All the Beautiful People We Once Knew

by Edward Carlson

  I finished the second pilsner and arrived at the threshold of two-beer equilibrium and watched Kath one block north on Broadway liberate her hair from a black-and-white keffiyeh while sipping from a Starbucks cup rimmed with waxy red lipstick. Bouncing curls, bumble and bumble, she rounded the bar and approached the table with her confident, jaunty stride. She gave a little wave to the side, rolled her eyes, annoyed with something, the city perhaps. She looked hungry for fame and fashionably pro-Palestinian. I stood, kissed her cheeks, probed her mood with my invisible instruments as I tucked her against the table. She ordered a glass of chardonnay and she studied the menu.

  “It’s all beef,” she said.

  “It’s Shoemacher’s.”

  “So. How is your day?” she asked.

  “Typical.”

  “Oh boo, that’s no good, Stephen. I don’t want to hear about typical. Do you want to hear about mine so far?”

  I told her I did.

  “I spent the morning editing these up-close portraits I shot of the grungy kids living in the protest camp. They’re so real and so amazing.”

  She sipped her wine and peered inside the glass and fingernail-extracted a bit piece of cork, stared at it cross-eyed, and flicked it away.

  “OK,” she said. “And then there’s Soncha’s upcoming presentation where I’m going to display some of the work. I’m so busy you wouldn’t think I’d be so broke all the time.”

  This was a lie. But trust funds set up by Main Line orthopedic surgeon fathers aren’t an open topic of discussion when you’re a struggling artist. Nor are the alimony payments you are entitled to receive from your well-off soon-to-be ex-husband, whenever you decide to make the raw decisions regarding distribution of property and finances. They were still in the boiling/denial stage, too wrapped up in their own anger to do anything other than fuck other people. But the time for judicial intervention would come. And then there would be that to not talk about as well. But until then you discussed the symbiosis between your art and your poverty.

  “So you’re coming to Philly with me next weekend, right?” she said, texting a reply to someone. She was a skilled phone user, which was obvious by the way she held it. “Remember, you promised. And I already told Benjamin we’re going to his fortieth birthday party and he’s really excited to see you.”

  “I doubt that.”

  “Don’t be negative.”

  I asked where we would stay.

  “He bought this ginormous Victorian in the ghetto. Said all the kids there smoke wet and it makes them fucking cray-cray.”

  “Wet?” I asked.

  “Angel dust.”

  “Oh,” I replied.

  “He’s been my rock.”

  “Who, Anhel Dust?”

  “What?”

  “Me llamo Dust,” I said, attempting to soothe the raw expectations between us with some corny levity. “Senor Anhel Dust.”

  “Don’t be an asshole,” she said.

  I sipped my beer and hid my displeasure. She had no right to scold me.

  “How’re your parents?” I asked.

  “My family still doesn’t understand the breakup with Robert. My dad doesn’t. Benjamin doesn’t either. My mom does but that’s only because I tell her things I don’t tell my dad and certainly don’t tell Benjamin. Even though they were so different my dad and Benjamin loved Robert. But it’s my life, not theirs.”

  This was the first time I detected a microscopic crack in the confidence of her post-Fleeger existence.

  “How’s that working out?” I asked.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Your life.”

  “What kind of question is that? You know how my life is working out. It’s fucking awesome. I’m doing what I want to do and being with who I want to be with. After suffering Robert for so long what else is there to do but be happy?”

  She looked at the tablecloth. We ordered another round of drinks and I ordered the filet mignon and Kath ordered the wild salmon. I laid my open hand across the table for her to hold. She rubbed the soft meat of my palm twice with her index finger before her hand retreated to her lap.

  Lunch began to feel forced. I felt pinned behind the table, behind the salt and pepper shakers, the sugar caddy. Kath’s safari boot touched my wingtip and hurried to her side of the leg stand. It was an accident and not a purposeful erotic act and this augmented the distance between our expectations. Together we drifted, silent, in our respective currents, conscious of submerged hazards, of the things we couldn’t talk about. I needed something to happen. Something for us to discuss other than ourselves.

