Manhattan Loverboy

by Arthur Nersesian

  I could envision what occurred. Time was divided into long, arduous tactical conferences and strategy symposiums. They spent the night building, tinkering, hammering, and decimating.

  I’m not saying this happened recently, or even ten years ago. (Maybe it only happened metaphorically.) It is foreseeable that they waited through the morass of Carter’s moralism and the last of the cumbersome disco age, a time of domestic polyester and third-world bullies: Ethiopia, Libya, Vietnam, and Iran.

  (The ’70s were basically a visionless duration. At best, it was the rear guard of the ’60s. Vietnam was lost and won. Former prophets were making a profit. Movements stopped moving, folk singer Phil Ochs had committed suicide. But the ’80s!)

  They had the perseverance of a cult, the investment strategies, and their parents’ hard, cold cash, but they realized that their tell-tale signs would give them away. The porous skin, the Chia Pet scalps or Hitlerian bangs, the freakish manners of laughter—all these had to be well camouflaged. Enviously, they had learned that good looks were a membership card to anywhere. That very night, the experts in the crowds set up booths in the massive barn. There were mass facial dermabrasions and contemporary haircuts. Radical weight-loss and weight-gain programs were initiated. Teams of plastic surgeons worked around the clock. Piles of oily flesh and hair had to be buried in the outlying hay fields.

  After the transformation was complete, everyone was probably issued a wardrobe: a perfectly tailored suit, a shirt, a tie, shoes, and a briefcase filled with a dossier and a directive. They were never to acknowledge each other should they meet. And off they went.

  In a conspiratorial silence, they attacked the early ’80s, an army of ants decimating a plush forest, digesting trees, from leaves to roots, leaving only stones and bleached bones behind.

  Where was this leading to?

  In small-town squares, cob-webbed bells had to be located and rung! Red buttons had to be pushed! Phones had to be picked up! Senator Proxmire had Mein Kampf translated into English in the mid-’30s to warn America of the monster they were about to confront. Then another Senator flashed in my head: a paper being waved by McCarthy, February 9, 1950, before a Republican women’s club in Wheeling, West Virginia. The buffoon speaks: “I have in my hand a list of two hundred and five names that were…members of the Communist Party…and are still making and shaping the policy of the State Department.” I would have to spend the night drawing up notes and plans, outlining an exposé on this movement, comparing it with other cataclysmic movements. I was the Quasimodo under this bell!

  As the plane was about to land in Kennedy Airport, I went up the aisle to tell the plane full of people what I had learned. I reached into my pocket for the fistful of putrid flesh…the pocket was empty.

  In fact, I wasn’t wearing pants. I was sitting naked in front of the TV. I no longer had a reason to lounge around in that warm mud-bath of an illness; the fever had broken. I took a leak and ate a brick of cream cheese that I found in the fridge. Then I began masturbating to the sexual testimonials on that afternoon’s various talk shows. I fell asleep, hand on knob, before the end.

  The carpenters came the next morning, and I watched as they referred to a blueprint that Amy and Albert Speer, Jr. had drawn up. They ripped out the walls, floor, and ceiling until the front half of the building was raw brick and joists. Then they started building. A plumber channeled off pipes and laid in a deep, terra cotta tub. Electricians rewired the place. A new wall shot up from the exact line of where her property began and mine ended. Once that wall was erected, I could no longer see a thing. That small, sacred sanctum that once contained my bed-box now held her toilet bowl. Sleepy, soothing, sedative colors were painted around her room.

  My apartment was subdivided and under foreign occupation. For all I knew, they were assembling a big Panzer tank behind that partition, pointing it squarely at my room. Why was I going along with all of this? Because of a cockroach crawling around in the bloody chambers and tubes, impossible to squish dead. That cockroach was love—adversarial polarity—for her.

  What is adversarial polarity all about?

