I waited.
Twenty-four hours later I got the film back. In the interim, when I came down, I figured it was all an illusion. My perception must have been twisted by the chemicals in my brain. But one little item changed all that. In one of the photos there was a slight blur in the upper half of the wall. Evidence of motion could be clearly detected. Regarding my case, I considered all my charges against her. First, she had made me sign a contract under pharmaceutical duress. But that would be my word against hers. To give me the edge of credibility, I quickly urinated into an empty Styrofoam cup that formerly held that morning’s coffee. The judge, if he so deemed, could analyze the metabolites (or whatever they were) in my specimen. After years of drug saturation, not to mention the joint I had just smoked, I was sure I would still turn up proof-positive, showing that any contract I ever signed had not been lucidly agreed to.
I also wanted to bring up the fact that she had her workmen intimidate me, but I had no witnesses, no bruises. She had had the water and electrical mains rerouted through her room; that was indisputable. But the “wall picture,” my Exhibit A, made me confident that I could win the case. The cup of urine, too, would be a help, but just to be safe, I spent the evening toking grass and blowing smoke bubbles in the piss through a straw.
CHAPTER SEVEN
ROACH MOTELS &
GLUE TRAPS
L & T, 110 Centre Street: Unprecedentedly, I was early. I entered and took a seat in a room that resembled a large storefront church. On the far side of what looked like an altar were the judge and his uniformed, overweight stooges. On my side were the pews, filled with angry and misshaped parishioners. I didn’t see Amy. With my cup of urine in one hand, a book in the other, I was an excerpt of savoir faire. I squeezed into a seat. Because my last name began with an “A,” my case would be on top of the cattle call. Reading Arthur Nersesian’s self-published classic, The Fuck-Up, I quickly heard the court crier cry, “AEIOU vs. RAPAPPORT.” His twisted pronunciation of my name sounded like, “Hey you!” and every twit in the place simultaneously pointed at himself and asked quietly, “Me?”
As I approached the bench, all the while looking for her, I bumped into some hyperactive post-adolescent who was carefully balancing a cup of soda. Perhaps it was his liquid Exhibit A. Of course it spilled all over me. The liquid had an acrid aroma to it. The kid raced off as if he had stolen my valuables, and the yeller yelled my name again.
“I’m Aeiou,” I said, trying to wipe the smelly stuff off my relatively good clothes. “Do I win by default?”
“We’re Rapapport,” I heard sung in harmony behind me. I turned around to see them: Four well-suited young lawyers, each armed with a briefcase, were casting a long, collective shadow over me. Amy was safely in the middle of them. It was like a Secret Service phalanx guarding their presidette. Whatever legal pyrotechnics they might have in their briefcases couldn’t rival the fact that I was right.
“Room six,” the head clerk announced. We all marched off to room six. A small room with two tables and six chairs was where justice would be meted out. A balding, older, overweight guy with an incredible goiter was the judge. As he mumbled some formalities and then read some forms, I couldn’t take my eyes off that enigmatic growth on his neck. It seemed to beckon me. Since I had brought the complaint, he asked me casually, “What’s on your chest?”
“Firstly, Miss Rapapport,” I pointed to her, “connived a lease out of me. Secondly, she divided my apartment in half. Thirdly, she has been moving the wall closer and closer into my part of the house, and the thing is, her yuppie friends have been conspiring to destroy my life. She also got me fired from my job for mis-spelling the word ‘compassion’ and…”
“No, no, what’s on your chest?” He pointed to my chest. My shirt and pants were filled with holes large and small.
“What’s that smell?” the judge sniffed. “It smells like battery acid or something.”
“They did it!” I hollered. The post-adolescent who’d spilled what I thought was soda must have been an agent of theirs. “They did it! She! See, I’m one of the normal people and she’s…”
“Enough! Prove it.”
“No problem.” Confidently, I held up the Styrofoam cup of urine and pulled out my photo and put it before him.
