by Darren Greer
Anyway.
What this handsome little fella taught me is that the term Classical per se refers to any music written in Europe or the French and English colonies between 1750–1800. Mozart falls into this category.
Anything written before that, and between 1600 and 1750, is called Baroque. Bach falls into this category.
Anything written after and up to 1900 is called Romantic. Beethoven falls into this category.
They have yet to come up with an agreed upon term for what was written after the Romantic period. Mahler. Ravel. The Beatles. May I offer a suggestion? How about the Consumeristic Period?
Back to the penis. I’m now arbitrarily censoring all Rachmaninoff, Bach, and most definitely Chopin. I know all about Rachmaninoff and Bach and Beethoven because I continue to tape the music pouring through my ceiling and carry it down to the clerk at BIG BAD RECORDS for him to identify.
In case you’re interested, I told the clerk the whole story (except for the part about you paying me to spy for you) and he thinks the penis is pretty good.
“I’ve heard worse in concert houses,” he told me.
“But you don’t have to live in a concert house.”
“Neither do you,” he said. “You could move. Besides it could be worse. What if the guy was shitty? Would you rather bad Baroque music rain down on your head every afternoon?”
I hate twenty-year-olds. They think they have the market cornered on logical sarcasm.
Anyway, this was my first step. Arm myself with knowledge then start banging on a ceiling with a broken Wonder Mop. Brilliant, huh?
2. Just after 10 P.M. on my night off, I snuck up to his apartment with a piece of paper and some tape and put this note on his door: “The difference between a writer and a musician is that when a writer makes a mistake, the entire fucking building doesn’t know about it.”
I was pretty proud of that. It took me three weeks to come up with something suitable, and I had just thought it up lying in bed the night before. The next morning, when I left the apartment to go out for some Maxwell House, I found a note on my door. Same tape. Same piece of paper. He wrote in red ink on the back of my message. “The difference between a musician and a writer is that ... I don’t know. I’m not as clever as you writers. I thought you and I were the ‘whole fucking building.’ I’ll try to keep it down if that’s what your message was trying to say.” I thought you’d be glad to know that at least we’re communicating, though I still haven’t seen what he looks like.
LXI
That night, at eleven o’clock exactly, I got a call at work. I knew it was Dagnia as soon as she spoke. Black Widows are easily identifiable. “Is this crap what I’m paying you a hundred dollars a shot for?” she asked, not even bothering to say hello. I had e-mailed the report from work the night before, forgetting that all messages sent on the Sally Ann system include the address and phone number of the centre.
“You didn’t like it?” I asked.
“Whether or not I like it is irrelevant,” she said. “I’m not paying you to entertain me. I’m paying you to feed me information.”
“I am feeding you information. This is all the information I have at present.”
“Telling me how much you like some boy at the record store is not what I call valuable information. In fact, none of it’s valuable. I already know Dean plays the piano, for God’s sake, and I already know he’s good at it. I want to know who he’s screwing and where he’s going!”
“I don’t know who he’s screwing,” I said, my voice rising. “I don’t think he’s screwing anyone.”
“How do you know?”
“Well, if you’re asking whether I’m checking his garbage for used condoms, I’m not.”
“Why aren’t you? You checked that other guy’s garbage in those stupid articles you wrote.”
“I thought you said you liked those articles?”
“I didn’t say I liked them. I said I read them. There’s a difference, Cameron.”
“Maybe we should just call this off,” I told her. I was suddenly very angry about her slandering my articles. This is why I didn’t read anything in writers’ group. People only encouraged you if it suited them. Especially Dagnia. I knew why she criticized so much: she was terrified that one day she’d encounter someone better than she was. We were all terrified of that. That’s why she got so mad at me when I wouldn’t read. If I didn’t read, she had no way of satisfying herself that she was better than me. I was about to say this, call her a fucking bitch, tell her to stick her five tightly rolled twenties up her cunt if she could manage to squeeze them in, when she defused things a bit.
