The Deep Whatsis

by Peter Mattei

  That’s when I see Gandhi talking to two black guys in the middle of the street, and not the kind of white black guys you normally see at these sorts of things, the kind of white black guys who can stomach us like the white black guys in the band TV on the Radio seem to be able to. No, these were actual black guys, they really stood out, they did not even have semi-ironic Afro picks in semi-ironic ’fros and they did not call each other “Negro” or wear bow ties or read James Baldwin on the subway. Seth introduces them to me as P-Mouse and Grain or something like that, it’s hard for me to hear because a faux–hair metal band is playing out of the back of a Budget rental truck parked on the street.

  “Hey, did you guys see the art? What do you think?” I ask. Titmouse and Plain are in the music business, Seth is telling me, and they don’t give a shit about art.

  “We don’t give a shit about art,” D-Louse says. “It’s stupid.” He then says he doesn’t think this crap here is art anyway, it’s just some bad pictures of some like dumbass rich girls flashing some of their rich-ass skin. I start to say something about the art being about a subversive, if not downright gangsta, appropriation by the highbrow culture establishment of a lowbrow pop icon, and Plane says “Who gives a fuck?” which kind of makes me want to hug him. Then Seth says these two guys wanted to meet me because they have just started a music production company, they’ve been producing some tracks out of the back blocks of Crown Heights, they are going to blow up any second, and, wait for it, they were thinking of getting into commercials. I could, see, get in on the ground floor, get a good deal on some demos before they were snatched up by the likes of Nike and Diesel.

  Ten minutes later we are sitting at a rusty metal table in the back of a place called Midnight Drab on DeKalb Avenue. It has no sign and not even much of a door and nobody is even sure if Midnight Drab is really the name of it, it’s just what the place is called, at least by Seth. The blacks are ordering gin and juice and so I order one, too. I’d already had the better part of a bottle of red wine at my apartment before coming to the art show, and for a moment I fear the dangerous combination of grape and juniper, as it’s not something I’ve experimented with before, but we’ll see. An hour later the conversation turns to all these great commercials that people have been seeing on ESPN, the one where the guy runs up the side of a building and explodes, the one where the car comes out the guy’s ass, I have no idea what they’re talking about. But as I am thinking about excusing myself and going home to masturbate to the pictures in some French fashion rag, B-Louse, or is it Painboy, unfurls a one-hit bumper in his enormous hand. Alright, maybe I’ll stay for another G&J, even if it does mean enduring the kings of alt-garage hip-hop pressing on me their sampler CDs. I grab the bumper and lean down under the table and pretend I dropped something and do a hit; when I arise the guys are chuckling while Ravi Shankar makes some kind of face.

  “No worries, I bought it from the bartender,” says Louse, meaning it’s all good here. I do another hit, left nostril this time, without attempting to disguise it. Seth gives me a micro-look like, That’s cool, you do your thing, and I can be here with you, because I’m a superior being now, I’ve reached this higher yogic plane of sobriety, I am but a mute witness to the fog of human sadness here before me. I try to hand the vial to Seth as a joke and he waves it off, not getting me. But to my surprise, Louse and Jane wave it off, too.

  “All you, dog.”

  So now I’m drunk and high and sitting with three idiots, guys who finish sentences with “dog” or “yo” or “fag”; unfortunately this constitutes the most satisfying social event of my week, not including the sexual encounter of four-point-five days ago.

  We decide to leave and go to the after-party for the opening, which is at a loft in Ridgewood. Seth still has the Range Rover that his parents bought him as a birthday present back when they were flush, and he hasn’t sold it yet even though he can’t afford the upkeep; I think he may have said something about the insurance having lapsed and what a pain in the ass alternate-side parking is. After we are at the loft party for a few minutes, which is packed with the same people who were at the opening, and our hip-hop friends are still the only African-Americans in the crowd, some guy with a waxed mustache and an eye patch comes around holding a bucket collecting money to pay for the keg of Milwaukee’s Best that is already gone and that’s when I realize I made a mistake in coming out tonight at all. Seth and the guys are talking to a couple of young girls; Seth thinks he is getting somewhere with them because of how Street his friends are, and how this confers status on him, but really the girls are not paying attention to him, they’re just thinking about the possibility of hooking up with Louse or Pain for the tweet of it.

