Manhattan Loverboy

by Arthur Nersesian

  “So you write poetry?” I asked as if I cared.

  “I’m working on a long poem about sleazy guys who’ll say anything to get laid, how ‘bout you?”

  “What are the roots that clutch?” I said in a fierce and demonic tone. “What branches grow, out of this stony rubbish? Son of man, you cannot say or guess, for you know, only a heap of broken images where the sun beats, the dead tree gives no shelter, the cockroach no relief, but there is shadow under this red rock. Come in under the red rock of my apartment and I’ll show you your shadow at morning striding behind you or your shadow at evening striding to meet you. I’ll show you fear in a handful of dust…”

  “Your red rock needs a little work,” she replied.

  “What kind of work?” It was part of Eliot’s The Wasteland.

  “It needs, like, a victim, or someone we can feel bad for. Like an oppressed group or something.”

  I steered the conversation away from modern poetry and careened her to the balcony where our lips collided in kisses. I touched her here and there and then nodded off. When I was awakened a couple hours later, I was alone. It was morning. I went out and tried to hail a cab, but there were none on B and Third. I saw the G-man and got in the back seat of his car.

  “Home, Jeeves.”

  “My name’s not Jeeves. Get the hell out of my car. I’m waiting for my wife.”

  I got out of his car and slowly walked along Second, from Avenue B to Avenue A. He followed twenty feet behind me the entire time, until I finally got a cab on First Avenue, and we went home.

  As soon as I opened the door to my apartment, I saw a big sign waiting for me. It read, “WHERE ARE YOU? FIRST CLASS IS TODAY AT NOON, DON’T FUCK UP!!”

  It was 7:00 in the morning. I could comfortably catch four hours of sleep and get there by noon. I rummaged around a bit and looked through the remains of my collections that had been stocked into boxes—all my old copies of underground magazines and journals such as the SoHo Weekly News, the East Village Eye, and the Berkeley Barb were gone. Also gone were my anthologies of Celebrity Skin, featuring Hollywood Starlets when they were just high-priced call girls, and my rare “Warts and Farts” issues of Hustler. I lay down in a slight daze and dozed off. I woke to the ring of the telephone.

  “How was it?”

  “How was what?” I said drowsily. “Who is this? Where am I?”

  “Your girlfriend, asshole.”

  “My girlfriend’s what?”

  “This is your girlfriend, asshole.” It was Amy: I loved her. “How was your first class?” I looked at the clock, it was 5:00 p.m.

  “It was first class!”

  “What did you learn?”

  “We got a breakdown of conventional refrigeration appliances,” I lied unimaginatively. “Today’s focus, though, was on conventional home-style stand-ups.”

  “Like what?”

  “Like G.E., Westinghouse, Maytag…”

  “What exactly did you learn?”

  “Well…” I was out of material. Refrigerators didn’t inspire me.

  “Yes?” She wouldn’t relent.

  “You know those little magnets with the little fruits on one side.”

  “What about them?”

  “They’re…ummm.”

  “They’re what?”

  “They’re poison to your standard home machine rheometers, especially the large-fruit magnets.”

  “Large fruit magnets?”

  “Yeah, like cantaloupe and watermelon magnets. They usually have two magnet strips behind them.”

  “Where did you end up purchasing your specially treated funnel?”

  “Small place near the river called Mesticles,” I quickly invented. “It sounds like you’re cross-examining me!”

  “You’re lying!” She switched gears into a holler, “I received a call five minutes ago from your guidance counselor who informed me that you missed your first class!”

  “Did you throw out my archives of underground journals?!” My first day and I was already assigned a guidance counselor.

  “I certainly did and I don’t want to even talk about them.”

  “But…”

  “But don’t worry,” she added. “We will have a talk. Don’t go anywhere, I’m coming home right now.” She then hung up.

  Oy, what was I going to say? She caught me red-handed. A moment later, she entered. “Now what the hell is going on? Either you provide me with a reasonable explanation, or this relationship is finis.”