“I’m sorry,” she said, breathing harshly into the mouthpiece. “I’m a little upset right now.”
“So am I.”
“The thing is I love the guy. I know you don’t believe that. I know you don’t believe I’m capable of loving anybody. But the fact is, I do love him. And I want him back. I think he will come back if he doesn’t hook up with one of those drunken women he’s so fond of and get sidetracked for six months. Listen,” she said, injecting into her voice a note of honest-to-God truth that was supposed to make me sit up and beg. “If he hooks up with one of these women I think he’s going to hook up with, I’m calling this off. I just want to know where he goes and who he’s with so I know whether to keep hoping or not. Can you understand that? That’s all I want.”
“You want a lot,” I said.
“Maybe I do,” said Dagnia. “And maybe I won’t get it. I should have told you this from the start, but you’re not the easiest person to talk to, you know.”
This I’m-really-levelling-with-you-now act that Dagnia was pulling shouldn’t have worked. It really shouldn’t have. A Black Widow is only convincing if you don’t know she’s a Black Widow. But for some reason, it did. I didn’t gush or anything. I still didn’t like her much, but at least I wasn’t about to say something unrecoverable and hang up. I was kind of glad. I would have been pissing an easy hundred bucks a week down the drain.
“Okay,” I said. “I won’t change my style, but I’ll try to focus things a little more on what you want. Maybe I’ll even try to meet him and make things a little easier on both of us.”
“You’ll like him,” said Dagnia brightly. “He really is an amazing guy.”
I highly doubted Dagnia’s idea of amazing would correspond to mine, but I didn’t say this. Instead I told her I had to hang up.
“Oh right,” she said. “You’re at work. What do you do there anyway?”
“I’m a rat.”
“A what?”
“Never mind. I gotta go.”
“Okay.” Quiet and partially deflated. The Black Widow at rest.
“And Dagnia?”
“Yes.”
“I lied. I did go through his garbage. I was just saving it for the next instalment. Dramatic tension and all that.”
Dagnia laughed a bit hysterically, and I wondered how well she was sleeping these days, even without Chopin’s Funeral March to keep her awake. “You bastard,” she said. “What did you find?”
“No used condoms,” I told her.
She sighed into the phone. “Thank God.”
I hung up, not bothering to tell her that we men rarely put used condoms in the garbage anyway. We flush a large proportion of our used condoms down the toilet. But this too I was saving for the next instalment. More dramatic tension. More funeral marches for Dagnia’s supposed hope.
LXII
Every third Thursday at the treatment centre is piss night. Actually it’s every Thursday, but because I rotate shifts mine only falls on the third Thursday of the month. I hate the third Thursday of the month. My job is too make sure everyone is in by curfew, then line up the plastic sample jars on my desk in the front office, each one labelled in my handwriting. The Thursday Dagnia called me at work there were twenty-six recovering addicts signed in to the centre, which means twenty-six plastic sample bottles sat in neat rows on my desk. Each w
as empty and just waiting for the forced calls of nature to fill them. One by one I went through the roll call. The intercom in my office was connected to speakers in all the rooms and the hallway upstairs. Sean A., Michael B., Fred D., Rachid E., and so on. As I called their names I heard reluctant footfalls on the stairs as the guys came down to meet their Thursday night fate. There were always a few guys who didn’t make it back after curfew on Thursday nights. They knew there was no point because by Friday morning they’d be gone. There were always a few more who did come back, even though they knew they’d be caught. These were the losers who were slipping back into that place where they didn’t know they were losers. Sinking slowly but surely back into the quicksand of denial. By the time I came in the next night a couple of guys would be back out on the street because of the results of the tests. Some of them would make it to the next Thursday only to be caught by the THC test instead of the cocaine/alcohol or opiates test. You can only check urine for one type of substance at a time. To check for anything else you have to get more urine and the Sally Ann has a policy of one sample per guy per week. They check a guy’s file to find out what his drug of choice is. But addicts are smart. They will lie to you about their drug of choice if they plan on using in the centre. Or they will change drugs, just to screw you up. To catch the addict in his lie, to keep him from using on the floor and to prevent other people from doing a hit, everyone is checked for everything in three-week cycles. If you’re using, your absolute grace time is three weeks. Most of the guys who don’t come back on Thursdays know that their time has run out.