  I take out my phone to call the car service to come pick me up when I see there’s a text I didn’t know I had.

  turn arownd!!!

  Fuck.

  I make a point of not looking around the room, I just stuff my phone back in my jacket pocket and watch Seth and the girls and black guys standing in a little circle. One of the girls is wearing a diagonal-striped Diane von Furstenberg dress from the ’80s. She has the wrong body type for it, but she doesn’t seem to care. In my mind I’m just getting into this heavy critique of her because I don’t want to look around and let Intern think I am looking for her. After a minute or two I realize I forgot to call the car service, but that will entail taking my phone out again, which Intern, if she is indeed watching me from somewhere in the big crumbling warehouse of poseurs, will interpret as my caring.

  Then I see Titmouse offer a bump to the girls and they enthusiastically buy in. So the skinny young white chicks from the suburbs go off with the guys from Crown Heights, stepping on a radiator and climbing out a window and onto a roof where they will do the coke, with one of the girls giving an OMG look to a friend of hers standing by the refrigerator as she takes the enormous hand of T-Louse, and the friend is trying to take their picture with her phone but she is too late, she missed it, they are outside now.

  I look back to Seth, and he’s staring at his phone as a means of avoiding the pain of rejection that is nonetheless etched into his face. Perhaps he’s thinking that if he still did drugs he would be getting some sex tonight, possibly in the front of his awesome Range Rover where he parked it around the corner on Onderdonk. Or perhaps he’s thinking what I would be thinking, which is that Pitmouse and Brain have betrayed him, left him hanging there, and even though they barely know each other, it was a pretty thoughtless move. But no, it wasn’t that, it was just a numbers thing, there were two cute girls, and three horny guys, and the girls had probably just moved here from college, from Bard or Reed or one of those other places where rich people send their kids so they can learn how to spot the latent sexism and racism inherent in contemporary culture, especially advertising, and now their degree qualifies them to make art about the latent sexism and racism inherent in contemporary culture, especially advertising, and for a few years they do this, until they realize how stupid it all is, and then they decide to go and actually work in advertising instead of critiquing it, to spend some time “in the belly of the beast” as it were, and maybe one day make art or write a graphic novel about that, which they never do.

  I am looking around for something to drink, not that I need it, and I haven’t eaten anything in almost five days which is only exacerbating my quasi-dystopic mood, but every red plastic cup is empty except for the ones with cigarette butts in them.

  Seth finally looks up from his phone and scans the room. I assume he’s looking for me, or at least someone else he can glom on to. At the moment I turn away from him and squeeze out the four-foot-round punched-out hole in the drywall that leads to the back stairs, I can tell he saw me and that he could see that I saw him and pretended I did not.

  I keep going and I don’t stop or look back until I am down at the street. If I heard his steps behind me or his voice calling out to me I would probably just tell him what an asshole he is, how I can’t stand his god
dam month-long theater wanks, they are pure torture, go keep bees on your own time, don’t charge people to watch you learn Farsi, and he needs to wake up and sell his car because I am not going to get him a job.

  Once out on Onderdonk I decide to walk past the projects to Marcy because sometimes you can get lucky and find a cab there. For a second I’m self-concious about walking past the PJs with my phone to my ear as I’ve heard that there’s been a lot of iPhone jackings recently, a slew of girls have been getting punched in the face while talking on their mobile devices at all hours of the day and night, it serves them right, in a way, it’s not even about the phone it’s about the obliviousness, there, here’s your phone back, lady. I’m just trying to keep my mind occupied so that I’m not scared or don’t go nuts when I hear my name said aloud. I’m not being mugged, muggers don’t know my name and besides the voice is a girl’s.