  “You want an explanation!” I began confidently, seeming to launch into a strong retort, but actually blank-minded. I began giving a brief history of the nature of consciousness, talking about the Great Earth Mother and the heroic evolution of the ego, and how the great egoless ego was symbolized by a snake swallowing its own tail.

  “What!” she screamed like a swooping bird. The scream snatched a marooned thought in its talons, and I was suddenly on to something else.

  “I feel a complete lack of faith in you,” I said, “and it’s paralyzed me.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Sex! This is supposed to be a sexual relationship, but we haven’t even seen each other nude! Explain that to me!” Amy started coughing. She coughed for such a length of time, I dashed to the kitchen and fetched some water in a bowl. After drinking it, she asked, “What do I look like, a cat?” The bowl was the only thing that was clean.

  “You okay?”

  “I’m coming down with laryngitis,” she rasped. “You’re giving it to me!”

  “Before you lose your voice, explain to me how you’re always so carefully out of the house when I’m excited, and vice versa?” If there was a vice versa.

  “I…”

  “Tell me what man would tolerate this behavior!”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Sex! Why don’t we have sex?!”

  “Fine, have sex if you must.”

  “I mean with each other.”

  “How does this relate to you not having gone to class?”

  “I’m drawing on your strength is how! And that strength isn’t coming because I don’t believe you care for me!”

  “Well…well…” she sputtered.

  I had found a breach and wasn’t about to acquiesce. I was on the offensive. In point of fact, I was sick of her You-can’t-make-an-omelet-without-breaking-eggs attitude, and I saw quite realistically that there was little chance this relationship was going to float very long. Too quickly, she was spotting cracks in my hull. It was time to find the best life boat and abandon ship.

  “Well?!” I asked with a false indignation.

  “All right?” she interrupted. “You’re right, I do love you, but I have something painful to tell you first.”

  “What?”

  “I can’t make love to you until…until you get the pupil-fusion operation. I can’t bear looking into your eyes.”

  “Why? What’s the big deal about the color of my eyes?”

  “I can still see the old monster staring at me through those eyes.”

  “I’ll wear sunglasses.”

  “No, we can have the operation done tomorrow. It only takes twenty minutes. The optometrist assured me there’s no risk.”

  “What is this operation exactly?”

  “Did you ever see David Bowie in The Man Who Fell to Earth? Where they fuse the pupils to his eyes? It’s like that.”

  “I didn’t see it, but I’ll do it.”

  “When it’s done, we’ll consummate our love.”

  That night we slept nervously. She kept coughing, and I kept thinking how this was the last night that my eyes would be their natural hazel.

  By the next day, the laryngitis had completely consumed her. With a cup of Hazelnut coffee and a warmed croissant, she quietly informed me that it was time to get up. She had awakened hours earlier and managed to secure a morning appointment with the noted eye-butcher, Dr. Mort Slocum. I dressed. Amy accompanied me, probably to be certa
in I wouldn’t run off. While in the waiting room of his attractive, ground-floor office on Fifth Avenue, I gained faith from his selection of quality, updated magazines that he was a good doctor.

  We sat in the waiting area across from each other. There was only one other patient, a middle-aged woman who looked like the mother I never had, voluptuous under a business outfit, buried behind a copy of Mademoiselle.

  If safe sex required any kind of patience and conviction, it was nothing compared to what I was about to undergo. Soon, the doctor came out and shook my hand, saying he was delighted to see me. He told me it was just a quick piece of cosmetic surgery, and gave me photos of before-and-after cases who underwent the operation. The “befores” were frowning, the “afters” were smiling. Other than that, I saw no difference. Then he excused himself to go to the bathroom.

  “Don’t forget to scrub your hands,” I called out to him. Rushing over to Amy, I appealed, “Can’t I just get a cheap feel to keep me motivated while I’m in there under the doctor’s knife?”

  “It’s not a knife. It’s a laser beam.”

  “That’s even worse!”

  Looking at me, she tightened her face like a fist, and through gritting teeth she hissed, “Okay, go ahead, feel it! Grope it!”

