The Fuck Up

by Arthur Nersesian

  Waiting for a train in New York requires more than just patience; it also demands a defensive outlook. During the early eighties, the city cordoned off “designated waiting areas.” They were encased in yellow overhead signs and usually they were within view of the token sellers, so if you were beaten to death within this section, your benefactors might have a good case at suing the city.

  Despite the wolf-pack gangs and the doubtful worth of the overpriced token, I had nurtured a perverse pleasure in riding the subways. I would get a ninety-cent thrill out of pressing against the front unwashed window, leaning next to the conductor’s booth and straining into the near darkness as the train whipped between the ribbed support beams through the enigmatic bowels of the great city. What subway riding in New York offers that far surpasses a train ride anywhere else is the wonderful relief upon arriving safely at your destination. I experienced this relief an hour later.

  I got off at Fourteenth Street and walked across it, past the many cheap storefronts that were all covered with metal pull-down gates at night. Past the old Luchow’s and the Palladium, I walked. From the corner of Third Avenue, I could see the Zeus Theater flag snapping in the wind. Why the theater had a proud flag, I wasn’t sure. The theater lights were still on and I had no particular place to go, so I decided to stop in and see Miguel. When I got to the corner of Thirteenth Street, I noticed the crowd out front. But then I remembered, the vanguardists Hans and Grett were premiering their film tonight. As I approached the NYU film students and punks flocking outside, I waited as gaggles of gays slowly filtered through and out, and then I pushed in. Hans, who was acting as a doorman, let me in. I walked rapidly through the theater.

  “Hey!” the Cambodian porter Thi yelled.

  Accidentally I had stepped into a pile of condoms, Kleenex and tiny squeezed out tubes of KY-Jel. Thi had marshalled the garbage together with the blowing machine, which was strapped to his back. Quickly he shovelled the pile into a black multi-plied garbage bag and sealed it. In the office I found Miguel chatting with a bunch of skinheads. He greeted me with a lapse of silence. I felt compelled to say something managerial, so I asked, “How’s business?”

  He pointed thumbs down. “It must be the nice weather.”

  I nodded and left the office; I didn’t mention that I had just seen enough gays exiting to start a gondolier’s union; he had to be stealing money. I decided to keep hushed and wait. Soon, Miguel left his office, the skinheads scattered, and he joined me in the lobby. The crowd was now entering, and as the guests filed past the box office, Hans and Grett handed everyone a plastic cup filled with champagne.

  “They sure must’ve put a lot of money into this,” I mumbled to Miguel.

  “No,” Miguel confided, “a generic case of Astor Home Champagne on sale from the New Year’s Eve surplus. Anyway you got to be a little zonked in order to truly relate to the full cinematic reality.” He wasn’t smiling, so I guess he was serious.

  After all had entered, I started mingling with the crowd. There were several cute intellectual-type girls flapping about, but to judge the semiology of their then-pop semiology books, I feared an insincere impregnability One girl, who came alone and also seemed to know nobody, seemed to be pretty prey. As I approached her, I noticed something that might give me some leverage; there was a green booger just above her nostril. I discreetly whispered this into her ear, feeling assured that she’d feel forever indebted for saving her much embarrassment.

  “It’s a jade nose ring, asshole!” And she marched into the theater, out of my life forever.

  Slowly after all the free champagne was gone, all gravitated into the theater where they assumed seats. Even though all were ready, certain crucial professors and daring small independent producers had not yet arrived, so the boys were still delaying the screening.

  Not knowing anyone and sensing that most people preferred it that way, I retreated up to the projectionist booth. Miguel was up there explaining to our projectionist the few idiosyncrasies that this screening would require; at certain moments the volume had to be turned up all the way, and on three occasions she had to sneak into the theater and whack cymbals together. He then gave her an envelope of money, which she quickly counted. Since our theater hours were what the projectionist union termed an “eleven hour” booth, and since Miguel didn’t want Ox to detect the undesignated overtime on the payroll, Hans and Grett had to bear the projectionist’s fee themselves. When all the details were ironed out, Miguel turned to me with a wide and mysterious grin asking, “So?”