“It looks like a photo of a wall.”
“Isn’t it brilliant? The subtlety of it! Isn’t it just genius?”
“What the hell are you talking about?”
“Examine, if you would, the top left hand corner of the photo.”
“Yeah, so?”
“The wall is moving! The wall moved! She did something to make the wall move! She made the damned wall move. Her and those warlock workmen. This is indisputable.”
“No, it’s not. You could have moved the camera when you shot this photo. What other proof do you have?”
“This,” I said. He held out his hand and I handed him the cup. He sniffed it deeply.
“What is it?” he asked.
“My pee.”
He put the cup down and wiped his hand off carefully while I elaborated. “She drugged me, and cocaine-positive metabolites are in that vessel.”
“What other proof?”
“What else?!” Distraught, in disbelief, and dissed, I despaired and felt panicky. I soothed my anxieties by stepping a bit closer to the radiance of his glowing goiter. I knew if worse came to worst I could somehow appeal to the humility of his goiter.
“We’d like to state our defense,” they said in chorus.
“Go on.”
“Wait a second,” I said to the goiter. “May I approach the bench?”
“I don’t have a bench.”
“Can I whisper in your goit…ear?”
“My ear?”
“It’s urgent!”
“All right,” said the judge with some resignation.
I had no idea what I was going to say but I had to make it clear to him what was going on. I leaned over his goiter. It looked like a dinosaur egg. I smelled it. It didn’t really smell. It had streaks and colors running through it that seemed to be a great amalgam of mystery. It was kind of a great unification.
“Well?”
“Did you ever see The Invasion of the Body Snatchers?” I said in a whisper.
“The film with that tall British actor with the mustache…”
“Whose son cheated on Julia Roberts…”
“Yeah, Donald Sutherland!” he said.
“He’s actually from Canada, that’s the remake.”
“Well, that’s the only one I saw.”
“That’s all right. Remember how pods from a foreign planet come to earth and replicate bodies of Earthlings…”
“What’s your point, son?”
“These people in front of us, look at them.”
“So?”
“They’re yuppies, right?”
“I suppose so,” he replied.
“Well, are they yuppies or not? Please correct me if I’m wrong.”
“Yes,” he conceded. “So what?”
“Where were they ten years ago?”
“I haven’t the foggiest,” he replied, and added, “If you’ve got something to tell me, you’d better tell it now because I’m all out of patience.”
“They’re from somewhere else—Bismarck, North Dakota. And they’re trying to peel us away. They lure us. They draw us out into their glue traps and then they drown us while we’re stuck there struggling and squealing…”
“I want to help you but…”
“Look, I can tell you’re one of me. Together we can take back all those goddamned buildings that they changed into their bases.”
“What bases?”
“You know, all those massive co-ops named after Midwestern states or Waspish names. The places that these guys had to bribe in order to get around all the local zoning ordinances and are built on New York landmarks!”
“Huh?”
“We can rebuild Penn Station and Moondog
and the Third Avenue El and…it’s culture-cleansing!” I screamed.
“Were you born in this city? Is that it?”
“No, but…”
“Were you raised in the city?”
“No, but…”
“Well, then, what are you talking about?”
“They’re with the Mafia,” I finally said.
“The Mafia?!”
“One of them,” I muttered, stepping up closer.
“Which of these people,” he pointed to the group, “are with the Mafia?”
“No, I mean they are each with one of the many mafias.”
“And how many mafias are there?”
“More than I could ever count.”
“Look,” he exhaled slowly and, looking over to Amy’s band of thieves, said, “I see what appear to be four very expensive lawyers over there. And I see you all alone. In trying to balance the scales of justice, I’m extending a patience I wouldn’t normally extend here.”
“I appreciate that. These people are with one of the mafias. Yes, that’s what I’m saying.”
“What the hell are you talking about?”