  Because no one is singular, no feeling is permanent, and no standardized definitions of emotion can exist, there can be no such thing as LOVE. Along with God and patriotism, love is just another great marketing tool. However, there is adversarial polarization, or a.p. Using the cold war as a paradigm, I had devised a realistic form of a relationship, in which two people of equal power were naturally balanced in wit and passion, with virtually equal doses of lust and distrust, the forces that attract and dispel. And therefore, through careful diplomacy, with checks and balances, there can be a lasting détente, a peaceful coexistence. This was adversarial polarity.

  When feeling neurotic, I behaved unusually. In the same way that some people chew gum, gnaw fingernails, or smoke, I tried getting channels on VHF that didn’t exist. I whipped open the window and tried catching the masses in the street off guard, testing my theory that all reality was a God-made illusion designed to deceive me, and me alone, that mankind was static, like mannequins, until I was in its presence. Finally, I dialed what seemed like thousands of phone numbers, hanging up after the first ring. I dialed until the last knuckle of my index finger was sore and swollen. (Who knows what mass hysteria or paranoid effects I might’ve caused?)

  A soft knock—I pulled on my pants and tossed open the door. There was She. I was dead at the knees and red in the face, riled and beguiled.

  “Those animals you hired, they truncated my apartment,” I established.

  “You’re embellishing.”

  “They bullied me and made me feel small and inferior,” I clawed.

  “You are small and inferior,” she clarified.

  “They made me feel even smaller and inferior-er.”

  “I’ll talk to them. In fact…” She disappeared mid-sentence into the hall to go through the new and separate entrance to her apartment.

  “And don’t play the radio too loud!” I screamed because that was all I could think of. But as soon as I took my clothes off—there’s no reason to be dressed when alone—my unlocked door opened wide again, and there she was, with a complete construction crew, eight large Italians, all of them standing there, staring at my sun-dried reagan.

  “Hey, doesn’t anybody knock around here?”

  “For a bossy guy, you sure got a teensy set of nuts,” the contractor said as I covered my privates.

  “This is Fleming.” She introduced him, ignoring his comment. “He’s my resident carpenter. He’ll be working here for some time, and it’d be nice if you could make an effort to be friendly to him.”

  “But I thought he was finished.”

  “He’ll be working here for some time; I thought I made that clear.”

  Here, now, were my thoughts and subsequent words: Wasn’t this absurd? “This is absurd!” Why should I have to put up with this? “I don’t have to put up with this!” Didn’t I enjoy living alone? “I enjoyed living alone!” How did all this happen? All I ever really wanted was to unclip those garter belts from those black fishnet stockings, pull down those flimsy, white-lace panties with the rip-away velcro crotch, and smell her fragrance: “All I ever really wanted was a little scratch and sniff!”

  “What?” the resident carpenter exclaimed, locking me in a full nelson. One of his buddy boys turned his power-tool arms loose on my looseness.

  “Stop that at once!” Amy commanded, after they had only severely damaged my large intestine.

  “I want…you out…of here,” I said to her, through tears of tearing pain.

  The guy grabbed me back in a half nelson this time. I guess he was only half as angry. The other guy grabbed my face, putty in his palm.

  “Release his face!” she called out. He did.

  “I’m sure we can work this out,” said the feminine voice of civility, as I re-sculpted my nose.

  “Why don’t you let us ‘talk’ to him a minute,” the resident carpenter offere
d. “I think we can ‘talk’ man to man.”

  “I think everything’s all right,” she replied.

  And they all went back into her part of the house where I could hear them demolishing with laughter. I quickly dressed and went to Landlord-Tenant Court at 110 Centre Street, where I filed a case on the docket. I, too, could play hardball.

  For the next couple of days I put up with the constant racket. I put up with construction workers kicking my door when they went by. I put up with loud, nasty comments like, “He must be scared of elephants ‘cause he’s got a peanut between his legs.” I put up with it all because I knew I’d have the last laugh.

