Manhattan Loverboy

by Arthur Nersesian

  “You mean give up my apartment?”

  “Yeah.”

  “No way.”

  “How about fifty thousand, cold hard cash up front. That’s a lot of money.”

  “You think I’m some hick?”

  “You stay away from me and Amy, and I’ll deposit a hundred thousand bucks into your personal account.”

  “I don’t have an account.”

  “All right, I’ll give it to you, but I want a year.”

  “Just keep her away from me,” I countered.

  “Fuck you,” he said as if it were a salutation.

  “Fuck you, too,” I saluted him back, and he left.

  During that entire duration, while the hospital kept getting Amy’s checks, subsidizing my journey into ever-unfolding beauty, she didn’t reappear once. They soon moved me to a place outside the city that was more of a sanctuary. Weeks turned to months, and months gave way to seasons. I reasoned that she saw this as payment for stealing my apartment, and I assumed that under Whitless’s ocean of wealth she was able to extinguish any alleged love for me.

  When most of the physical therapy was complete, I was informed that I’d be allowed to live at home and come in to the hospital for daily workouts and checkups.

  Inasmuch as each of us is the center of our own universe, it takes no effort to believe that we are gods and should be treated accordingly. During the time in the hospital, when all the money and attention was being spent on me, I wasn’t compelled in the slightest to wonder why. I was me and there-fore worth all the money in the world. To me, bad as they were, my farts always came out smelling like roses.

  Good fortune has a way of making even the most bitter mind magnanimous. This jihad with Amy had gone on long enough. I was soon well enough to check out. Hopefully she and asshole would have moved off somewhere and killed each other with their selfish and surgical forms of love.

  On my first day home, I walked across the hallway and knocked on her door. I wanted to set the matter straight. Getting no response, I went to my adjacent door. At the base of it, I found a sealed envelope. Tearing it open, I found a VISA card made out in the name Joseph Aeiou. Inside was a letter:

  Aeiou,

  Here’s a company credit card with the first installment, five thousand dollars of credit. In return, all I ask is that you leave me and the mother of my future children alone, and you will receive more money with time. This is my last effort at being nice. If this continues I’ll have to be…not so nice.

  Andrew Whitlock,

  M.B.A. Harvard, 1958

  I slipped the note into my pocket and entered my home. Aggg! My apartment was a wreck. A typhoon had passed through it. The furniture was destroyed. My clothing and belongings were piled around the place. Filth, debris, profanity everywhere.

  In short, it was exactly as I had left it. After two months of living like a king in a hospital, I had cultivated both a need and an admiration for purpose and structure.

  I stepped into the waking nightmare, dreading the primordial things growing chaotically around the refrigerator and sink. I feared the hostile communities of insects and rodents with which I had clumsily coexisted in the past. They had bloomed and multiplied. Two sabre-toothed mice with thick, woolly coats held their ground and stared indignantly when I entered their living room. ‘You dash and dive into some filthy crack,’ they seemed to say.

  Flying waterbugs and other bespeckled lotus-like insects swarmed on the neglected Fritos, uneaten Hostess products, melted ice cream, and funky onion dip which I had eaten for dinner and left on the counter just before the heart attack.

  Upon inspecting the burlap texture and urine odor of my old clothing, which I had once so thoughtlessly pressed against my now silky skin, I was retroactively sickened. If I needed an added reason for a new wardrobe, all my prior garments were of irregular dimensions for a squat fatty.

  After a couple hours of shopping at Macy’s way above my plastic power, I handed the cashier girl my card and chewed my bottom lip to see whether its magic would take. She asked for ID, I pulled out my old college ID, and she made doubtful expressions, while trying to compare me with the fiend in the photo.

  Desperately, I stuck my fingers in my nose making it more bulbous. I pulled back my hairline to give her a taste of my former baldness. I squashed my cheeks together to indicate my poor skin, loose jowls, and multiple chins.

  Finally, nervously, she returned the plastic wand with a receipt. I went off to the Herald Center. With bags and boxes containing all the styles and fashions that I had once mocked in glossy magazines, I was ready to leave. But first, exhausted by my little shopping safari, and hoping to delay returning to the hellhole apartment, I dropped into a midtown trap for a watery, tourist-bilking beer.