  Near our table an affair bloomed at the bar, heavy with tannins and scent. The woman’s blonde hair slicked like she just swam laps in a pool, rubbing her man’s hand, both sides, against her curves. I hadn’t felt cotton like that for a long time. She laughed and threw back her head and exposed her veiny neck to his curled lips and bonded teeth. The bartender winked at them while refilling their glasses.

  “Cherry and leather,” the man said, as he aerated the wine with a swirling wrist.

  “Chocolate and tobacco,” she replied.

  Kath watched them too and they cheersed, rubbing each other inside the shadows beneath the bar.

  “That’s quite an engagement ring,” I said.

  “Maybe. But it’s not from him.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Because no woman touches her husband like that in public.”

  The waiter placed the entrées on the table and removed the saucer lids to reveal our selections of protein. Kath flaked her salmon with a fork and I touched my meat with the steak knife. I sliced off a chunk and blood pooled inside a lagoon of au gratin potatoes.

  Outside, to the south, the protesters resumed their constant marching. A centipede working its way around and over and through the squares and blocks of Lower Manhattan. The cacophony of their plastic bucket drums echoed through the canyons of granite and brick. The sound now omnipresent and somehow patriotic and defiant as the protestors marched past the restaurant windows, petit nosegays of carnations and baby’s breath, swinging arms, pewter and glass, plastic whistles, porcelain and ice, that upside-down American flag still hanging from a pole once used to clean swimming pools. A phalanx of police mopeds corralled the protesters inside the southbound Metro bus lane as a tall black man donning a sparkled motorcycle helmet riled the crowd with his banged-up bullhorn. It was the man with whom I smoked a cigarette in the rain, surrounded by white Kokopellis blowing their ocarinas of no justice, no peace. He turned his head and there was the vexatious keloid. Kath pointed with her knife.

  “That’s Jupiter,” she said, spearing my steak with her fork.

  I refrained from telling her that I had already met him.

  “That’s a cool name,” I replied

  “It’s a slave name. He gave it to himself.”

  “Think I can call myself Mars?”

  She looked at her plate.

  “Come on. You don’t think I’m worthy of a slave name too? After all, I work for Robert.”

  “Yes, but he’s a prophet.”

  “Who is? Robert?”

  “No, idiot. Jupiter is.”

  This stung.

  “And I’m not?”

  “Stephen, you are many things but you are not a prophet.”

  We were five thousand miles from the initial promise of lunch. The maintenance of a constant topic of conversation collapsed. Editing and then reediting myself before I spoke became exhausting. Kath, I could tell, didn’t want to be here either. We had both been to enough restaurants and this one wasn’t very good. I wanted to walk out the door.

  “I think it’s farmed,” she said, forking the salmon.

  She extracted a slice of tomato from the salad and slipped it past her now nude lips.

  “How’s the salad?” I asked.

  “Good.”

  Like a herd of foraging herbivores looking up one after another from their plates, ears twitchin
g on account of the presence of a stalking predator, we all sensed the change as the straggling remains of the protestors’ peaceful march trotted past the windows, followed in the shadows and on the sidelines by a crew of moody anarchists passing things to one another from fist to fist as they crossed Broadway and approached the steakhouse’s big windows that now felt exposed. The anarchists amassed outside the restaurant on the sidewalk and then stood calm, watching us watching them.

  “Have a bite of my French dip,” cackled a tall, thin woman wearing middle-aged, conservative Manhattan finery, waving her soggy sandwich at the crusty anarchists, her wrist adorned with silver and amber-tipped bangles.

  Their response was immediate. A protestor chucked a hard pellet against the window, where it burst into a splotch of purple dye. The gang screeched in delight, headbanging and cheering in a crusty form of pidgin English, as the instigating diner uncoiled herself from behind her table, flicking ashes from a one-hundred light cigarette into a crystal ashtray that she held in her long, thin hand.

  “Eat,” she commanded the rest of us. “Don’t give these beasts the satisfaction of spoiling your meal.”