  I spin around and it’s her across the street, coming toward me. She’s wearing a skirt that hugs her thighs and those Hunter boots. Also a gray hoodie that I think says Tribecastan across the front and a floppy hat that I’m guessing was knitted by those French grandmothers on that website that was super cool a few years ago. It wasn’t really cold enough for such a hat but I could not deny that it framed her face well, with one of the earflaps slightly more askew than the other. As a rule I refuse to watch any film made after 1936 but occasionally I will make an exception for the French director Jean-Luc Godard, and Intern looks very much like a ’shopped version of Chantal Goya, she has the same bangs and the same kind of eyes and features, large lips and high cheekbones, and she has none of Goya’s sad, little-girl winsomeness, and she does not have Goya’s bright, brittle, optimistic smile, either, and she’s young, as I have said before, but exactly how young I don’t know. And her smile does have a kind of odd glaze, a rare color mixed from mischief, neediness, intimidating intelligence, ironic adolescent stupidness, beauty, and so on.

  “Hey, Eric!” neo-Chantal is saying. I still don’t know her real name.

  “Hey.”

  She gets to my side of the street and just stands there waiting for me to do something like walk away. I would but even that would be a form of communication and I desperately do not want to engage in any kind of dialog with her. She tilts her head to the side and there’s the smile and a little laugh as if to say, “We hooked up, sort of, you and I, and then you ignored me but I’m fiendish and fierce and I got a job at your company and now you have to be my friend, too bad for you, and we’ll hook up again one of these days, but probably not tonight?”

  I hang on that thought for a beat too long and then she says, “What did you think of the party?”

  I decide to pretend that I never got her text. “What party? This party? Were you there?”

  “I know you got my text, Eric, I saw you reading it!” And she laughs again, does the smile thing again, and I look away.

  “OK, cool beans, I got your text.” I don’t know what else to say. At this point I can’t tell if my fear of her is what’s making me nauseous or if it’s something else, possibly the smell of burning plastic coming from under the street, an electrical fire or something.

  “Are you mad at me?”

  “Why would I be mad at you?”

  “Well maybe because I got an internship at your agency without even asking you about it or anything? Also about puking on your imported throw rug.”

  The girl can be funny; I can’t help but laugh.

  “Ah, I knew there was a human person in there somewhere,” she says with a slanted little wink. I should say this is disarming because it is disarming.

  “It’s a free planet you can say whatever it is you want to say to whomever it is you want to say it.” Even as I speak the line I know it is incredibly lame, even the construction of the sentence, the useless repitition of “it is,” the overly correct use of “whomever.” I am drunk and doomed all at once.

  “You are mad. Ohhhh! Goody!”

  “No, I’m not angry, why would I be angry at you?”

  “Because I’m stalking you??!?”

  “Are you stalking me?”

  “Isn’t it obvious?” she says with a laugh as if stalking someone were pretty much the same thing as saying hi to them. She is so weird I have to look away again, and then I think of that French phrase, jolie laide, “beautiful ugly,” and then for something better to do I’m reading the badly painted signage on a warehouse, it says USED POLICE CARS UNLIMITED, THE NAME SAYS IT ALL™, which has to be the worst tagline of all time.

  “To be honest,” I say, “I hadn’t really noticed whether you were stalking me or ignoring me or what. It’s not really my concern.”

  “Then why didn’t you say hi to me when you were on eight?”

  “I wasn’t even on eight,” I say.

  “Yes you were. Jake told me you were walking around the floor in circles all afternoon. In circles like some last survivor of a plane wreck in the desert or something, thinking they’ll get somewhere but really just, like, the prisoner of their own physicality.”

  “I have no idea what you’re talking about,” I say, dismissing her but intrigued with the metaphor, so I decide to parallel-path my thinking, unpacking the desert analogy and at the same time shutting down the conversation. “And I don’t even know Jake.”

