Affinity
Page 30
Our employer proved to be the rapacious skinner William “Smooth-bill” Brodie. He arrived at our rendezvous at the Municipal Aviary decked out—apropos of a low profile—in soap-locks and chav duds, sporting an infinitely waxable handlebar. He asked if we fancied a smoke and, before Lunch or I could get an aff or neg out our argleblasters, whisked a match from the brim of his bowler hat and planted its accolades on a meerschaum that supplied his initials for the benefit of the short-on-memory. Brodie was a swell of the jackdaw class, ran euchre and whist games at the Bone Flute, original as sin and, like all originals, ruled by a unitary passion. His mania was bird-watching and so the yolk of the scheme was delivered by way of the entendre specified as double, with us lifting our binoculars to the cagey trees where the flock was going all flappertoy and wackadoo in the evolutionary endeavors of mating (alternating prey or passage as dictated by primal inclination and the selection known as natural).
“The world turns on a worm, see? Word from the owl is, couple of sparrows get the worm in their beak, could be the pigeons migrate. No one likes a squab, boys, but if the bluebirds wear out their wings on finches and crakes, could be the cuckoo gets the nest. That’s when the woodpecker widens the hole. Next thing you know, feathers start to fly around and no one’s a dove no more, got me? Every rook and raven on the wire wants a hollow tree, boys. All you got to figure is whether you is a sparrow or whether you is a canary.”
And then, in deference to the science of omen and augury, a speckled exemplar of the origin of all currency—that is, an egg—toppled out its wreath and into my potato-peelers. I commenced a curiosity as to whether I’d seen the last of shabby adversity. Maybe it was time for a couple respectabilized mugs of the larcenous gentility like me and Lunch to slip the roux-and-ragpick that’d been our mutual lot so far and make good on the racket known as higher education by cashing theory and thesis for the maximal citywide pandemonium.
And so, by suchlike delusions of the grandeur class, I found myself trailing dear old Lunch’s Vesuvian rumple-stump through the city’s cloacae. Scraping my shins on sewer pipes of the fit classified as Procrustean while I, with utterances hindered by the flashlight clutched in my jabber-box, provided navigation from our map’s noodly circumscription of tunnels to the earthly navel all funnels and faucets lead to.
Measure by flatulent measure, the unmentionable macadam of the nether regions revealed its nadir. I rolled up my map and took hold of Lunch’s suspenders just in time to be ejected by the pressure qualified as pneumatic out the heating vent and into the energizing nexus of every light fixture, phone cord, and security rig in the whole metropolitan gut-storm. May the coffee in my veins turn to lard if I tell a lie, boys, that place was a glorious blueprint gone gunmetal gray with dials and wires crisscrossing like the precarious dream of a construction worker fast asleep on a bed of girders. And in the center, a massive buzzing squid, a towering generator of the phallic shtick, whose mission was the same as ours: transposition and conversion of powers. My lovely Lunch subdued the security guards by forcible exposure to his reeking sweat bags and the attendant fleet of janitors and electricians underwent a metamorphosis of rubber noses and adhesive whiskers until we were yap to yobbo with the accomplices assigned by Brodie’s outfit. There was Kid Glove John Longacre, Whisky Johnny, Big Jon Jissom, John Lee Leftside, Johnny “Mock Turtle” McManus: the Johns. Not so bungling after all.
Everything was cream and George Washington pie as I and my old confidant began our work. The Johns jiggered the cameras, monitored the red arrows at the center of each gauge for sudden moves, and did their best to decipher the readouts spewing in a neat soufflé from underneath the circuit board. All this time, my pal Lunch was scaling the generator by way of his unfurled girdle, which he had wrapped around either side so he could hoist himself up like a lineman, with me riding shoulder-top to the old sock and sipping a cup of tea I’d prepared from the scalding water that dripped in increments from the open spigots and the bags I customarily carry in my pockets.
Our ears brushed wires. Each hummed with the ghost of two million televisions and radios, even as the pipes issued a symphony of shower taps and storm drains. Placing my teacup on the flat of my porkpie, I flipped over the map Brodie’s boys had slid under my door and consulted the diagram on the other side.