This is the part of my job I hate the most. The guys like me — most of them anyway — but no one even says hi when it’s urine-test time. I have to get some of them out of bed to take it. Some act casual — pluck the sample container out of my hand and say, “I ain’t got nothing to hide, Annie.” Those are the guys that usually do have something to hide, and that week, or the next, the test will show positive for something and they’ll be given the boot or told to go back to detox. Most opt for the boot.
I wouldn’t hate it so much if I didn’t have to stand there with them. They use the staff bathroom. I make them stand in front of the urinal, turned a little towards me. One of the guys said “I ain’t takin’ a piss in front of no faggot.” I let him go, and the next morning his counsellor, after reading my log entry, went up to his room with a pill bottle in hand, got him out of bed, and said, “Come on, Kevin. I ain’t no faggot.” The guy tested positive for cocaine and was ousted that very day.
Piss night is anything but sexy. Twenty-six cocks pissing into clear plastic jars one after the other is not my idea of a turn-on. Old cocks, young cocks, long cocks, short cocks. Cocks with venereal warts and chlamydia scars, and cocks as long and smooth and thick as raw sugar cane.
Some say they can’t go with me standing there. “You’ve no choice here,” I tell them. If I turn my back, even for a minute, they might switch the bottle with a full urine bottle they’ve swiped from somewhere else and filled on a day when they aren’t using. It has been done before, which is why we name and number the bottles.
The indomitable human spirit.
But even with the labelled bottles, they could have the urine of some clean, new guy on the floor in another bottle in their pocket. Without me in the room, it’d be cinch to substitute clean urine for their own or mix their own urine with a little bit of vinegar from the dining hall to make the test come out negative. Addicts are pretty smart.
So I stand there and watch them. Some clients, especially the new ones, really can’t go. They’re too nervous, or they just went a half-hour ago. What they don’t know is that no matter how many times you go in one day, or how long ago, or how nervous you are, there’s always a little more piss inside you, waiting for the chance to come out. I tell them to relax, we only need a little bit. I tell them just to try to imagine that I’m not there and that they have to piss really bad, even if they don’t. If that doesn’t work, I turn on the faucets and let them run full blast into the sink.
This usually does the trick.
Sometimes it works too well, and so much piss comes out that it fills the bottle and spills all over the sides before the guy can pull away and finish up in the urinal. I always wear rubber gloves for the flooders, as Adrian calls them. Once the guy is finished, I hand him the cap to screw on his little bottle of uric acid, he hands it back to me, and I carry it into the office and put it in a minibar-sized, locked fridge we keep just for that purpose. Even with the rubber gloves, I can feel the heat of other people’s urine on my palm and fingers. It makes me sick to my stomach. If just holding one plastic bottle of hot piss can make me queasy, can you imagine what twenty-six of them do to me? By the end of piss night, I am usually in the bathroom throwing up. When Adrian comes in at two, he always asks me if I did the urine tests. When I say yes, he looks at me, smiles, and says, “Didn’t go looking for any hot apple juice in the fridge there tonight did you?”
This was only borderline amusing the first time. Now it enrages me and sends me into the bathroom for one more dry heave before I knock off for the night.
LXIII
Darrel’s sister June is permanently committed to the Sisters of Good Hope Care Facility on East 73rd Street. It is a monstrosity of a three-level brownstone that takes up one whole city block. I was surprised to be greeted in the cavernous green-tiled hallway not by a nun but by a middle-aged nurse in white soft-soled shoes that squeaked when she walked. She ushered me into an office, sat me down at a desk, and took my vital information.
