Iris Has Free Time

by Iris Smyles

  Anyway, I like being a student again, whiling away the hours in libraries and cafés, reading books I was supposed to have read back in college (Madame Bovary: I confess I only read the CliffsNotes.). “Youth is wasted on the young,” Shaw wrote. This is equally true of college. Certainly it’s the raison d’être of graduate students. But what does it matter what I study finally, when time is really what I’ve bought? Like I told the guy at the job fair, I’m working on a novel, that’s my main thing.

  In addition to Romanticism, I’m taking a class called History of the Novel, which, it turns out, has been a controversial art since its inception. We’ve been reading all about Anthony Comstock’s banned books and yesterday had a long discussion about the growing fear in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries that novels were perverting the minds of the young, particularly the minds of very young girls. The professor distributed this text from an 1815 almanac:

  The indiscriminate reading of Novels and Romances is to young females of the most dangerous tendency . . . it agitates their fancy to delirium of pleasure never to be realized . . . and opens to their view the Elysium fields which exist only in the imagination . . . fields which will involve them in wretchedness and inconsolable sorrow. Such reading converts them into a bundle of acutely feeling nerves and makes them “ready to expire of a rose in aromatic pain” . . . The most profligate villain, bent on the infernal purpose of seducing a woman, could not wish a symptom more favorable to his purpose than a strong imagination inflamed with the rhapsodies of artful and corrupting novels.

  —T. E. C., JR., MD

  After he finished reading it aloud, everyone was excited and a wonderfully interesting conversation ensued. Instead of leaping into the fray as I usually do, however, for a while I just listened. Looking around that safe, warm, wood-lined classroom, out the window of an old brownstone situated comfortably at the edge of Washington Square, and then back across the conference table, at the animated faces of my impassioned peers—eager full-time Humanities students like me, young, unemployed, would-be writers and poets, possessed by literature to the point of total incompetence—it hit me: The real danger of the novel is that it might make you want to write one yourself.

  BOOK I

  CHAPTER 1

  THE BASTARD FELIX

  That winter I was in the grip of abstract furies.

  ELIO VITTORINI, CONVERSATIONS IN SICILY

  I

  It goes like this: Felix will call from a noisy bar and tell me he’s in town, or from a mutual friend’s apartment telling me to come over, or from his car while en route to a party telling me to be downstairs in five minutes; he’s picking me up. If I decline, he’ll tell me it’s going to be so much fun that I can’t afford to miss it, and if I come and hang out with him and his friends for a few hours, it will be so much fun, I couldn’t have afforded to miss it. And then the night will wind down, and everyone will take off to their respective apartments, and Felix will give me a lift back to mine and end up staying for the next three or four days.

  “Wake and bake!” he sings, when I find him in the kitchen watching Soul Train, making breakfast, and smoking what’s left of a joint. “It’ll help with your hangover,” he says, passing it to me. I exhale in a chain of rueful coughs. He pours me a glass of water from the tap. The Bastard Felix—my shame, my solace.

  Like a child born out of wedlock, Felix is a roommate born without a lease, a bastard roommate whose origins are illegitimate. Under a mess of broken crackers, he just appeared on my couch one morning. Swaddled in my throw blanket, there was Felix gently snoring, the ignominious offspring of another long night of terrible fun.

  I don’t much mind having a bastard, and Felix for his part is quite happy with the arrangement. I have a pretty decent apartment, what he calls my dukedom. There are certain records of mine he likes to play, certain cheeses I keep in the fridge that he enjoys, and I’m okay with him leaving a few things, too. After he’s gone I’ll discover a pair of fresh socks he’s stuffed discreetly between the wall and the sofa; a T-shirt stuck in with my books, folded up small between The House of Mirth and Martin Eden; or some very expensive volumizing hair conditioner that one of his girlfriends gave him hidden beneath the sink, behind the toilet-bowl cleanser. “She works for a cosmetics company,” he explained when I asked him about it. “She suggests I play up my curls.”

  It’s not an uneven trade either, lest you think he’s taking advantage of me. We have a lot of fun together for one thing. And for another, if I get drunk and pass out somewhere, he’ll wake me up, help me home, and then in the morning take care of breakfast. Felix can make a meal out of anything—a lonely onion, a packet of mustard, salad croutons. . . . This is partially how he earns his keep. He’ll tell high-spirited jokes to ameliorate your hangover while finally putting to use that two-year-old can of olives you thought you’d never eat, that weird jar of pickled mushrooms that came with the apartment, and an unopened container of paprika.

  Since the host wherever Felix is staying is usually too much crippled by the excruciating hangover that almost always results from a night out with Felix to prepare any food himself, Felix’s bizarre meals come as a sweet relief. Only very rarely are his dishes inedible. Once, for example, he made these deviled eggs using chocolate syrup, and another time he made tuna salad with cocktail olives and some other odd ingredients I wasn’t able to identify.