  “So what?”

  “So how was it?”

  “How was what?”

  “I don’t want to violate your space,” he replied, “but last night you went home with one of the prize trophies off Muscle Beach.”

  All of last night fell back into my lap and accordingly I snickered and said, “I don’t kiss and tell.”

  “It’s not the kissing I want to hear about.”

  “Let me put it this way. I didn’t get any sleep last night.” That much I could say on any polygraph machine.

  Suddenly the intercom buzzed. Grett announced that cinema history could no longer be delayed. The lights dimmed, the projector was started, and Miguel and I took seats among Han’s and Grett’s alumni. After the credits, which were thunderously applauded, a muddle of images and colors flooded the poor screen. Racing down the sound track came metallic screeches and oblong howls, and then an interjection of urgent radio news broadcast started crackling out of a wall of static, which was overlaid with quasi-images of the tumultuous and the tranquil. It was all carefully disjointed and painfully abstract. It ushered in a host of whispered yet supportive clichés, of which I could hear a couple behind me whispering: “Post-expressionistic…prehensile…atonal…”

  Peeking about, I noticed Miguel was nowhere to be seen. Discreetly I abandoned my seat and slipped off to the office; maybe there’d be something painless on TV.

  Opening the door, I saw Miguel seated at the desk, talking with two older guys. The air was thick with smoke. A cup that was torn into a makeshift ashtray was filled with Gitanes cigarette stubs.

  “No, I don’t think it’s fair,” said the more dashingly dressed NYU student. “You charged Hans a fraction of what you’re charging me.”

  Miguel threw me a quick glance, and putting down the pizza he was eating, he replied, “Look, me and my partner simply don’t feel that staying here for that length of time is profitable for any less than a hundred a piece.” I was an instant partner in some leery deal.

  “Well”—the young filmmaker arose—“I have only a hundred dollars budgeted to this screening. Beyond that I’ll just have to look elsewhere.”

  Before he left, Miguel replied, “When you find that it gets no cheaper, swallow your pride and come back.”

  The young director left the office, and his sidekick closed the door behind him.

  “Hungry?” Miguel took an angle of pizza from a cardboard box that was sitting on canisters behind him. “It has a whole wheat crust.”

  “What’s going on?” I asked, and then bit into the slice.

  “I’m supplementing our income a bit, is all.”

  “Well,” I said as I gorged myself, “I don’t want to play the devil’s advocate, but can’t you settle for a hundred less? I mean, a poor student like that can’t have much more to spare.”

  “Trust me when I say that I know what I’m doing. I’m a sweetheart. In fact, I didn’t charge Hans and Grett a cent. I just said that so I could get money out of this guy.”

  “What’ve you got against this kid? His film has got to be better than that…cinematic havoc now on the screen.”

  “Did you ever hear of the Owensfield Complex?” It sounded at first like a Freudian term, but I remembered reading about it. The Owensfield Complex was a glamorous group of midtown co-ops that had been in the news recently because they had remarkably reinterpreted certain building codes and zoning laws.

  “Who is that guy?”r />
  “Nigel Owensfield, grand-nephew to the tycoon-founder Clarel.”

  “The guy that just left here?” I inquired.

  “Yep. Do you know the Harrington Quarterly!”

  “I’ve heard about it.” Helmsley had gotten stuff accepted there.

  “What did you hear?”

  “That it recently gained a lot of prestige, if that’s what you’re getting at.”

  “Prestige came with a cost. The only thing that separates mainstream culture from subculture is a budget. Owensfield bought an editor position and at the same time pulled the quarterly from the level of the Sleazoid Express and put it on rank with The Hudson Review.”

  “How do you know all this?”

  “I heard,” Miguel replied, lighting up another cigarette. “In short, he could spare another hundred bucks.”

  “Am I really your partner?”

