Manhattan Loverboy

by Arthur Nersesian

  I went over to her and held her tight, and sincerely explained, “I’d be honored to be your roommate, but I just don’t know if I can. I just don’t think it would be a realistic match.”

  “I hardly think your criterion of reality is anything to judge anything by,” she replied curtly.

  “What is that supposed to mean?”

  “You’ve bungled one thing after another. Andrew told me how you met, how you initially scared the hell out of him. He didn’t just pick on you out of the blue.”

  “Did he tell you how he cut my grant money?”

  “He doesn’t owe you an education. He only started the endowment in honor of a relative who died in his arms.”

  “Who was this?”

  “I don’t know, he doesn’t talk about it. All I know is it happened in Tokyo in the early ’60s. He wouldn’t mention it. I suspect it might have been a son.”

  “A son? Well, that doesn’t excuse other things he did.”

  “What other things?” she asked.

  “Did he tell you how he humiliated me on a stage at YUK! and screwed my girlfriend?”

  “There’s another example of your gripless reality. He claims that she was not your girlfriend, he didn’t screw her, and that you were a hit at the comedy club.” Everything I said was a barefaced lie; every opinion was fundamentally wrong. Another comfirmation that I had met my true match. Adversarial polarity was achieved.

  I had no choice but to be with this woman. She was the only one I had ever met that would not allow me to lie to myself. The only person that could truly hurt me. Furthermore, she was the only person who would demand nothing short of excellence from me—not that she’d get it. And besides, I desperately wanted to screw her.

  “All right, fine,” I said. “How shall we do this? We already live together so shall we make my room the living room and your house the bedroom, or vice versa?”

  “What do you mean? Who said anything about a restructuring?”

  “I thought we loved each other.” I didn’t dare launch into the adversarial polarity philosophy. Women can’t bear dark, stark realism. After a lifetime of being babied and wooed, they like soft lighting, sweet-smelling, sugary-tasting, laughter-inducing stuff, and who could blame them?

  “Even if we did love each other,” she replied, “that doesn’t imply that we should become inseparably connected until we merge into a single bland person.”

  “Did you want to have a relationship or what?”

  “Bane, I care for you deeply. I find you intriguing, deeply intriguing, and we can try a limited partnership, but first, your eye color scares me. Secondly, I’m late for an appointment now, and, indeed, will probably be late for my next three appointments. But lastly, I can’t respect anyone, Bane, who doesn’t have a decent livelihood.”

  “You’re absolutely right.” She was right.

  “I’ll call you later,” she said, and off she went.

  With that she dressed into her office uniform and dashed out the door. It was 10:00 a.m., time for bed.

  I went to sleep with the faith that—in the words of the greatly misunderstood and unfairly neglected Captain & Toenail—Love (or adversarial polarity) would keep us together.

  I was asleep. The phone started ringing, I awoke and answered it. A frantic voice said, “So what livelihood have you chosen?”

  “Who is this?” I replied, still high on sleepitude.

  “Me—Amy. What have you done in the space of five hours since I last saw you?”

  “Oh, it’s you dear. I’m sorry, I was dozing.”

  “Dozing?! These are the business hours! The wheels are turning! The doers are doing!”

  “Yes, but I was up for twelve hours yesterday.”

  “Twelve hours, ha! This is my thirtieth hour, and I’m fit as a fiddle. You’ve got to learn to lengthen your biological day.”

  “My biological day?”

  “You can’t be a slave to your metabolism. Got to run.” Click, she hung up. She probably was actually running. I did love her. She was living a life for the both of us. I felt sure that my life would now work out okay. She watched out for me in the waking world, while I looked out for her in the sleeping world. Slipping…sliding…sleeping…

  Ri!i!i!i!i!ng!!! Phone again, I answered and put phone to ear.

  “What have you done now?”

  “I was looking for work.”

  “Good. What are we having for dinner tonight?”

  “I got some Lays potato chips and onion dip,” I said, still drunk on z-z-z’s.

