The Soho Press Book of '80s Short Fiction

by Dale Peck

  “Okay, I feel a little like somebody telling some guy in a coma I still care, but here goes. I don’t really know you, but I feel attached to you, even though you’re not exactly an individual. You’re more a type, which makes me some kind of aesthete, I guess, and you the real work of art, not that I buy all your bullshit.

  “We had sex. I let you fuck me. That was the hot part, but though it’s hard to admit, all the hugging and shit is what I really liked. To be held tight by a person who’s had me . . . well it’s one thing to shake hands and chat awkwardly about art, and something else to be fucked then respected.

  “I used to think that if lovers got wind of my shit I’d be ‘too realistic,’ in their words. I kept rolling onto my back, clenching my ass when sucked off so the stink couldn’t get out. I had this weird idea that there was something wrong under my looks, not just gory stuff.

  “Then some guy ate out my ass and asked for a second date. Since that night I’ve tried to shrug off each fear in turn. Now I’m dead. It figures no one’s around to appreciate or make bad jokes about my ‘passing on,’ as you’d probably call it.

  “I wanted love. Sure, I was attracted to sex-crazed types, their faces so overcome by the need for me it was as though leers were sculpted right into their skulls and their skin was just draped over bone like a piece of cloth. But I was a stupid jerk.

  “This part is meant for my father’s ears. I’ve felt more than you thought or I’m able to spit out. My moods were really mysterious, even to me, which makes them not worth the time to you, no matter how long you stared in my ‘great eyes’ last night.”

  George felt faint and teetered slightly. He wished he had a banana, something with sugar to pep him up, but he imagined he couldn’t eat, that food would perch in his waist like a caged canary, or drop with a thump to the carpet.

  Dan filled the postcard and lay back. George could just make it out. “Dear Fran,” it began. He didn’t notice his name in the scribbles. It was a simple tale: Empire State Building, good view, dinner at Lüchow’s, Love, Dan. P.S. I wish [unintelligible] tonight.

  Was George beginning to fade away? He wasn’t sure. So much depended on the right light. “Umm, this may be it,” he mumbled. He hadn’t meant to lower his voice. “Shit,” and he started to tremble. “I like you. What can I say? Or not you, but you’re all I have.

  “I blew it.” He blended into the afternoon. Outside the window a car honked. Inside the room a man’s watch ticked. Dan stood and scratched his ass. He put the card in his shirt pocket. He had a faraway look in his eyes as he lit his cigarette.

  From After Delores

  by Sarah Schulman

  1988

  I was on my second one, staring at the still blinking leftover Christmas lights when a female voice came to me from the other side of the bar. It started as a tickle in my ear and then, for a second, I thought someone had the sense to record a quiet rap song, but when she got so close I could see her reflection in my ice, I realized that a real person was talking to me. A blonde.

  “Hey,” she said, pulling up a barstool. “You want to buy a phone machine for ten dollars?”

  We drank for a while until the girl asked if I wanted to see the machine. I was tired and needed to talk so I just decided to tell her the truth.

  “I can’t. I have to give Priscilla Presley back her gun.”

  “Do you have to do it right now?”

  “I guess it can wait. I’ll show it to you if you want to see it, but we have to go to the bathroom.”

  “No thanks, I’ve seen guns before. You look kinda sad.”

  “I am sad.”

  Somebody played Patsy Cline on the jukebox and that made me even sadder, but in a pleasurable melancholy way, not a painful Delores-type way.

  “Look,” she said in adolescent earnest as I watched her recite from memory. “You have the possibility to make your life beautiful, but possibility is not forever and it’s not immediate. Know what I mean?”

  “Who told you that?”

  “Charlotte. That’s my girlfriend. So, you want to see the machine or not?”

  I paid the check, rang Pris’s buzzer one more time but still no answer.

  “She’s probably live at Caesar’s Palace,” I muttered.

  “What?”

  “Never mind. Let’s go see the machine.”