  Usually, I would order a pitcher and work my way to the dregs. But here I was with this nice, new body and I had already ground one carcass into hamburger meat. So I just ordered a single headless, lite beer and sipped it very slowly.

  Three cute girls who looked 90210-esque were laughing it up at the other end of the bar. Looking them over, I realized that they were all staring at me and giggling. Since the ’70s, I couldn’t help comparing tripletted babes to Charlie’s Angels, but they didn’t look anything like Charlie’s Angels. I kind of shuffled over, approaching the one that looked least like Farrah (Majors (O’Neal)) Fawcett. I said, “Hi.”

  “Hi,” returned the one who looked nothing like Jaclyn Smith.

  “What do you kids do?” I asked the one without any resemblance to Kate Jackson.

  “We’re actresses,” replied the non-Farrah-esque.

  “Really? I’m kind of a director of intelligent, low-budget, poorly distributed films.”

  “What kind of films do you do?” asked one or all of them.

  “Mainly adaptations of wordy, anglophile novels of the latter part of the last century.”

  “Why?” they or she asked.

  “Because there’s a bunch of people who don’t read books anymore, but feel real guilty about it, so they figure that by punishing themselves through these tedious films, they’re filling their reading quota for the year.”

  One at a time they responded:

  “Don’t the actors not get too much money…”

  “…Or exposure…”

  “…For it?”

  “That’s true,” I said suavely, “but I make them appear far more intelligent than they’ll ever really be. And no one has to take off their clothes.”

  “Wow!” They raced with the bait. Then one of them asked, “Are you from Europe? You seem to have kind of an accent.”

  “Well,” I replied Daniel Day-Lewisly, “I am in something of a self-exile. New York is a natural Elba. Don’t you agree?” They all giggled, so I continued, “Few realize that among New York’s many former expatriates one must count both Trotsky and Talleyrand.”

  “How fascinating,” they chirped.

  Out the bullshit kept rushing. I couldn’t believe that all this was happening, and I kept wondering, why are they buying this? But then I remembered I was good-looking, a homonym for right, a synonym for everything profitable. Usually I just didn’t get a response. (If lucky, I earned an insult.) But my looks now were a catapult from which I could sling forth endless crap. Eventually, we all went to one of their apartments in Kip’s Bay. I unloaded my bags near the door, and we examined the flat. It had a lot of rooms, and we spent the evening giggling, drinking wine coolers, playing Nintendo, and watching MTV. Subtly, I’d sneak off with them one at a time to a different room and slip one hand up the blouse, the other down the pants, past the elastic guards and straps, and feel them up, one at a time, twice as fast. Aside from the dewy warmth and pointy tips, all I could think was—Wow! Even I felt like tipping them off: Can’t you see it!? He’s a slinky!

  It wasn’t like I was even horny. I just felt like I had to get away with it. Soon, when two-thirds of them faced the hard fact that I probably wouldn’t marry them—which is the only re
ason most chicks ever let you space out on them—they departed.

  I was left alone with non-Farrah. I entered her bedroom, where she was spread out against a vast collection of stiletto-high heels, an Imelda ready for her Ferdinand. After some preliminary handiwork, I realized that I could usurp her, a rebel uprising. All my life I had been starving, with only morsels of memories to sustain me. This chick was undoubtedly the best looking thing I had ever conned into the sack. But suddenly I understood that even though Joseph Aeiou could do no better, I, Bane, could only do better. I was a diamond cutter with a cheap mood ring.

  I remember reading how Hugh Hefner, during his middle-aged, pre-AIDS heyday, kept a blue book filled with notes on all the chicks he’d made it on. It was complete with notes on where he put his dapper reagan and everything. If possible, he would even videotape the spectacle. He had boxes full of economy-size Johnson’s Baby Oil carried in, sometimes on a weekly basis, by workmen who had to keep from snickering as they marched through the mansion. Presumably, they had to leave the boxes in the bathroom. The non-Farrah’s bathroom was adjacent to the front door. Claiming I had to squeeze a dump, I grabbed my Herald Square shopping bags and snuck out.