A gingerly snip of a certain cord of linguine-like manifestation and the Johns reported that every stoplight and neon-beer logo on Bottle Street had abruptly fizzled out. A plucked angel-hair and the five-card shysters and showgirls of the Theater District were deprived of their red-lights, the names of screen idols demoted to the obscurity of their patrons inside the darkened marquees; a clipped spaghetti sucked the electricity from three-quarters of the Tenth Ward and two of the Six Points; and a rerouted cable of the fettuccine class eclipsed the Financial District, opening automatic doors and stifling bank alarms. Carlos Calisaya, I thought, I’ve done you right proud and quoted from memory that ineluctable maxim from the Fagin of philosophers: crime is the only moral ideology because only crime sees reality with rods and cones untainted by spotlit subjectivity.
One by one, the windows of the gridlocked waffle above us began to flicker out, the underworld having made good on the proposition defined as analytic and literalized its sobriquet, casting a shadow from under the very rock to which the slavery of wages known as society confined us. Trains, clocks, and the damning jangle of cash registers: the indifferent dough-cranks of routine ground to a halt over our heads—I only wish I could blame that unleavened rumbling for my failure to detect my good Lunch’s first gastric tremors. But the red flags of the coming disaster had been there since my old friend and partner’s unceremonious belly flop into the private sector. They had been the cellophane twisted round the toothpicks plunged through each compulsively devoured BLT, the raised welts on the cornmeal coating shelves upon shelves of pickle jars, the red-pepper flakes covering the moonish mounds of coleslaw one found festering in the brim of my buddy’s fedoras. And, finally, they were the fungoid and plankton toppings previously concealed in an undisclosed cache, now dressing the pizza pie Lunch, unbeknownst to the rest of us, had been engaged in preparing throughout all our iniquitous labor. Only as his sauce-dipped digits reached for the olive oil ensconced in his quivering flesh taco did we realize how his appetite—and, since I cannot keep from blaming myself, my own ignorance of the dawning midnight snacking hour—had betrayed us.
The bottle swirled the air as it plummeted, as if tasting the distance from Lunch’s outstretched thumbs to the control board. The impact sent an ominous crackle through the instruments and put a shard through John Lee Leftside’s right hand—but I kept my crumpet, boys, and fished the flour (an ideal coolant) out of my beloved Lunch’s elephantine breast pocket, passing it overhand to the scrambling Johns even as I fought for equilibrium atop my bucking behemoth, my too-much-changed friend and partner. Lunch’s girdle had become distended in all his swiveling and now snapped like a slab of bacon, leaving me no choice but to abandon ship and dangle with one hand from the piping while drinking the dregs of my tea with the other, captive witness to the airborne ballet now working itself out before me.
Lunch, in lieu of the terra known as firma, plunged one hairy drumstick into the high-voltage spiderweb still strung overhead, the concerted knotty mass of which sagged like a small intestine before my partner made a spectacular midair pirouette and forced a trembling, tofu-pale thigh into the generator’s remaining cilium. From there, he twisted deeper into a progression of coils that shortly had him subdivided into dozens of bulging slivers. Soon my bulgy comrade was cocooned within the entrails of the metropolis’s central switchboard. The Johns jumped up from their dials and charts to relay what the stalks of light shooting crazily on and off through the open-ended plumbing rigs confirmed: Lunch was now physically hardwired to the city mainframe, the progress of its power lines indentured to his every twitch and hiccup.
As for myself, stranded amid the drainpipes like a fish of th
e hooked persuasion, I happened to peer into a gaping faucet and what should I see but the unmistakable louche decor of a house of the repute qualified as ill—Vera’s Primas, to be exact, and there was the proficient Vera Lyons herself, disciplining her latest magdalen over one knee on the scarlet divan.
Habitual voyeurism is a preference second only to cereal. Life was temporarily worth living once again. But this tableau had one gargoyle too many. Creeping in through the wainscoting, as-of-yet unobserved by the panoply of pouting soubrettes, I spied the obstreperous gospel grinder Father Delmonico, no doubt waiting for the blackout to reconcile the ormolu and lapis lazuli with the color of his Cossack before sharpening his Psalter on the belles of the barrelhouse, in flagrant violation of that proverb of the axiomatic class, “All that is easy is not free.”