  In a week or so, the carpentry stopped. They had finished whatever it was they were building. A couple more days went by and I got a notice in the mail to appear in Landlord-Tenant Court, which meant she’d received her notice as well. I laughed that morning as I read the notice. The trump was mine, but just to impart the final knee to the groin, I unscrewed the fuses in my apartment. The electricians might have rewired her place, but there was still only the one fuse box, and it was in my room. I also turned off all the water valves. The siege was on!

  I spent the day feeling pretty good about myself and others. It was a great day, warm and sunny, so I went to the movies—Home Alone 2. I walked around—up Wall Street. I sub-wayed to a big indoor mall—the Trump building. I bumped into an old boyhood chum—Critter. Ate a fish dinner—sole. Finally I returned—home. She had broken into my apartment and turned on everything I’d turned off.

  I ran into the hall and banged on her door. “You fucking bitch, I’m going to kill you, do you hear me!”

  “Please don’t,” she yelled back in a calm voice, “I’m sure we can talk about things reasonably.”

  “Fuck reason! Open this door, I’m going to kill you!” I continued pounding and screaming until about a half an hour passed. At that time a duet of cops appeared behind me; I was about to explain my woes when suddenly she came out.

  “She took half my apartment from me! Now she’s trying to take the remainder!” Some high-strung rookie walked me into my apartment, and the ethnic, virile, senior partner who resembled the deceased actor Vince Edwards (TV’s Ben Casey) disappeared into her apartment.

  “Okay pal, what’s up?”

  Slowly and calmly I started to explain my story. But spotting my collection of rare issues of Hustler in cardboard boxes, he apparently played a hunch.

  As I explained the underside of my story, he fingered through the fused-together issues that I had had to stack rather hastily. Suddenly, just as I was getting to the part where Amy’s thugs had damaged my duodenum…

  “What the fuck is this!” he exclaimed, pulling out a nickel bag of old and shitty grass.

  “I never saw it before!” Always deny.

  He twisted my arm around and shoved me face forward against the wall. In a single, well-practiced motion, he whipped his handcuffs around my wrists.

  “She planted it!”

  I remembered purchasing it one desperate night on First Avenue and Ninth Street and had never even bothered to smoke it. Usually I put whatever drugs I had in the hiding space under the toilet. He dug through all my belongings, which he tossed into a pile. Although he didn’t find any more drugs, he did scrounge around boxes until he located my head-shop collection: bongs, metal pipes, rolling paper, and so forth.

  By the time the high-strung rookie finished reading me my rights, my door opened and in entered the virile fuzz checking his zipper.

  “This guy’s a dope dealer. What’d you find out?”

  “This scumbag subleased half the apartment to this lady at an exorbitant rate, and no sooner did she move in then he started hitting on her, threatening her with eviction unless she consented to oral-genital sex.”

  They pushed me roughly down the stairs. Several times I almost lost my footing. Into the back of a squad car I was shoved, again falling sideways into that familiar leg area.

  We ended up at a Kafkaesque locale called Manhattan Central Booking. They took fingerprints and mug shots of me, then they sat me at a desk in front of a detective who looked exactly like the late actor Lee J. Cobbs.

  “Occupation?”

  “Politico-social historian in the epic tradition.”

  “Unemployed,” he concluded, and typed it in with opposing index fingers.

  He then asked me to sign a confession to my alleged crime. He also said that if I wanted to confess to the charge of coercing sodomy (Fellatio is legally termed as sodomy!), it would be better in the long run. Like Roman Catholicism, the more I confessed now, the easier it would be for me later. Indeed, if I were planning future crimes, I could confess to them as well. I informed him that I wasn’t read my rights, this was an illegal arrest, and added, “Unless I’m given an apology and driven home this instant, I will notify Geraldo Rivera, Howard Stern, and Rush Limbaugh.”

  He led me to a public phone and said, “Call.” I called information but felt too embarrassed to ask for the numbers of Geraldo, Howard, or Rush. I thought of calling some friends, but I didn’t know their numbers and I knew they’d all be unlisted if not entirely disconnected. Nervously, I dialed some random numbers and hung up after the first ring. Someone finally picked up before the ring ended, and I lost my quarter. Since I had no outstanding warrants, I assumed I would be released on my own recognizance.