  First, though, the girl had to call her friend who was getting an abortion the next day to see if she needed her to go along or not. It was the last cold night in March and the wind was blowing dark and ugly. She used the pay phone on the corner as I huddled in the doorway with a cigarette and tried to push away the tiredness.

  “You got your period!” she shrieked. “That’s great!”

  The girl seemed only five or six years younger than me but she was from a whole different generation. She wore those black tights and black felt mini-skirt and oversized shirt that everybody wore. Her hair was cut short on one side and long on the other with blonde added to the tips. My head was still in the sixties. The only thing that happened in the last two decades that made any sense to me at all was Patti Smith. When Patti Smith came along even I got hip, but then she went away.

  “How did she schedule an abortion without a pregnancy test?” I asked, following her little leather cap and one dangling earring.

  “I don’t know but she got her period. Isn’t that great?”

  She started walking east and then more east until it was too east. There I go again, I thought, being old-fashioned. The idea that Avenue D is off-limits was a thing of the past. Now white people can go anywhere.

  “Where are we going?”

  “Charlotte’s place. That’s my lover. I have the key.”

  “How did you know it was okay to come out to me so quickly?” I asked.

  “Easy. Charlotte taught me the trick. She says that if you’re talking to a woman and she looks you in the eye and she really sees you and listens to what you have to say, then you know she’s gay. It works every time.”

  “Charlotte sounds like a pretty unusual person,” I said.

  “Yeah,” the girl answered, not noticing the cold men in thin jackets staring silently as we passed by. “Only she’s married . . . to a woman, you know, named Beatriz. I stay at her place sometimes when they’ve got gigs out of town. Charlotte’s an actress. I’m gonna be one too. Beatriz is a director. They’re different.”

  Our conversation was the only sound on the street and her part of it was much too loud.

  “It’s funny having Charlotte’s key. It’s like an older person.”

  “How old is she?”

  “Thirty-eight. My father’s forty. Why do older people always have keys?”

  “Because older people have apartments. They’re not moving around staying different places. They know where they live.”

  “Let’s get some beer,” she said heading for the yellow light of a bodega presiding over the steely emptiness of Avenue C. I watched the Spanish men watching her. She was so young. She had no wrinkles on her face and wore a childish blue eyeliner passing for sophistication.

  “Let’s get a quart bottle of Bud and a small bottle of Guinness and mix it. It’s not too bad.”

  I handed her two dollars over the stacks of stale Puerto Rican sweets and shivered. Even the apartment was cold.

  “We make love here in the afternoons when Beatriz is away. Charlotte says she likes the smell of young flesh. She says it smells like white chocolate. Old flesh smells like the soap you use in the morning until it’s really old and then it starts to rot. My grandmother used to smell that way but I loved her so it smelled good. One time Charlotte and I came up here and an old man passed us on the stairs. ‘I hate that smell,’ Charlotte said. ‘It’s weak and worse than garbage.’ But I loved it because it reminded me of my grandmother. When you love someone they always smell good. Want to h
ear a record?”

  She was smoking Camels without filters and playing albums by groups I had never heard of.

  “Listen to this version of ‘Fever.’ It’s Euro-trash, you know, French New Wave? Instead of the word fever she says tumor. ‘Tumor all through the night.’”

  We sat and listened. My Punkette sprawled out on the floor. Me, freezing in the only chair.

  “That was great,” she said, pouring more beer. “Let’s hear it again.”

  Her hands were short and white with badly painted black nails.

  “I’m so in love with Charlotte,” she said.

  “How do you know?” I asked.

  “Well, she’s strong and she’s a good lover. You think I’m young but I know the difference. Plus she has good information about life. Like, you know what she told me? She told me to tell all my secrets but one. That way you invest in the world and save a little something for yourself.”

  She grabbed on to one of the longer strands of her hair and started splitting the split ends.