  On the way home, I saw the all-night pharmacy on Fiftieth Street and Lexington Avenue. I quickly picked up some Blistex, Vaseline Intensive Care, and a few other protective medications. I had to take care of my new-and-improved self.

  When I got to my building, it was about 3:00 a.m., and I had to return to the same contemptible apartment that that slime Joseph had lived in. Sticking the key in, opening the lock and door, I entered loudly, flicking the lights off and on in hope of scaring away the wildlife. I was greeted by disbelief. It was beautiful, as if my world had been beautified along with me. In the space of twelve hectic hours, most of the garbage, including boxes and clothes, had disappeared, and a connecting door had been quickly constructed into the adjoining Berlin wall between Amy and me. I threw my boxes of new clothes on a couch and called for Amy. She wasn’t there. Nervously, I tried her door. It was unlocked. I went into her new bathroom. Whole walls were covered with magnification mirrors and bright bulbs. I opened some of the dermatological products I had purchased.

  I started putting on applicants and creams, I don’t know why. I had never done it before. I spent hours doing the inexplicable. Time that I would normally invest in either intellectual acquisition or piggish habits was, instead, devoted to skin care. Soon there was a knock at her door. I had no idea who it was.

  “Go away.” I didn’t want to do anything but work on myself. But the door opened anyway. It was Amy. From out in the hallway, I heard Whitlock appealing, “But look at the xeroxed letter and this credit card printout. He’s sold you out for the price of a wardrobe.”

  “Then I respect him that much more.”

  “I love you,” Whitlock invoked.

  “I’m only interested in you professionally!” she replied. “Now leave me alone, old man!”

  I had a magnifying glass and was carefully searching for irregularity in skin texture, only noticing her peripherally. She was dressed in some “sexy” Frederick’s of Hollywood lace. Suddenly I had a rush of excitement: A just-visible dot, which I suspect was a speck from a cigarette ash, was lodged deep in one of my forehead pores. Carefully, I extracted the speck, a pimple aborted. For the first time I had an idea of the thrill that pulsates through a pimple-popper.

  “I’m glad to see you’ve finally taken an interest in yourself,” I heard her say. She was leaning against the bathroom door. I looked over at her. For the first time, she seemed extraordinarily plain. She kept talking about how much she had cared for me and how all spats that we had in the past were just an indication of this care. She slowly approached me. I think it was an attempt at being romantic. When she came between me and my mirror, I stepped even closer to her, attempting to see my reflection in her eyes.

  “Bottom line,” she said, “I love you.”

  “I love you, too,” I said to myself reflected in her eyes.

  “Oh, Bane!”

  “I worship you, I…I…” I couldn’t believe how strikingly handsome I was. I was hypnotized by my own eyes. Yet, I had to admit it, the brilliant, blue pupils that glowed in the dark were my one sin of omission. Still, I had to see more of me in different lights. I picked up a hand mirror and danced around with it. I was energized by seeing myself. I was something that transcended sexes. Hermaphroditically handsome. I was my own lock-and-key, I felt sure I could self-produce, I could cleave like a hydra upon orgasm.

  I was above standard morality. I could do more, understand more, jump higher than an ugly or plain person could. I couldn’t understand how come I wasn’t followed, pursued, exalted, lionized, and worshipped. Adulation and prostrations were lavished on things of far less beauty. I went over to the window and looked down at the moving gray mass, like squirming brain tissue—meaningless commuters.

  In some great overwhelming and predestined surge, I raced out the door, down the flutter of steps, and onto the streets filled with the morning rush hour. In my right hand I still clenched my scepter of power, the hand mirror.

  Jumping onto the hood of a parked car, I stared into the mirror and screamed to multi-legged men-o-pede: “Run to your false prophets, inspect the photos and trinkets on your altars, and compare. Notice the sentimental Bambi-eyes of Christ! See the ragged turban on Mohammed! The large, oily forehead of Lenin and booger-like mole on Madonna’s upper lip! Observe disproportions, imperfections, and flaws of both a structural and aesthetic nature. If you saw them on the street, would they be living embodiments of their truths? Would you instantly recognize and be faithful? Behold me! My beauty has been laid bare. My deep and undeniable philosophy exudes through me—an onomatopoeia of truth. Hidden and intensive meaning has been exhumed from me. I give this era and place definition high above other periods and places. You live in the age of Bane!”