“Name?”
Without thinking, I said Cameron. She looked up sharply. “I thought you were June’s brother, Darrel?”
I have always been a pretty good liar, and without missing a beat I said that Darrel was my name, and that Cameron was my middle name. Sometimes I went by my middle name. Sorry.
“I have to put your name down as it’s listed in next of kin,” she said, going back to her forms. Darrel Greene. Address: 2367 Lime Street, Apartment 1. Phone: 230-1720. Work: Salvation Army Treatment Facility. Business phone: 789-2064. She asked me for ID.
“Sorry,” I told her. “I didn’t know I needed any.”
She stopped writing and looked up at me. “How do I know you are who you say you are, then?”
“Why would I lie?”
We who live in the Consumeristic Period have an obsession with making sure people are who they say they are. Why would some guy pretend he was someone else so he could visit a retarded girl? I wasn’t going to kidnap her. I didn’t imagine there was a booming black market slave trade in the cataclysmically retarded. Of course, I didn’t say any of this to the nurse. In fact, I was a guy pretending to be another guy coming to visit his retarded sister. I could have explained this to her, and perhaps she might even have let me in. I could have levelled with her. “Look. Darrel’s dead. It’s a shitty world where a guy can be dead and no one visits his retarded sister. So I’m just trying to make the world a better place, okay?”
But I wasn’t sure I could make this convincing because I wasn’t sure it was true. Victims of retardation are like car accidents. Sometimes you have to see how retarded they really are before you can sleep at night. The fact was, I didn’t know for sure why I wanted to visit June. I just stuck with the lie. I squeezed by on a technicality. “I don’t carry my wallet in this part of the city,” I told her. “I’ll bring it next time, okay? Not the wallet. Just the id. Now that I know I need it.”
“Next time, then,” she said, and closed the file.
LXIV
Every time I visited from then on, the nurse at the reception window asked me for my ID. Every time, I made up another excuse. They always let me in anyway. It was just another stupid rule by another blind bureaucrat in a city office somewhere. Since these nurses had to face the reality of cleaning someone else’s shit off a wall every day, their overall tolerance for blind bureaucrats and their rules was as low as a sheltered millionaire’s taxation rate
.
LXV
This is the layout of the Sisters of Good Hope Care Facility:
1. First floor: administration offices, doctors’ offices, counselling rooms, cafeteria kitchen and laundry facilities, storage closets, maintenance and boiler room, massage therapy room, and observation (suicide watch) rooms.
2. Second floor: manic-depressive and suicidal tendencies wing, including dorm rooms and private rooms, on the east side. West side: drug and alcohol detoxification ward and cafeteria. Men’s and women’s showers and washroom facilities on both sides.
3. Third floor. East wing: geriatrics and Alzheimer’s ward, including dorm beds, recreation and TV room, washrooms and single rooms for those in the last stages of the program (otherwise known as life). West wing: Down’s syndrome and catatonia ward with two-bed rooms, recreation and TV room, washrooms, and floor cafeteria.
4. Each floor has a nurses’ station, a “containment” room (popularly known as a rubber room) and two orderlies on duty twenty-four hours a day in case somebody has to call in the muscle.
LXVI
A few things I learned about the Sisters of Good Hope Care Facility on my first visit:
1. The Sisters of Good Hope have given up. The city took over from the Catholic Church after the Second World War, probably to keep a lid on the fact that it was filled with veterans who saw blown-off fingers in their soup every day at lunch.
2. The Alzheimer’s ward was called the senility ward, until 1987 when it was discovered that losing your marbles and shitting your pants, previously thought of as natural old age, was a bona fide disease, a rotting of the brain, which some believe is caused by the gradual oxidization and subsequent ingestion of particles mixing with food prepared in aluminum cookware.