I’d been used, my friends, hard-boiled by a poacher of the Tartuffe class. As the Vademecum tells us: The shill and flimflam man answers to an honesty of his own, while Hell hath nothing but torment in store for the chouse-at-heart who wears Heaven’s sandwich-sign. Vowing to balance this banquet once and for all, I reached into my shoulder holster for my usual syrup (the cavalier’s condiment) and greased myself up one-handed. And then—would you believe it?—I shimmied up the pipe like a regurgitated short-stack and emerged from the boudoir’s bidet, narrowly evading the exposed derriere of one of Vera’s scrimmers. Caught by his collar just as he was preparing to ravish a Delilah, Father Delmonico—rather than admit he’d been apprehended with his fingers in the jam jar (so to speak)—lapsed into improvised panegyrics before the assembled tradeswomen and moonlighting hot-corn girls, asserting that he was the victim of their uplifted skirts (and not the verse of that particular vice). All I had to do was think of all the sins I wasted in confession. And then I threw the fridge at him, boys.
We dueled baguette to holy wafer, we raised rhubarb and hugger mugger, we smothered our knuckles in grits and corn flakes before erupting into fisticuffs as the girls danced a scandalous bolero. We took turns trying to strangle each other with sausage links while the piano played a tarantella. I admit I had my back to the wall after Delmonico brought a demijohn of vino down over my head and prepared to transubstantiate me with the broken bottle—but just then, the lights went out. Attaboy, Lunch! With the bagnio rallied behind me, I unforked the dimmed chandelier from its chain and brought it down on the Pharisee’s blinded melon. The flicking of the crucial switch was too timely to be accidental—and, in appreciation, I spread a generous helping of cucumber on rye and flushed my old friend’s daily bread down the toilet, where, with any luck, it would find his open gullet. Then, figuring every peck deserves a slosh, I emptied a bottle of absinthe down the sink.
From the fire escape, I took stock of the flash-lit day dawning in the middle of the night and beheld a criminal’s carnival where the ovoid doors of busted bank vaults rolled down the streets like hubcaps. Tenners rode the wind in the manner of kites and the air was scented with gelignite and other elements of the explosive class. A rumpus seized the city, albeit selectively. A bank robbery enacted by Tom Faraday’s goon squad in Whitehall under cover of darkness ran afoul of suddenly glaring lamplight in Bughouse Square, forcing the assembled army of moll-buzzers and chinchilla coats to stow their swag in fire hydrants before the leatherheads could round them up. Across town, the Boothouse Boys hit the dirt known as pay, looting a jewelry store stripped of sirens only to have the lights come up just as they ran afoul of “Humpty” Van Dyke and his infamous Sewer Rat gang crossing over from Barrow Town, igniting an impromptu gang fight. Even Bill “Smoothbill” Brodie’s gang of Sparrows got their feathers plucked after their escape route swerved into an abrupt limelight, signaling them out against the otherwise enshadowed thoroughfare.
The city’s population of fluorescents danced like a disco floor. It was not mere chance that dictated each aurora, but the unmistakable stamp of the largest life I knew. In that pandemic light show I glimpsed the spirit of my friend. Yes, Lunch—now delivered from his former corpulence and incarnated in the very flow of things—was his old self again, a bloated Bogart with a direct feed into the electric unconscious, marvelously bringing to pass the formerly shanghaied promise of his school days by way of the skelter known as helter.
Faced with a wayward throng of cracks and screeves, orphans and urchins, pimps and buttoners, all outlaws after my own heart crowding the curbstone—well, what could I do, boys, but join in? I borrowed from Vera accoutrements of the petticoat class and, with those colored skirts as my royal standards, I waved the motley mobsmen, still clutching their outsized suitcases stuffed with bills, through the blitz. I knew every raisin in my partner’s mental muffin and thus, leaping from ledge to ledge, sliding down drainage pipes and clinging to caryatids, it was easy as quiche to keep two steps ahead of the next flare-up.