  I was taken to an empty cell that smelled like dead pigeons, but soon it started filling up. My fellow inmates were holding their bruised heads and talking reminiscently.

  “What you in for?” I finally employed the cliché.

  “We were just fucking around, minding our fucking business in Tompkins Square Park, and next thing we know, the fucking pigs are clubbing us and then fucking tossing us into paddy wagons.”

  “Fuck!” I replied in unity.

  Others, the latest characters from the Tompkins Square saga, joined us and exchanged their tales of woe, employing “fucking” not merely as adjectives and adverbs but also as prepositions, pronouns, and conjunctions.

  Convicted felon Leona Helmsley—the Eva Braun of New York real estate—was not incarcerated in that particular cell. That particular cell was loaded with white anarchists, downtrodden black and Puerto Rican guys, all foreigners in their own country, fellow sublets who had been rounded up on this latter-day Kristallnacht.

  Sleepily, I sat in a corner, suppressed tears, and wondered if they would deport me to the unknown land of my forefathers. I soon fell into a nauseous sleep. A lurid, vivid, tumultuous dream, which included the background sounds of the jail, encircled me: Riker’s Island was vastly overcrowded, and so were the Staten Island ferries. All of them were jam-packed with prisoners. Finally they sealed all the exits and filled the subways with convicts. As I walked through the city streets, fingers of the prisoners protruded, squirming through the subway grates and even cracks in the sidewalk. They were begging and moaning for anything. Sometimes they were spat on, and sometimes hard shoes would walk on the grill, crunching down on their fingers like snails on a moist suburban morning.

  I was awakened to find a cop was shaking me. He told me to follow him. He led me to a desk where I was informed that I had no outstanding convictions and that the lab had determined that my grass was 100 percent catnip. Regarding the allegations of sexual coercion, the young lady had refused to press charges. In short, and much to their chagrin, I could go.

  When I got home I couldn’t believe what had happened. Somehow, she had entered my apartment and had switched the fuse box and water mains to her half of the house. An intensive, extensive job in electricity and plumbing had been done in a matter of hours while I was in jail. I sat on the ground among the rubble caused by the quick construction, only to be awakened in a couple hours when the phone rang. Someone claiming to be a representative from my proofreading agency said, “Aeiou, how do you spell compassion? Don’t answer that; you might spell Rolaids. I just got a call from Reigert & Mortimer. Someone said you mis-spell
ed the word once too often and, unless you’re thrown to the winds, they’re pulling the account. Well I got news, ta ta…” Click.

  In the five thousand years of recorded history, had there yet been a legal document with the word “compassion” in it?

  Amy had put the wooden stake through the heart. She had not only gotten me fired, she had trumped up the charge that I was unable to spell the word “compassion.” What a diabolical sense of the acerbic!

  Ironically (since I was just released from jail for not having pot), I retrieved my actual cache of pot from under the toilet and lit up to calm down. I also took out a line of acid drop papers that had the words “12-step program time” printed on them. Why? Why not?

  I leaned against that wall dividing me from her and busily smoked a joint, trying to get over the loss of my crap-ass job.

  Suddenly, though, I thought I felt an optic nerve pinch, but no! It moved! The wall! Just about a sixty-fourth-of-an-inch, but it actually moved into my half of the apartment. I stared at it some more, and through pin pricks of light I could see it recede backward. No longer trusting myself, I got my camera and patiently lay in wait for the beast to show itself. All the time, I wondered what the hell was going on. Was it an optical illusion? I touched the wall. It felt like half-inch drywall sections innocently anchored into aluminum studs, nonchalantly secured to joists—a very shrewd camouflage. I drew pencil lines along the points where the wall met the other walls, the ceiling, and the floor. After two hours, I did more acid to keep from falling asleep, and that’s when I saw it pulsate again. It only did it for a second, but I was able to snap the picture. The first thing next morning I took it to the Fotomat.