  “WHAT! Are you insane?”

  “No ma’am.”

  “You have a very serious heart condition. Didn’t the doctor give you a lecture on what foods to eat, and exercises???”

  “Yes, I wasn’t thinking.”

  “Clearly. I got to go.”

  “I love…” She hung up.

  I went back to sleep.

  SLEEP; R!I!N!G! The heart doc was calling at the request of Miss Rapapport to remind me what nutrients I needed and sample dinners that I could ingest. I thanked him, unplugged the phone, and went back to sleep. When I finally awoke it was dark, early evening. But for me it was morning.

  The first bad habit that day started with the breakfast of two oily eggs, greasy potatoes, and a beer. Afterwards, I went to the East Village and looked at photo art books with dirty pictures at the center table in the St. Mark’s Bookstore. There I bumped into another friend, Cecil, who was going to some vaudevillian transvestite show at a new place that was once the site of the old dance joint called The World, over on Avenue C. I went with him, lost him, got drunk, and fell asleep in one of the big ballroom’s bathrooms. When I awoke it was about 6:00. Some strange man in a car stared at me as I stumbled to Houston Street for transportation. When I walked toward him, he zoomed off.

  Before hailing a cab, I realized that someone must’ve gone through my pockets ‘cause I had no money. When I got home it was 7:30 a.m. The telephone was ringing. I picked it up. It was my new girlfriend, Amy.

  “Where were you?”

  “I went out,” I said. “Where are you?”

  “I came home, got six hours of sleep, and came back to work.”

  “But you were at work yesterday,” I said.

  “I put in a seventeen-hour work day. I’m trying to bring it up to twenty.”

  “But…”

  “I don’t think we’re connecting,” she added.

  “We’re not,” I assured her, and then asked, “How much money are you worth?”

  “That changes day to day with Mr. Dow Jones. In the neighborhood of two hundred and fifty thousand in stocks and bonds. Why?”

  “How could you afford all the operations done on me?”

  “I have a great insurance plan. I have you down as a spouse.”

  “With a quarter-million you can quit and we can live off that for ten to fifteen years.”

  “Right, and then you’re in your forties, without a livelihood. What then?”

  “Well, I don’t know if you saw that film narrated by Welles.”

  “Orson Welles?”

  “Yeah, he did a film about Nostradamus, who says that New York is going to be blown up soon. We’ll all be dead in a few years.”

  “Let me get this straight,” she said, “I’m supposed to plan my life around the predictions of some mystic of the last century.”

  “Sixteenth century. He mentioned Franco by name.”

  “Who?”

  “Franco, the former dictator of Spain. And he predicted Hitler’s rise to power, only he called him Hisler.”

  “Suppose Nostradamus is wrong. We’ll be homeless soon.”

  “We could always go on welfare.”

  “Now you listen up,” she said. “If you want to remain in this relationship, you’re going to have to find a career.”

  “Huh?”

  “I am looking for a professional partner. Do you understand?” She elaborated, “I am looking for someone who I can lunc
h with in executive dining rooms. Someone to go on junkets and conventions with. You don’t have to be managerial, but I at least expect someone gainfully employed.”

  “But life should be a vacation,” I replied. She hung up on me. I laid down and thought awhile. Could she be right? What if Nostradamus was wrong? What if peace in the world were sustained? What if I turned forty and drove another body into the ground? I did need a new course, a way of getting more mileage. To that foggy resolve, I fell asleep. But it didn’t last very long.

  I awoke to a glass of cold water being thrown on me.

  “Up and at’em!” she yelled as I bolted up. “Now! Before you do irreversible damage to your life! Are you or are you not ready to batten down and find an occupation so you won’t someday be a bag person?”

  “Bu…” Moments earlier I had been in a deep, important sleep.

  “What do you want to be?” she asked.

  “I don’t know—a fireman?” Her stare became so sharp and intense I thought her eyes were going to cross. It was quickly apparent that she wouldn’t tolerate that answer.