Oh, we were a team again. His was the griddle and mine the batter as we collaborated on a double-deck caper of the revolution class that reversed the fortunes of the marginalized, put government tender in the greasy palms of the misfit, the physically disfigured and socially suicided, and unhooked even so fundamental a hierarchy as day and night. They were chanting my name down in the vacant lot, toasting the jentacular saint of Mayhem with pillaged stereos and torches.
But I was just a man, boys, and so, having slid down the railings, carried on their shoulders to the center of the lot, I cleared my snot-chute and prepared to address the masses. I was going to begin (as a hush settled across the asphalt) by quoting at length from Calisaya’s Vademecum—If fear and finance are the clothes with which society hides its nudity, then night is a striptease—and go on to say that no connection is soft, all connection is deep. Radioactive. Because we are all playing the part of parsley on the earthly plate, each of us an outlet for the airways. Blips lost in a system from which no book or brickbat can permanently unplug us. But dear old Lunch was the real hero, even here, in a city of villains.
But before I could commence my speechifying, a sequence of flashlights sputtered to the position qualified as operational, revealing that my audience had fled. In their place was a wall of bobbies, gendarmes, and flatfeet, and all aiming their heaters in the direction of my icebox. Things followed in the course properly allotted as due, with the Black Maria coming to cart me off to the hoosegow. When it opened its doors, I beheld the woeful personages of the Johns, chain-linked like a string of daisies—but I say it could’ve been worse, boys.
Lunch did his best to keep me cheery, twinkling inside the neon and halogen, glimmering under the manholes in anticipation of the inevitable overload and causing the passing television sets to show the same channel so I could follow the story. When they asked for my plea and the public defender wondered aloud who was to blame, I couldn’t find a grain of fault with my impalpable friend partner. No, Your Honor, it wasn’t society or the company I kept, it wasn’t me childhood nor a lack of opportunity, it was—(well, what you think, boys? I blamed my diet).
And as for Lunch, my coconspirator and all-purpose corn flake, my soul’s laxative, cheese of my cottage, he is part of all of us. He is the inlet and the outlet, the AC/DC, the electric toothbrush. He is the city’s umbilical and extension cord, and all our power stations are answerable to him. I watch him flicker here and there, I see sparks now and then, I know it is the last of my friend and partner, that he is the city’s digestion. And, come to that, spare a thought for me, as I choke down the prison’s rank toaster fodder, as I serve out my sentence for daring to dream that we could all sup from the same pail. Seeing me in this state, you may well ask: Do I feel that my friend sold out, now that he is not only part of the system but its very center? No, boys, I will say this much about my old friend Lunch. He never sold out to get where he is. He stole it.
Passages
Isabella Hammad
Ahmad Faris Al-Shidyaq translates the Orientalist Lamartine as follows:
The Arabs smoked tobacco from their long pipes in silence, watching the smoke rising like gracef
ul blue columns until it dispersed into the air in a way beguiling to the observer, the air at the time being transparent, gentle.
I was in the no-smoking room of a café near Clock Square. The room was like a little conservatory—sloping ceiling, glass doors overlooking a vegetable garden. Weeks without rain, the imams were praying the salaat al-istiqa’ for the farmers. I noticed two men sitting on the far couch. One was gray and haggard (just released from prison, I would shortly be informed; “Come to the protest this weekend, give me your number?” Remember: don’t get on their records, do not be seen at any marches, stay inside on Fridays). The other had a scarred face, he was thin, and his eyes were pale blue.
“Are you international?” he asked. And then, “Are you a student?”
“No,” I said. “I’m just reading Ilan Pappé,” and I showed him the spine of the book, with a Library of Birzeit sticker near the bottom.
“Oh yeah, such a great guy,” said a blonde, turning and leaning over the back of her chair. American or Canadian, a tattoo on her arm—May I live Simply so that Others may Simply Live—ah, I thought; they all know each other, I’m the only stranger in the room, that’s why.
And Ahmad Faris al-Shidyaq discusses Chateaubriand as follows:
[Chateaubriand] writes that he saw an American Indian woman with a thin cow and said to her, bewailing its state, “Why is this cow so thin?” and the woman answered to him, “She eats little,” and again he provides these words in English, to wit, She eats very little. In yet another place he writes that he observed fragments of clouds, some in the shape of animals and others in that of a mountain or a tree or similar things.