  “I know that she and Beatriz love each other and I’m trying hard to see it from Beatriz’s point of view so that someday we can all be friends. But for now I don’t mind seeing her afternoons, I guess. I have to work mostly nights anyway. Just a couple of lunches. I go-go dance in New Jersey. Told you that, right? On New Year’s Eve I was so coked up after work and wanted to spend the night with her so badly that I wandered into the Cubby Hole at four-thirty in the morning and they still made me pay.”

  She had drunk all the beer by that time and smoked all her cigarettes. I gave her some of mine.

  “Thanks. There was this yuppie girl there talking to me and I was so desperate I would have gone home with her but she didn’t ask. Charlotte encouraged me to take that job, dancing. It’s not too bad. Want to see my costume?”

  She went into the next room to change and I started smoking. It was so cold, I had on a sweater and two blankets and was still chattering.

  “Okay,” she shouted from behind the door. “Now, sing some tacky disco song.”

  “Bad girl,” I sang. “Talking ’bout a bad, bad girl.”

  Then she came go-going in in her little red sparkle G-string and black high heels. Her breasts were so small that she could have been a little girl showing off her first bikini. She bit her lip, trying to look sexy but she just looked young. I segued into the next song.

  “Ring my bell-ll-ll, ring my bell. My bell. Ding a ling a ling.”

  “Sometimes they hold up twenties,” she said, still dancing. “But when I boogie over to take them they give me singles instead. ‘Sorry honey.’”

  Then I saw her eyes. They were smart. They were too smart for me.

  “Charlotte says there’s a palm at the end of the mind and it’s on fire. What does that mean?”

  And I thought this kid can get anything she wants, anything.

  She saw me staring at her eyes and she got scared all of a sudden, like she was caught reaching into her daddy’s wallet.

  “I’ve never done that for someone I respected before.”

  Those breasts, I thought. How could anyone make love to those breasts? There’s nothing there. Nothing at all.

  “Do you think Charlotte will leave her? What do you think?”

  “You really believe in love, don’t you?” I said.

  She looked up at me from her spot on the floor, totally open.

  “I don’t know what you want from me,” I said. “I’m the last person in New York City you should be asking about relationships.”

  “Do you think she’ll leave her?”

  Then I realized she saw something special in me. She trusted me. And I was transformed suddenly from a soup-stained waitress to an old professor. We were sitting, not in a Lower Eastside firetrap but before a blazing hearth in a wood-lined brownstone. Charlotte was my colleague and Punkette, her hysterical mistake.

  “Look, sometimes you have to cheat on your wife and sometimes you have to go back to her.”

  I looked into her eyes again. They were really listening.

  “Maybe you’ll get what you want,” I said. “But you’ll have to be patient.”

  And suddenly I wanted her so badly. I wanted to throw off the blankets and be vulnerable again, to roll on the rug with a little Punkette in a red G-string and I wanted to show her a really good time. Nostalgia.

  Work

  by Denis Johnson

  I’d been staying at the Holiday Inn with my girlfriend, honestly the most beautiful woman I’d ever known, for three days under a phony name, shooting heroin. We made love in the bed, ate steaks at the restaurant, shot up in the john, puked, cried, accused one another, begged of one another, forgave, promised, and carried one another to heaven.

  But there was a fight. I stood outside the motel hitchhiking, dressed up in a hurry, shirtless under my jacket, with the wind crying through my earring. A bus came. I climbed aboard and sat on the plastic seat while the things of our city turned in the windows like the images in a slot machine.

  Once, as we stood arguing at a streetcorner, I punched her in the stomach. She doubled over and broke down crying. A car full of young college men stopped beside us.

  “She’s feeling sick,” I told them.

  “Bullshit,” one of them said. “You elbowed her right in the gut.”

  “He did, he did, he did,” she said, weeping.

  I don’t remember what I said to them. I remember loneliness crushing first my lungs, then my heart, then my balls. They put her in the car with them and drove away.

  But she came back.