  “I…I…I’m good with my hands,” I replied, holding them up for examination.

  “Good! Now that’s a start.” Leaning forward she looked fiercely into the unwashed windows of my bloodshot eyes, as if to read my thoughts more closely than I could.

  “Since your operation, you look…rugged,” she remarked. “I don’t know why, but I see you in overalls.”

  I released each syllable of the word slowly, “Pro-le-tar-i-an.” I remembered a postcard sent to me years ago. The subject of the card was the giant statue of the Futurist poet Mayakovsky in overalls on a pedestal in downtown Moscow. For me, this was the symbol of heroic modern man.

  “I’ll do anything to wear overalls!” I said heartfully, picturing myself in dungarees with blue straps over my shoulders.

  “Great, I have it all mapped out. Dress!” I dressed.

  “Come on!” She grabbed and dragged me down the stairs and into a cab. It was then that I noticed the G-man. I remembered him from the other night parked in front of The World. This morning he was sitting across the street in a parked car. He was conspicuously inconspicuous under a fedora and sunglasses. He turned over the engine of his car and followed our cab.

  We ended up at the Apex Technical School. The G-man parked across the street. As we went in I told Amy, “A G-man is across the street.”

  “Whitlock hired a gumshoe,” she said with an eye-rolling expression. “If he wants to throw his money away, so be it.”

  We entered, and she sat me down. A receptionist asked me to take a very basic test before meeting with any of the guidance counselors. I decided to test the test. I took it and deliberately flunked. They said they’d make an exception in my instance and sent me and Amy in to see the counselor.

  “What exactly do you want out of Apex?”

  “Well…” Amy cut me off before I could say, “A job in which I could wear overalls.”

  “Training for a job that would provide a starting wage of something in the ballpark of twenty K—starting figure—but with entrepreneurial potential.” The virtues of being a welder, an auto mechanic, and a refrigerator repairman were discussed. Each had merits and demerits. Classes, tuition, placement services, and statistics of employability in different job markets were considered. For the next thirty minutes the interview became a dialogue between Amy and the counselor. I quietly sat as my life was mapped out for me. For the most part, I tried listening to the sounds of their words as a dog might attempt to comprehend a human conversation. Occasionally they would look at me for a response. When Amy shook, I shook no. When she nodded, I nodded yes. A strong relationship required the faith and loyalty of a trained seal. Amy furiously jotted down notes. I noticed that she wrote the counselor a personal check, and I assumed I was enrolled in something.

  “Is there anything else you’d like to know?” the guidance counselor asked, before we were to take leave.

  “I’d just like to ask two questions,” I said. It was the first time I spoke.

  “Shoot.”

  “Are tools included?”

  “I’m afraid not.”

  “They are in the commercial.”

  “That’s just TV.”

  “Are distressed-denim overalls standard issue?”

  Amy sighed.

  “Well, you certainly may wear them, but many of our students wear either orange or white overalls.”

  “Fine.” We went outside. The G-man was still out there. Amy tried to hail a cab.

  “Why don’t we get the G-man to drive us. He’s going to follow us anyway.” She ignored me and got a cab with bad shocks. As our cab pogoed from pothole to pothole and jockeyed wildly from lane to lane, Amy explained my schedule. I was to attend a class in freon management. I had to purchase a face mask, goggles, a pair of industrial rubber gloves, and a funnel through which the freon would be poured into the apparatus. The first class was tomorrow at noon.

  “Wait a second!” I stopped her. “What part of a car requires freon?”

  “You idiot! It was decided that you were going to study refrigeration and air-condition repair.” She explained that there was far more money and marketability in it. She told me where I could purchase the special funnel, and opening her purse, she loaned me the money to purchase it. Then changing the subject, she talked about my getting that last piece of corrective surgery: my pupil-fusion operation.

  “Who devised it, Joseph Mengele?”