  “Clown Jake, Tom’s assistant? Tom, my new boss? Jake and I knew each other in film school, that’s how I got the internship.”

  “I may have been on eight, I’m allowed to go onto pretty much any floor I like.”

  “I want you to stop being mad at me and I want you to think about everything that is happening to you and ask yourself, Why am I such a dickapotamous?”

  Now I try not to laugh, or smile, which is difficult because she’s winking at me with her entire face.

  “When people wander in the desert,” she says, “with nothing to guide them, no compass or GPS or anything, they tend to just go in huge circles rather than a straight line, because inevitably one of their legs is just a little bit longer than the other.”

  At this I decide I’ve had enough of the conversation, the abject stupidity of USED POLICE CARS UNLIMITED is bothering me again, not to mention her discourse on human anatomy, and so I walk off toward Flushing. Which is when she breaks out in a half-human cackle.

  I turn back and she’s smiling at me and toying with the flaps of her hat.

  1.9

  After staying up all night drinking Herradura Gold and her getting so trashed she bangs her head on the doorjamb while trying to take pictures, and then us doing everything short of intercourse in my Hästens Vividus bed, she leaves, this time without my having to evict her and more or less in control of her bodily functions.

  I call her a car and she gets dressed and I watch her and think it’s ridiculous that I’m involved with a girl this young. The only sensible thing to decide is to not see her again, and that’s what I do. Should I tell her this is our last conversation? I don’t know if it’s worth it. I stare at her feet and my hands. I need to eat.

  “What are you looking at?” she asks me.

  “What?” I say, pretending to be spaced out. “Your feet?”

  “You’re giving me a funny look.”

  “Am I?”

  “I know you’re thinking you wish you hadn’t done this. You wish I hadn’t shown up at that party. You wish you had more self-control than to be sleeping with someone who works with you and is younger than you and isn’t even that hot.”

  “Yeah, no, I mean, whatever, totally,” I go. “And you are hot, don’t underestimate yourself, wait a second.”

  “Wait a second what?”

  “Why would you say you’re not hot? You’re like Chantal Goya in Masculin Féminin. It’s a movie by this French guy.”

  “I know, and Chantal Goya wasn’t hot per se in my opinion. She was beautiful. She was intriguing.”

  About an hour ago she was naked, as was I, and she slipped one of her socks onto my dick, and she thought that w
as hilarious, and so she found some masking tape in a drawer, I didn’t even know I had masking tape, she took two little pieces of it and she balled them up and stuck them on my sock so that it looked like it had eyes, then she grabbed her phone and was taking pictures of it. She was laughing so hard, and was so drunk, and the floor was so slick that she slipped and stumbled backward, spinning to catch herself, but it was too late. Her head hit the doorjamb, and she fell to the floor and lay there, moaning and laughing at herself. She was OK, but there was a welt near her eye, and so I cradled her for a long time, then I got some ice from the ice machine in the Sub-Zero Pro 48 and put it on the appropriate spot.

  “This is crazy,” she said softly. “My head is in pain but I like you.”

  “It is crazy,” I said. Then I thought about it and said, “Wait.”

  “Wait, what?” she said.

  “Wait, why is it crazy?”

  “It just is,” she said. “It just is, I can’t tell you why right now, but it just is.” I nodded a yes and then we went into the bedroom and went to sleep. But now it’s morning and she’s standing in the good-bye pose at the door, with a welt on her face, and I can hear the car service honking down below.

  “That’s my car,” she says. I ask her if maybe we should have lunch or something, or go see a movie, or a play. She says she hates theater, it’s so phony, and I think I can see tears welling up in her eyes, at least the non-swelling-up one of them.

  “Maybe I shouldn’t be doing this,” she says softly.

  “Doing what?”

  “Following you. I followed you, Eric. Last night.”

  “You followed me? What do you mean?”

  And then she tells me that she followed me from the opening to the after-party because, after all, I wasn’t responding to her texts.