  This morning, after the fight, after sitting on the bus for several blocks with a thoughtless, red mind, I jumped down and walked into the Vine.

  The Vine was still and cold. Wayne was the only customer. His hands were shaking. He couldn’t lift his glass.

  I put my left hand on Wayne’s shoulder, and with my right, opiated and steady, I brought his shot of bourbon to his lips.

  “I was just going to go over here in the corner and nod out,” I informed him.

  “I decided,” he said, “in my mind, to make some money.”

  “So what?” I said.

  “Come with me,” he begged.

  “You mean you need a ride.”

  “I have the tools,” he said. “All we need is that sorry-ass car of yours to get around in.”

  We found my sixty-dollar Chevrolet, the finest and best thing I ever bought, considering the price, in the streets near my apartment. I liked that car. It was the kind of thing you could bang into a phone pole with and nothing would happen at all.

  Wayne cradled his burlap sack of tools in his lap as we drove out of town to where the fields bunched up into hills and then dipped down toward a cool river mothered by benevolent clouds.

  All the houses on the riverbank—a dozen or so—were abandoned. The same company, you could tell, had built them all, and then painted them four different colors. The windows in the lower stories were empty of glass. We passed alongside them, and I saw that the ground floors of these buildings were covered with silt. Sometime back a flood had run over the banks, cancelling everything. But now the river was flat and slow. Willows stroked the waters with their hair.

  “Are we doing a burglary?” I asked Wayne.

  “You can’t burgulate a forgotten, empty house,” he said, horrified at my stupidity.

  I didn’t say anything.

  “This is a salvage job,” he said. “Pull up to that one, right about there.”

  The house we parked in front of just had a terrible feeling about it. I knocked.

  “Don’t do that,” Wayne said. “It’s stupid.”

  Inside, our feet kicked up the silt the river had left there. The watermark wandered the walls of the downstairs about three feet above the floor. Straight, stiff grass l
ay all over the place in bunches, as if someone had stretched them there to dry.

  Wayne used a pry bar, and I had a shiny hammer with a blue rubber grip. We put the pry points in the seams of the wall and started tearing away the Sheetrock. It came loose with a noise like old men coughing. Whenever we exposed some of the wiring in its white plastic jacket, we ripped it free of its connections, pulled it out, and bunched it up. That’s what we were after. We intended to sell the copper wire for scrap.

  By the time we were on the second floor, I could see we were going to make some money. But I was getting tired. I dropped the hammer and went to the bathroom. I was sweaty and thirsty. But of course the water didn’t work.

  I went back to Wayne, standing in one of two small empty bedrooms, and started dancing around and pounding the walls, breaking through the Sheetrock and making a giant racket, until the hammer got stuck. Wayne ignored this misbehavior.

  I was catching my breath. I asked him, “Who owned these houses, do you think?”

  He stopped doing anything. “This is my house.”

  “It is?”

  “It was.”

  He gave the wire a long, smooth yank, a gesture full of the serenity of hatred, popping its staples and freeing it into the room.

  We balled up big gobs of wire in the center of each room, working for over an hour. I boosted Wayne through the trapdoor into the attic, and he pulled me up after him, both of us sweating and our pores leaking the poisons of drink, which smelled like old citrus peelings, and we made a mound of white-jacketed wire in the top of his former home, pulling it up out of the floor.

  I felt weak. I had to vomit in the corner—just a thimbleful of grey bile. “All this work,” I complained, “is fucking with my high. Can’t you figure out some easier way of making a dollar?”

  Wayne went to the window. He rapped it several times with his pry bar, each time harder, until it was loudly destroyed. We threw the stuff out there onto the mud-flattened meadow that came right up below us from the river.

  It was quiet in this strange neighborhood along the bank except for the steady breeze in the young leaves. But now we heard a boat coming upstream. The sound curlicued through the riverside saplings like a bee, and in a minute a flat-nosed sports boat cut up the middle of the river going thirty or forty, at least.