  “Oh, sure. I’ve been meaning to talk to you about it. I have a lot of connections and I need your help.”

  “Fifty-fifty split?”

  “Well, sure,” he replied benevolently, only to add, “but half of nothing is nothing, isn’t it?”

  “What exactly does Owensfield do at this magazine?”

  “Part owner and some kind of editor. Why?”

  “Just curious. You wouldn’t mind if I talk to him alone, would you?”

  “What are you going to say to him?”

  “I’m not sure, but I promise I won’t ask for a cent less than you want.” Miguel smiled and jumped out of his chair. He dashed through the theater, hunting for the heir-editor. I sat in the swivel chair and in another moment the heir was sitting alone with me in the office.

  “I think I can deliver this place to you at the fee you want, but there are two provisos.”

  “Continue.”

  “Before I continue, I don’t think we’ve been properly introduced.” I told him my name and explained that I was an obscure visionary poet from the East Village.

  “Another obscure visionary poet,” he muttered bored.

  “Not another,” I corrected, “one that has control of a theater you need, and frankly I’m hoping to be less obscure.”

  “That would leave just the visionary.”

  “Right, and I envision that we can help each other.”

  “You’re jesting.” He quickly understood the direction in which I was heading.

  “I’ve been writing poetry all my life and, other than in school, I’ve never been published. All I’m asking is that you look at a poem of mine. If you don’t like it, nothing lost. But if you do like it, you gain a poet and a theater.”

  “Why in God’s name do you think that I can get you published?”

  “Everyone knows that you are to the Harrington what Delmore Schwartz was to the Partisan Review, what Mencken was to American Mercury and what Perkins was to Harper & Row.”

  “Perkins was with Scribner, and that wasn’t a magazine.”

  “I thought Bartelby was with Scribner’s.”

  “Oh, God!” He sighed and rose to go.

  “Look! All we’re talking about is a couple of well-crafted lines, one stanza that describes the mechanism of the East Village.”

  “The mechanism of the East Village?” He smiled. “What’s your poem about, a car?”

  “Call it what you will.”

  “Is this machine rhymed or free verse?”

  “I rhyme, but…”

  “Narrative, confessional, free association…?”

  “Essentially narrative.”

  “Where is this sacred poem?” he asked. Apparently I had passed the multiple-choice part of the quiz.

  “I’ll have it for you in a week.”

  “A week! Tomorrow is our final editorial conference. Then we go to print. Next week is my first vacation in two years.” He rose again and said, “That ends that.”

  “Wait a second.” I stood up. “I can have it for you before the film ends.”

  “All right, fine,” he replied, prepared to go.

  “Then you’ll do it?”

  “I’ll consider it if you get the poem here before the film ends, but I’ll tell you right now, don’t expect much.” He opened the door to leave.

  “One last thing,” I requested before he departed. “Miguel’s a bit of a barbarian. In order to get you your price I would like you to tell him that you’re paying the whole two hundred. I’ll cover the deficit.”

  “You mean if I accept your poem,” he added. Then we shook hands, and he went back into the auditorium.

  I swiftly went through the office collecting necessities to write poetry with, a beer from the fridge, a clock, two sharpened pencils, paper. Calling the projectionist, I asked her how long the film would last.

  “Another reel, about twenty minutes,” she replied, curiously free of any antagonism.

  I snuck into the bathroom stall, and for the benefit of any curious eyes that might check the exposed underpart of the partition, I dropped my pants around my knees and sat.

  I hadn’t written a poem in years, and was not sure of why I was doing this. Occasionally opportunity was prompting enough. I thought hard about nonsense and started scribbling. First, I started just jotting out recollections of New York, but then I dashed down little slogans and aphorisms that I had heard over the past few months, then I rhymed them into a quick poem, while offering my own criticism in alternating verse:

  Stop Aids not Gays.

  It wasn’t well rhymed

  No entry for gentry

  A graffitied wall chimed.