  I told her that I’d wait till after the operation. The doctor returned and told me to follow him.

  “There’s something I want to say before I go,” I said to Amy.

  “What?”

  “Remember how, before Gorbachev, the U.S. and Russia had enough weapons to destroy the world, and each of the other’s weapons were pointed into the heart of the other, how that created great distrust, but kept the other on each other’s minds to the point of constant, day-to-day anxiety?”

  “Yeah.”

  “It wasn’t like a big country dominating a little country, and it wasn’t like two big, dumb countries at constant peace, was it?”

  “No, the doctor’s waiting for you.”

  “It was two big countries with huge and sophisticated weaponry pointed directly at each other, and both countries were stuck on the same globe.”

  “So?”

  “A generation of drills, school children under the table, backyard bomb shelters, the birth of bottled water…”

  “So?”

  “It was adversarial polarity.”

  “So?”

  “I, too, have developed an adversarial polarity for you.”

  “Huh?”

  “Mr. Aeiou,” Sawbones Slocum called, “I get paid by the hour. Let’s paint those pupils, shall we?”

  “What I’m trying to say is I’m animus possessed!” I explained.

  “Huh?”

  “I love you,” I replied, employing the colloquial term. Then the strangest thing occurred: I distinctly saw the swell of a tear in Amy’s cold, functional eyes.

  “I’m sorry about everything,” she replied and kissed me. Despite the laryngitis, she assured me that she would be there waiting for me when I got out. I followed the doctor into the examination room.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  ‘DON’T DIS YOUR SIS’

  Dr. Mortimer Slocum reassured me that although the operation was new and difficult, it was a quick procedure, and he’d have me out of there in twenty minutes tops.

  “There are no side effects or anything?”

  “Why, are you a lawyer?”

  “No.”

  “Just stay home for a couple days and for god’s sake, don’t take off the cotton patches until tomorrow afternoon.”

  “What patches?”

  “You’ll have to keep your eyes patched until tomorrow.” He then called in a nurse. Together we went into a small room where I was laid back. He looked into my eyes, placed the soft plastic lenses, and inserted what felt like a tiny, red-hot poker into each eyeball. I felt a blinding light.

  As a strobe of light zapped my cones and rods, I remembered Byzantine Emperor Basil II. Upon capturing fifteen thousand Bulgarian troops, he had them blinded, leaving every hundredth man with one eyeball in order to lead the rest of them back to their homeland.

  Why was I doing this? I wondered. Then I remembered. My reagan pup-tented in my pants as I fantasized having sex with Amy while the procedure was done to the other eye. Then he applied bandages.

  He excused himself, departed, and in a moment, Amy was there before me.

  “Did it hurt, my little bat?” she hissed and rattled. The laryngitis had pulverized her voice.

  “Excruciating, my little snake,” I replied, placing the guilt-ridden foundations upon her to support the sexual colossus I was hoping to build. As she led me outside and into a cab, I started slipping my hand down her buttoned blouse.

  “Don’t you want to wait,” she whispered, “until you can see?”

  “I’ll see feelingly.” I borrowed Shakespeare for the occasion. An eternity passed as she paid the cabby and we fumbled up the stairs. I rubbed up against her with every step. As she grappled for her key, I groped at her. By the time I heard the door slam, my reagan was ready for its own performance of Bedtime For Bonzo.

  “Hold it!” she whispered, fighting her sore larynx. “I’m not nearly as experienced at this as you are, Bundles. I’ve only had sex three times, and I don’t want this to be any cheaper than it is.”

  “Too late,” I replied, and rushed her.

  “Hold it!” she said. “If we really have to do it like this, at least let me get a drink.”

  “All right, get me one, too!”

  I heard her go off to the kitchen and in a moment she returned with two glasses and a bottle. We drank our swill quickly. Then I battled her, bathed in her, drank her, nipped and nibbled her, all mere foreplay. Her clothes restrained and disguised her true resources. Before long, she appealed for a second bottle of vodka.