“There’s the Irish Mafia in the church and police. The Jewish Mafia in psycho-analysis, Hollywood, and the literature of the ’50s. There’s the Indian Mafia on Sixth Street restaurant row as well as the subway newsstands. The Korean green-grocer Mafia. The Gay Mafia of the beat generation. Not to mention the Black Mafia in Harlem, the Russian Mafia in Brighton Beach, the Armenian Carpet Mafia…”
“Enough!” he put his hand up. “Son, you need help…” He rambled on. I had lost him, and saw that a supreme authority was required, the emergency cord, the goiter, an all-unifying force in a fragmented world. A rainbow organ, a multi-cultural growth, a great democracy of cells. I seized the goiter in both hands like a fallen sparrow and whispered sweet caresses into it. He shrieked, and the yuppies charged me. Court officers dashed in and helped them press the right side of my face to the marble floor. The judge ordered them to take me outside and set me free. The case was dismissed.
I don’t know what became of the urine specimen.
Even I know I shouldn’t have touched him. I’m convinced that some kind of mind-controlling inhalant was in that soda spilled on me in the cattle-call area. In the past, I had always been afraid of goiters. Once again, they had made a fool of me.
Two weeks later, an unoriginal countersuit arrived in the mail. They and the Japanese, no imagination, the lot of them, just replicating and mass-marketing the ideas invented by the likes of us. I had to appear in court, and it wasn’t landlord-tenant court, either.
It was the kind of court that had a bench, but the judge didn’t let you approach it. In fact, everyone seemed to shun me, even my Legal Aid lawyer, who seemed to feel that I had somehow gotten him in trouble. Whenever I humbly asked him a question, he’d reply with rolling eyes and opening lines like, “For the millionth time…” or “You again?!” A goiter in that courtroom would have been macheted from the neck like a coconut. I didn’t even bother to bring the “wall picture.”
In front of the H.U.A.C. hearings in Hollywood, Sterling Hayden had denounced his former mistress. Clifford Odets named J. Edward Bromberg, whom he had just eulogized. Screenplayist Martin Berkley had rattled off 161 names. When Amy got up in the witness box and wagged her finger at me, I knew how the former mistress, the late Mr. Bromberg, and 161 names must have felt. When she started her denunciation, my flimsy, wonton noodle-like heart started flapping like an angel fish on a table top. I had loved (realized an adversarial polarity for) her.
They had all those macho, archetype-possessed men testify against me. They had the cops testify against me. They had the workmen testify against me (they commented on the smallness of my reagan). They had my former co-workers at the Strand Bookstore testify against me. They dredged up an old school teacher to testify against me. They established beyond all reasonable doubt that I was a failure. Initially, I was just an under-achiever and undisciplined, but gradually they slipped in words like recalcitrant and incorrigible. They read from a print-out of my T.R.W. credit history. It indicated that I had defaulted on my student loan. I didn’t have a bank account and I was unable to get credit cards. In short, I was a bad risk, kept gaspingly alive in this dusking age of undeserved entitlements.
Then they went through great pains to vindicate society. America was strong. I was its runt. Opportunities were plentiful. Incentives were ubiquitous. The courtroom was pure, I was its speck. We might have won in Vietnam if guys like me hadn’t protested and then moved to Canada. The prosecutor put forward some far-fetched theory that I had been sent by the Japanese to oversee the fall of America. He gave an outlandish image reminiscent of the rooftops in Saigon loaded with refugees vying with each other to board evacuating helicopters.
My lawyer didn’t object; he was too busy flossing his teeth with an embossed business card. Even if he did object, the judge probably would have overruled him. The general thesis was that I had come from the right side of the tracks and had gone to the wrong side. I had only myself to blame. I was once lean, quick, and handsome. They proved how through self-will I had turned short, fat, and dumb. It was as if the promising side of me was suing the lazy side of me.
Also, many of the statements that would bring the inevitable judgment to a speedy appeal were stricken from the record. Other things occurred that simply eluded the record. For instance, I repeatedly caught the judge giving the plaintiff a nod of familiarity, a wink of complicity.