  Only niggers pull triggers

  There’s a strong verse,

  Drink, Drive and Die—Alliteratively terse

  Mug and Goetz what’s coming

  A pale little pun.

  I’ll stick to free verse

  Couplets are done!

  But then I remembered that I specifically said it would be an East Village poem, so I started thinking about each street, from First to Fourteenth. I drew up a small map and noted every established hangout and local institution; the poem had to be short, cute, and simple. I sensed that this was all the silver-spooned editor could digest.

  There were no revelations in that refuge for defecators and lovers. Sitting upon that unwashable and ancient toilet, I toiled, tinkered, and versified. When seated in that position too long, something is bound to fall out and soon the bowels moved; a cheap little stanza complete with all the squalid neighborhood emblems. For no clear reason, I entitled it “Cowboy Streets, Indian Avenues”:

  Third Street bikers

  At Seventh Street bars

  Met Twelth Street whores

  Screwed quick in cars

  Are busted by cops from Fifth Street way

  Who drive them all off toward Avenue A

  It was forced and trashy and I hoped that one day I would be a writer talented enough to repudiate it. Outside the stall, I could hear someone pacing, and then more feet. The film must have ended. After quickly writing a final draft, I flushed the toilet for effect and abdicated the chair.

  Entering the theater in the middle of deafening applause and brightening lights, I saw no sign of Owensfield. But then I heard a bunch of giggly punk boys and girls and spotted the patron in their midst. Silently I watched them giggle and react to his every movement. Wealth, like fame, provided incredible leverage to one’s character; an adequate mind seemed brilliant if it belonged to a star. Not-repulsive looks made a blue blood stunningly handsome; mild sensitivity catapulted one into heights of sexiness; basic decency made them rivals of Mister Christ. Owensfield and his lucky entourage were about to skip out the fire exit when I intercepted him.

  “Here.” I shoved the poem in his face. With nothing more than a rise of his eyebrows, his group was signaled to linger outside. As he mumbled the poem aloud, Miguel appeared from the other side of the theater and started approaching.

  “Well,” he uttered as he crinkled the page into his pocket, “to buy this much space as an advertiseme
nt would cost you about a hundred and fifty dollars and frankly we’ve published a lot worse.”

  “Is that an acceptance?”

  “No, it’s a deal.”

  “What’s a deal?” Miguel entered in the middle of the conversation.

  “Your friend drives a hard bargain.” Owensfield seemed to yield. “He got what he was after.”

  “Wow!” Miguel marvelled as he looked at me.

  “I’ve got people waiting,” the well-to-doer replied. “We’ll discuss all the bindings later. Au revoir.” And he was gone.

  “How the Tao did you do that?”

  “I knew what appealed to him. It turned out I had read his latest piece, a study on Bobby Musil. We talked about that awhile, until the next thing I know we’re both reliving Hapsburg, Vienna, Wittgenstein, Karl Kraus, and Saint Stephen’s. My God, first we were in tears and then in stitches.”

  “What the hell are you talking about?”

  “Kindred spirits!” I exclaimed. “Elective affinities. For the moment we were the same person. Hell, when I finally popped the request it was like I was asking myself for something.”

  “And you’re telling me he just gave in.”

  “It was more like I gave it to me.”

  “Amazing. And I always thought the richer they were the poorer they were. I was ready to take his offer.” Miguel looked perplexed. Only the speech pattern and mannerisms remained of the Miguel who was once the sincere earth child. The money and the vulgarity had made its breach; Miguel knew he couldn’t walk nude along the streets or hand out dandelions, and he knew that rhetoric was just rhetoric, but in his heart of hearts I think he really wanted to believe that the right words could precipitate the correct actions. He nodded, still perplexed, and went into his office.

  People poured into the street, coagulated into lumps, which broke away and dissipated. I waited outside for Miguel to lock up. When he was finally done, a bunch of people had collected, waiting for him, or waiting for the few people who were waiting for him. I was about to bid him goodnight, when he asked me if I was hungry.