  The protestors yelled at her: full throated, mouths opened, black cavities, lips pierced, gums tattooed blue. Now chucking ever more dye against the glass and sending the white Iked Latino waiters in a tizzy as the bartender moved through the crowd, agreeing with the diners, “Yes, where are the cops,” as she placated the more senior and wealthy among them with the contents of the bottles chilled in their individual wine buckets.

  Kath extracted her digital camera from her bag and pushed back from the table and began her shoot, tossing her hair and her keffiyeh over her shoulder as she shot the bartender, the French dipper, the lovers. Working the room, she switched in and out lenses and quickened to the soiled windows and threw her legs over a booth, camera now mounted at the ends of her outstretched arms.

  “Find something more interesting to do with that thing, young lady,” said the bartender.

  “What could be more interesting than this?” Kath smiled.

  “All you’re accomplishing is riling them up more,” the tall, thin woman chastised Kath.

  “Really? Pretty sure you already did that on your own.”

  Outside on the sidewalk, a young woman, still half a girl, head shaved, frayed mustard shorts, tank top of slapjack paps, stepped through the crowd of boys, a protest unto herself against popular notions of femininity. Her eyes widened as her cohort whispered in her ear. She grinned, and with quick work dropped her pants and dingy sailor-striped panties and pressed her pimpled butt cheeks against the window, opening up herself for Kath’s camera as the diners collapsed, revolted, taken down by the rifle of her Aegean stables. Kath gripped the table to remain in place as two waiters tugged her boots and the diners counter-rioted against the anarchists, shaking clubbed fists, Maytag blue cheese, Russian dressing, jus de boeuf, while outside the girl danced a happy impish jig, warmly ensconced within her coterie of misfit lepperchauns, all of them now yelling fuck, fuck you, fuck, what the fuck as they crumbled beneath the swinging, swatting billy clubs of New York’s finest. Kath still shooting but with one hand while sliding backward atop a tablecloth pulled by two Guatemalan busboys at the bartender’s command, as outside the cops grappled the mass of anarchists into plastic straps, hog-tied and deposited them on the sidewalk in a pile. All of it, them, the commotion, over but a few minutes after it began.

  The diners stood and applauded their appreciation and the cops ignored them at first but then nodded in recognition of the recognition. Off to the side of the pile and looking over her shoulder, the crusty girl gasped on a torrent of thick red blood discharged from her nose and crawled from beneath the hog-tied pile and sprinted, straight backed and arms pumping and fast and chubby toward the river. The cops let her run for it, some of them laughing at her lack of natural athletic capability. I rested my finger against my temple and felt a blood vessel swell and pump. The bartender shoved Kath out the door and I grabbed her bag and flagged a waiter to pay as Kath stood outside laughing and taking pictures of the restaurant staff. The cops. The bloodstains on the sidewalk.

  I hurried after her. She was flush. Technicolor. A swirl of green eyes and red-black hair but electric. Once again one of those magic boardwalk lollipops. The neon sign for the magic lollipop store. With her thumbs, she shuffled through a digital zoopraxiscope of the images she captured. Some periscope of hers now up, scanning south and east, now north and west, searching for her proper direction. Her tongue clicked in the back of her mouth.

  “I think there’s a fish bone in there,” she said, pointing in her mouth.

  She tilted back her head and I placed my hands on her face. Gentle and firm. I peered inside. Her pink mouth filaturing gossamers of saliva. The caves between her gums and teeth clear of plaque, tartar, food and her uvula dangled swollen and pink and wet. I spotted no bone. I wished I did. If I did I would have extracted that fishbone without buzzing her alarm.

  With a life all its own, the silken tendrils of her thick hair wrapped around my fingers and pulled me against her as she stuffed her hands into the back pockets beneath my coat. Her jeans against my pants. I coursed with her current, her warm tongue against the back of my lips. We launched. I held back. Something wasn’t free. I stiffened and she reversed. A red hair extended from my lower lip across our mutual canyon and her breath ceased for a minute particle of a second. Smaller than the particles revealed after physicists smash seconds into seconds within the confines of a deep underground particle collider. She squeezed my hand. I broke the link.