Wolf down wads of cotton candy, blocks of fruitcake in brandy sauce, a storm of Hostess Snowballs, a toilet bowl full of Lime Jello from a hospital cafeteria, prunes in heavy syrup from a parochial school. Pepper it with headcheese, Scooter-pies, kale. Then, as a chaser, add a six-pack of Colt 45 tall-boys and do some high-impact aerobics. You’ll feel the bottled-up nausea I had to hold in. And you’ll understand why I suddenly bolted to my feet and yelled, “Lies! Fascism! Totalitarianism! Death of Justice!”
“Objection, your honor!” screamed the attorney for the plaintiff.
“You’re blowing our case!” screamed my attorney, who was also for the plaintiff.
“Shut up both of you!” said the judge, to my shock and delight. All eyes, like spotlights, were upon me, and for a moment I was in command. I had complete faith that if I could unify that fragmentation of knowledge into the correct blend of words, like the right digits of a combination lock, I could indeed get what I wanted.
“Young man, I will not have accusations like that bandied about in my courtroom. Do you have something pertinent to tell the court?”
“Yes I do, sir.”
“Make the oath, take the stand.”
The court officer rambled, I said “I do,” and did. “Well, it’s like this. This is a case of the rich squeezing the artist out of his workplace because they’ve turned their own homes into beehives of boredom.”
“Ah, then you’re an artist?”
“Yes sir.”
“Well, I’m quite sympathetic to that. Indeed, I work for the Volunteer Lawyers for the Arts,” he said. I glanced over to their lawyer and I could see him unbuttoning his top button behind his tight little tie knot. God was on my side this time.
“What paintings have you painted?” he asked.
“I’m a writer,” I said.
“Ahhh, prose, playwright, or bard?”
“None, your honor.”
“Essays? Journalism?”
“Well, I’m pursuing histories.”
“Well, what histories have you written?” he asked impatiently.
“None, really. I’m planning on bringing history to the masses.”
“How?”
“Well, let’s be honest, Your Honor, sitcoms are the popular venue.”
“So what you’re saying is you write screenplays?”
“Not quite,” I replied, “I’m on the idea-pitching level of the writing pyramid. I can hire some grad student to put the idea into words.
”
“Pitching?”
“Well, I mean, I’m working on a cinematic treatment of world history…”
“Cinematic treatment. In my day, we used to call that a novel.”
“Your honor, let’s be honest, the written word is dead.”
“I see,” he grinned a bit. “So you’re one of those people that always introduce themselves as writers, but quietly believe the written word is dead.”
“Yes sir.”
“You’re a bad name to those few, poor, struggling writers who genuinely scratch, scramble, sacrifice, and do write!”
“I…”
“You’ll sit back in your seat and not another word from you, idea-pitcher!” I quietly returned to my seat, and the attorney for the plaintiff spent the remainder of the day insulting me, then I went home.
On the last day of the inquisition, I realized that the judge, with his large jaw, thin lips, and wire-framed glasses, looked vaguely liked Vyshinsky, Stalin’s chief prosecutor during the purges. I anticipated the sentence. He’d point at me: “Take Mister Vowels here, the ‘pitcher,’ to a garage filled with old trucks, turn on the engines to drown out the gunshots, and away with him!”
Well, that wasn’t quite it. I was to stay something like ten kilometers away from the plaintiff and stop harassing her. If I persisted in harassing her, I would be sent to Riker’s Island. He said, “You would be subject to the pangs of an overcrowded prison.” Pangs rhymed with gangs, and overcrowding implied there’d be a tight fit—gang-raped, macho-male-homo-inmate style was the explicit implication. In the words of inner-city youth James Ramseur, victim/villain in the “subway vigilante” Bernie Goetz case—the municipal trial of its day—replying to the cross-examinations of Goetz defense attorney Barry Slotnick, “I know what time it is!”
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