  I hugged myself. I kissed myself passionately on the lips. I tried sticking my tongue down my throat. An erection knifed upward and still more blood filled; my reagan was in extreme pain. I groped at me in lewd, yet sincere ways. I dropped down to my knees. My head was spinning, arrhythmic pulses; suddenly I vomited… Quickly, Amy, still in lingerie, hustled through the maddening crowd, pulled the mirror out of my hand, and shoved a paper bag over my head. In a moment I passed out.

  Sometime later I awoke back in the apartment, the bag still on my head. I could hear a male voice whispering, “We had a deal, Aeiou!”

  “Shut up or leave!” Amy shrieked. It was the Shadow—Whitlock.

  “Look,” I heard, “here’s the company credit card I gave him to leave you. And look at these receipts! His use of the card is proof of his willingness to dump you!”

  “SHUT UP!” Amy yelled, “Are you okay, Bane?”

  “I think I had some kind of…ego avalanche,” I explained through a mouth hole I poked out of the bag with my tongue.

  “Vanity,” Whitlock decrepitly replied, “he’s become vain about his looks.”

  “Are you okay?” she asked.

  “I guess I have to find something new that’s ugly about me. New ruffles…”

  “Shouldn’t be too hard,” I heard Whitlock mutter.

  “All this is very difficult. My thoughts have been taking on a new and sensible turn. I’ve been thinking in short, declarative sentences. And worse, I…I…”

  “Do you hear that, Whitlock?” Amy said to the monster.

  “Elaborate,” replied Whitlock.

  “I’ve secretly been considering a ca…ca…” The word was obscene, the phrase had turned men into machines. I dreaded saying it, but there it was, “Career!”

  “What?”

  “I’ve been making plans!”

  “Plans!?”

  “For the last couple of weeks, I’ve been thinking about making myself more efficient and goal-ridden within the common value-systems.”

  “What value-systems?”

  “Money-makin
g, power consolidation, social acceptance. I mean, never before have I cared about what other people thought of me. Now I’m filled with doubts and wonder, like maybe all my learning is just gratuitous. If knowledge can’t be utilized or, more important, be instrumental in reaching a precise financial return, it’s unjustified.”

  “Do you hear him, Whitlock? It’s over.” I could imagine her silly, syllogistic thinking process at work: Money was meaning, ergo I was meaningful.

  “Give him time,” Whitlock rushed in, “He has no staying power. In no time at all he’ll backslide into the same slothful sybarite.”

  “Test him!” Amy replied.

  “Test me for what?”

  “Exactly,” Whitlock replied. “Test him for what? He has the same desires as the rest of us.”

  “What are your desires?” I asked Amy, wondering if we were truly of one mind.

  “Amy wants to be a self-made millionaire,” Whitlock spoke up.

  “And once you’re a millionaire?” I asked. “What then?”

  “I want to travel,” she uttered modestly behind an embarrassed smile.

  “To be a dekillionaire!” Whitlock corrected her in a sky-shaking boom. “Amy then strives to be a dekillionaire.”

  “And then?” I asked Whitlock, who appeared to be acting as her truthful side.

  “To be a hektillionaire,” Whitlock asserted.

  “Wait a second,” I heard her mutter.

  “How can you treat yourself so well?” the liberal jerk in me needed to know. “How can you want so much while others, just as human as you, are starving?”

  “Maybe,” Whitlock joined in, “just maybe all people are not equal. And maybe, just because people like us do succeed, it doesn’t mean we rob you of success. Maybe people like you fail on your own.” It was like listening to Scrooge teach the Spirit of Christmas the error of his kindly ways.

  “Get the hell out of here!!” Amy finally belted out. “Get out! You’re repulsive.”

  As I saw her shove the most eligible bachelor since [the late] John John [before he married, and accidentally killed, Carolyn Bessette] right out the door and slam it, I felt that deep sense of gratitude that was frequently and falsely advertised as love.