  Over the next hour or so, a lot of alcohol was ingested in small, slippery quantities, and in the bathroom I felt my way through the medicine chest for some lewd quaaludes that I had from long ago. Soon she was as smooth as silk, soft as a pat of butter, and loose as a goose. But in another moment she started sinking into sleep. She couldn’t say a word, just a bunch of gurgling sounds. I finally placed her on the bed and wormed my way up that list of psycho-sexual fantasies like a rectal suppository. A couple times she would moan in pain, and her consciousness would peek out from the shroud of intoxication as she appealed for the traditional positions that were a part of her family values.

  “Nonsense,” I retorted. “Moral sex is banal sex.”

  On and on we went, the hunter and hunted, like a nation buying joy it never earned, spending money it never had. At one point, feeling like a teenager, I gave a sensuous hickey just above her breast. Eventually she passed out, and after a couple more hours of unilateral adversarial pole-arising (a/k/a lovemaking), so did I.

  The next day, late in the afternoon, I awoke to the sound of the shower. I carefully peeled off my eye patches, and my eyes slowly adjusted. Checking my blue eyes in the mirror, I discovered that I finally had something in common with Paul Newman and Frank Sinatra. I fuzzily remembered almost everything from last night. I went to my half of the house and did some pore inspection. Then she came out of the bathroom, entered my part of the house, and looked at me strangely.

  “What’s the matter, my turtle dove?”

  “What did you do to me last night?”

  “Whatever do you mean? We made love.”

  “YOU DISGUSTING PIG!!” she suddenly shrieked. “Oh god, how could I delude myself so miserably? You’re even more disgusting than you were before!”

  “What do you mean, my love?”

  She stormed out, back to her apartment. I trailed after her, but she’d locked the door. When I returned to my apartment, I wondered what the problem was and how much money it would cost to rectify. My devotion to Amy was the most sobering path I had ever walked, and I didn’t want to lose it. Suddenly my phone, which few had the number to, rang.

  “He doesn’t live here o
r want any,” I answered, hoping to fend off tele-sellers and wrong numbers.

  “I got photos of you with a piece of tape on your chin feeling up some thirteen-year-old girl at the Nuyorican Poet’s Cafe.” It was Whitlock.

  “What?”

  “And I just want you to know, sleazebag, that it wasn’t your looks and charms that did it. We paid her to let you.” So that G-man did some work the other night.

  “Hah.” I feigned a one-note chuckle.

  “They’re in the mail to Amy. Let’s see how you talk yourself out of this one.”

  “She knows all about it, asshole. You think you can extort our relationship to death? Forget it! We have an open, honest relationship. A simple relationship that takes into account the dynamic excursions of the male libido.” I hung up the phone. That fucking thirteen-year-old hadn’t looked a day younger than fifteen.

  The phone rang a moment later. Him: “Look, I give up. Just say it. Dictate your terms. What do you want to stay out of my life and leave me and Amy alone forever?”

  “Nothing.” I hung up the phone, he called back. I had no intention of parting with Amy, but I remembered the determination that Whitlock used when he called me after the stand-up comedy episode at YUK!, so I decided to make him an offer that he would refuse.

  “I want cash, cold and hard and green. And a lot of it.”

  “How much?”

  “Three hundred and fifty-seven thousand dollars, and thirty-eight cents.”

  “WHAT!”

  “That’s my price, and I’ll never see her again.”

  “You’re crazy!”

  “That has nothing to do with it.”

  “I ain’t giving you a cent. I can hire some college kid to kill you for a thousand bucks, pal.”

  “Sure you can. But even dead she’ll be mine. Morrison, Elvis, and Jim Croce all reached greater heights of popularity in death than in their lives. She’ll be my number one Elvis impersonator, pal.”

  “I’ll give you half of that.”

  “Fuck that. You’re rich. In fact, get me back into the masters program, reinstate me in the proofreading agency, and come up with four hundred and eighty-two thousand dollars and twenty-eight cents.”

  “Hey, I’m willing to compromise in the middle.”