  While she rambled on about how I could have such beautiful baby blues, I envisioned years from now, in the early part of the twenty-first century, standing in front of a one-floor, cinder-block garage with a pull-down gate. Inside the garage would be two half-ton pick-up trucks with “AEIOU REFRIGERATION REPAIR” stenciled on the front doors. I could see myself in front of the place with overalls. It was a good, solid, satisfying picture, something worth working toward. Amy let me off in front of a Gap.

  “Remember,” she said as the cab was about to speed away, “classes commence at noon tomorrow. Don’t fuck it up.”

  I purchased the best pair of overalls in the place. I looked really good in them, and inspected myself in the mirror awhile until the sales-chick said, “Will that be all?”

  While walking around I found a pair of sunglasses and a rainbow-colored headband that complemented the overalls. Soon I meandered home. I located a large claw hammer and admired myself in the mirror. I was born to wear overalls and swing a hammer. It was early afternoon, and she was still at work, so I went to sleep in the overalls, still clenching the hammer.

  My growling stomach woke me up: hunger. Amy still wasn’t home. In the kitchen cabinet, everything had been thrown out except bouillon cubes, tomato paste, and Saltines. I mixed these together in a small pot, added a little warm water, steamed it, and ate it down. It wasn’t so bad.

  CHAPTER TEN

  TRUTH IS WHAT WORKS

  As I went out that night the G-man followed me. I walked around, went to various discount stores, and spent all the money Amy had given me on petty indulgences, entirely forgetting about the rubber gloves and funnel. I decided to forgo the Downtown scene that night in order to be with my pretty woman. When I got home, though, around midnight, I was broke and starving. My little woman was fast asleep. I awoke my woman.

  “Come to bed,” she grogged. “You’ve got your first class tomorrow.” She then rolled over and went back to sleep. I shook her again.

  “What?” she bolted up when I touched her.

  “Can you spare any change?” I said delicately. “I’m genuinely starving.”

  “My god, is there no escaping beggars in this city? I worked a ten-hour day, and sacrificed my lunch hour to get you a livelihood. Can’t I sleep in peace?”

  “You’re my girlfriend. You owe me.”

  “Pardon me?”

  “If it wasn’t for you, I’d still have a job proofreading.”

  “How much do you want?” She re
ached over to her purse.

  “I’d like three hundred a week.”

  “What?”

  “That’s how much I used to gross proofreading.”

  “I’ll loan you the money until you are employed as a refrigeration technician. Then I expect to get it all back.” I agreed.

  “Do you want me to sign some kind of agreement?” I asked.

  “You’re my boyfriend, I trust you,” she said in a strange tone. She took fifty out of her purse and laid back down.

  “While you’re awake and it’s still night, let’s have sex,” I said, hoping to seize an opportunity. She didn’t reply, she just lay there.

  I inspected her more closely. She had gone to sleep. Sex was always the first thing to go in a relationship; fighting was the last thing to go. I took the fifty and went out. The G-man’s car was across the street. I tried hailing a cab, but there were none. I went to the G-man, opened the rear door of his car, and got in.

  “Can you take me to the Nuyorican Poet’s Cafe? They’re having a poetry slam.”

  “Get the hell out of my Buick,” he said without turning around.

  “You’re following me. Why don’t we just do it this way?”

  “Get out of my car. I’m waiting for my wife.”

  I got out and successfully hailed a cab to the Nuyorican Poet’s Cafe to hear some poetry of our age. The G-Man followed. I paid my five bucks at the door and went up to the bar. The slam apparently was already over, people were drinking and mingling. I saw the G-Man peeking inside, looking for me. My new body really made a difference. Finding a roll of black masking tape, I taped a little on my chin so it looked like a plastic goatee.

  Moving around, I bought a beer at a usurious price, then came on to as many girls as I could. Finally, I approached one cute chick and introduced myself as last week’s poetry slam champ. I showed her ten bucks, the prize money, as proof. She couldn’t have been much older than sixteen. We talked about TV shows. I finally won her over with my crisp recollections of the early ’80s, and she let me buy her a beer.