  “Come on, let’s go,” she said.

  “Where?” I asked.

  “To the protest camp.”

  “Why?”

  “I want more. Come with me, I need you.”

  She extracted from her bag an orange hard pack of American Spirits. Cracked open the fresh box and reversed her lucky smoke. She inserted one in my mouth and one in hers and lit our matching cigarettes. Smoke blew from her mouth in the same direction the wind blew her hair. She squeezed my hand.

  “You OK with that?” she asked.

  I told her yes. Very much. Let’s go.

  19

  MISCHIEVOUS VANDALS HAD TWEAKED the don’t walk street crossing lights with black electrical tape, turning the halting red hands into devil horns and middle fingers. Yellow boxes bolted to the traffic poles bending in the strong, low winds of almost early spring. Bobbing beneath the weight of CCTV cameras and police radio antennae. Here, where the city pressed against the converging rivers and the rivers pressed back, the city felt like an island. The brackish water of New York Harbor smashed against the staunch rectangle hull of a scow laden with gravel, a white tug made up to its starboard bow, flying an American flag from her upper wheelhouse.

  “Stephen, let go,” Kath said, and I released her hand.

  The camp appeared before us. Tented and intricate and governed by posted rules about respect and property and privacy, but also broken down, by the wind and entropy and perhaps a looming apathy borne of the nascent realization that a proper revolution depended on a convergence of conditions that here, in this time, didn’t exist. At least not yet. After months of protest, the dominant paradigm had proven more fixed to this earth than the protestors presumed, and some had begun to dismantle their tents and pack their things, in search of somewhere else to belong.

  Strings of lights glittered in the almost-warm sun. Clothes swung from clotheslines. Boys wrestled and kicked one another while fist-smoking cigarettes, as a girl hid from them, changing beneath the shadows of the elevated highway scorched black with the pitch-black runic: IXXI IXXI IXXI IXXI. She removed a torn GWAR T-shirt, revealing a bare back tattooed with an outline of the state of Montana. Back to where you come from, I thought. Anarchy flags still fluttered atop the roofs of the hurricane-flooded maritime bars and sugar shacks, hoisted atop scavenged plumbing and sticks and torn by the incessant wind. But it felt like the final inn
ings. Subjected to its own energy, the protest was burning out.

  Donning a soiled white kufi, Jupiter reclined on a vinyl restaurant booth, his encampment nestled behind a former taco stand. In his small, designated space there was a library of books and bottles of wine stacked in milk crates, and a simple red telescope mounted on a flimsy tripod pointed at the sky. He bit into an apple, the chewing of which revealed the depths and the brutality of the scarring to his face, as if he had been chomped by the pinchers of a giant ant that poisoned its prey to prevent the skin from properly healing. Death via sepsis that he had barely managed to survive. He was holding court with a gang of fidgety anarchy boys.

  “Of course the cops are going to beat you. Why wouldn’t they?” he asked. “Your responsibility to yourself is to accept the consequences of your decisions and then move on. But wiser from experience. We were raised to be exceptional. Taught the importance of being exceptional. But there’s not enough around for everyone to be exceptional. The word by its very definition denotes that those who are exceptional are different. So to be exceptional you will have to take it.”

  He removed an old dictionary from a milk crate and held it with his vitiligo-bleached hands.

  “You know how many niggers out here are happy to take a doorman job for fifteen dollars per hour? You’re fucking expendable, man. But it’s your responsibility to fight against that.” Jupiter spotted Kath approaching his encampment and dismissed the class, to be resumed tomorrow.

  “Your hair looks redder,” he told her, matter-of-fact, sitting up with straight forearms. He looked almost pained, as if he too had taken a billy club to the back and shoulders. “Redder or more red? Which is it, dear?”

  “Redder is fine,” she said and kissed his non-scarred cheek. “Stephen likes it this way.”

  She introduced us and Jupiter continued staring at Kath despite the fact he and I were now shaking hands. His pink, melaninless hand was strong and dry. The word Koolstar tattooed on his neck was something I hadn’t noticed before. Affixed there long before whatever happened that led him here.