhea who can greet defecation by simply sitting on a toilet, I found sleep as soon as I got supine. But there was still no escaping the low-income sleep.
Many of my dreams and revelations came from the margins of the city, places like the subway or bombed-out, boarded-up brownstones, dank and populated with ill, foreign, ugly, hungry, poorly-clad people. Their laughs were nowhere near as powerful as their cries. They met their pleasures in perversity. Their behavior was irrational, repetitious, erratic, tormenting, and I invariably awoke being chased. On this particular occasion, I dreamed I had just broken out of a large, leathery roach egg, and my father, a sewer rat named Drogun, was chasing me. I was at a perilous place on the food chain.
I awakened with a start, took a leak, ate a quart of Cherry Garcia ice cream, thought about the women’s suffrage movement in the middle of the nineteenth century, disentangled my scrotum, and plunged back into that toxic gutter of muddy sleep.
CHAPTER FIVE
“WHOEVER SAID ‘SIZE
DOESN’T MATTER’ WASN’T
TALKING ABOUT NEW YORK
APARTMENTS”
A nanosecond later, I awoke to the sound of something very heavy being dropped very near my head. I opened my eyes slowly. Amy and a couple of yuppies were rummaging around in the apartment. I went back to sleep. Later, I awoke to the sensation of having my bed hoisted up in the air and transported across the room. More yuppies filled the house. Every time I went back to sleep, I would awaken only more exhausted and drained. The next time I awoke, the place was packed with yuppies. I could see these were not the old yups of the early ’80s, engendered by the false boom, who died out by the market correction of the late ’80s. These were a deadly swarm of survivor yuppies who had mutated with New Democrats in the Clinton age. Their well-pressed lapels and jackets looked like wings. They were filling the place slowly and insidiously, like the crows in the jungle gym scene of Hitchcock’s The Birds.
I tried to get up, but sleep was an obese bed-fellow, and I couldn’t get out from under her. When I awoke for the last time, the lady of the house was there with only a few of them, the final nominees. They were all walking around inspecting details. It was like a competition of fastidiousness. She was talking to some guy with a tape measure and level. Most of my furnishings and belongings were now tightly packed into the rear third of the apartment, away from the healthy windo
ws facing the street. My bed and I were firmly angled upon boxes. The other two-thirds of my apartment had all these idyllic things, like a prefabricated bar with a small statue of mercury and customized shelving. There were also several boxes of Ikea furniture waiting to be opened and assembled. A Port-O-San in the corner indicated that this was a union job.
They ignored me completely as I struggled to my feet and wrapped a sheet around my naked weight, searching for a grenade among my memorabilia.
“I have the lease in my name and I don’t want any roommates,” I said to one of them. But it was as if I wasn’t there.
“Party’s over, everyone out!” They ignored me. “Hey, what is this? I’m master of my castle, get out!”
“Can’t you see we’re talking?” Amy replied lividly. Grabbing me by the scruff of my loose, bulldog neck, she yanked me into the hall and pinned me against the wall.
“Yesterday, you said some things to me that no man ever said to me before.”
“Did I?” I asked, wondering if she was pleased or angry with me.
“You seemed to care about me. You seemed to be the only man on this whole goddamned selfish island who…who… who was interested in my welfare.”
“Well, sorry if I misled you, but you must make a lot of money. I’m sure you must find my assistance insulting.”
“I didn’t get to where I am today by accepting either apologies or buts. I’ve already accepted your offer, and if you fell down these stairs right now and broke your neck, that offer would be something that made you a much grander human being.” To illustrate my humility, she leaned me perilously over the stairway.
“What offer was that?” I asked nervously.
“You said that if I get a carpenter to do a major renovation on your place, and make it presentable, and pay a year’s rent, you would let me stay for two months. Now that’s certainly not asking much, is it?”
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