  Inspired after one of his better breakfasts, Felix and I came up with an idea for a TV show. We’d call it, The Wandering Chef, and it would follow Felix as he wakes up on strangers’ couches and makes breakfast out of whatever they happen to have in their kitchen. The first segment would show him coming to in a room where a party was recently held:

  Felix sits up, yawns, stretches and then, delighted to find a roach lying in a nearby ashtray, pulls a lighter from his pocket. Relighting the joint, he inhales deeply until there is nothing left but air between his fingertips. After a moment, the person whose home he passed out in wanders through and, surprised to find Felix (with a whole camera crew) on his couch, awkwardly says, “Hey, man. I didn’t know anybody was still here.” Whereupon, groggily but cheerfully, Felix replies, “Mind if I cook up some breakfast?”

  “Nah,” the host answers, “but my kitchen’s completely empty.” To which Felix responds, “I’ll just have a look.” He opens one cupboard after another before, wild-eyed, he cries out, “Waddya mean ‘empty,’ you got baking soda and dried parsley! Let me see what I can do.”

  Cut to twenty minutes later, and we see Felix serving what he calls “an egg substitute.” The host digs in, “Hmmmmm,” and shakes his head. “How did he do it?” the host asks the camera now. Cut back to the kitchen twenty minutes earlier, and the audience gets to watch Felix create his meal from scratch and cook along with him at home.

  The credits roll as the host and Felix enjoy their breakfast. “Just like Pellegrino!” the host exclaims, following a sip of his Alka-Seltzer water. Then Felix takes a sip of his own glass filled with watered-down ketchup. “Hmmm, just like tomato juice!” he says, raising his glass for a toast.

  We have lots of ideas, Felix and I. Since he’s around so often, we get to talking and come up with all sorts of stuff. I try to write down the ideas as they come to us, in order that we return to them once we’ve finished the joint, that round of backgammon, or “The Hokey Pokey” (I have it on record; mostly I play it at parties, but one time Felix decided we should get some exercise). We’ve got some pretty good ideas for screenplays, too. My favorite right now is City Squirrels!, in which New York City in the not-so-distant future is overrun by vindictive squirrels. It’s like The Birds meets Escape from New York but with squirrels instead of birds.

  I’m more of a scheduler than Felix is, so I’ll say, “Felix, here’s what we’re gonna do. At 1:00, we’re gonna work on City Squirrels! Then at 2:00, we’ll have a fifteen-minute dance break. Then we’ll do an hour’s worth of revision on whatever we’ve come up with.” We’ve never actuall
y gotten to the revision stage though. Usually, we get stuck arguing over details. For example, Felix thinks the squirrels should be noticeably demonic looking with extra-red eyes, while I think it would be much scarier if the squirrels looked completely normal.

  “It begins in Tompkins Square Park, where the squirrels have gotten into some hypodermic needles left over from the ’80s when the park was overrun with junkies, which causes them to mutate and become extra aggressive,” he says.

  “No way! No one should know why it’s happening. It should be an existential apocalypse, a scourge open to interpretation!”

  We’re never able to resolve these disputes so usually after arguing awhile, we’ll just move on to a different project. I’ll get out my crayons and coals and suggest we clear our heads by drawing and return to the script later. I have a drawing table in my apartment, so friends are always making things when they come over. I usually draw The Naked Woman—the heroine of my comic book, which is on sale at St. Mark’s right now; I’ve sold three copies. I’d started out trying to draw classical da Vinci–style nudes, but my nudes tended to look more cartoonish than Vitruvian, so I figured why not go with it, and gave her a drink and cigarette and began adding speech bubbles.

  Felix likes to make drawings of hungry monsters eating their spectacles and the spectacles of others, or hungry spectacles eating monsters. He’s very creative. All of our friends are aware of how creative and talented Felix is—though he’s primarily an actor/comedian, he also paints and draws—which is one of the reasons we let him stay on our couches. We’re like patrons of the arts, sponsoring him, until he makes it. The other reason, I think, is loneliness. Sometimes it’s just nicer to wake up to Felix’s antics than to the terrible sadness that tends to come on huge after a night of furious drinking. Felix will tell jokes and goof around, and you’ll just be too busy laughing or trying not to laugh to review your own foolishness from the night before. Breakfasting with Felix allows you to put off that moment of reckoning, at least for a little while. Though lately I’ve been putting mine off for too long.

  Felix has been here nearly a week. He’s on the couch right now trying to assemble four roaches into a pinner, while I’m at my computer with my feet up on my desk, ready to write but feeling overwhelmingly, unidentifiably sad. How can I write with Felix here? I type out an idea, something I decide I’ll have to get back to later because I can’t concentrate now what with Felix around. I close the document and update the “about me” section of my Friendster profile. I delete what I had before and type, “60% cotton, 40% acrylic.” Save.

  I don’t share all of my ideas with Felix. Sometimes I won’t say anything but just write it down and make a note to implement the idea later, after Felix leaves. For example, the idea I just had is to create adult coloring books. Why not color in some porn or some scenes of East Village squatters sharing needles? Or romantic restaurant dinners between two consenting French adulterers feeding their dogs at the table directly from their spoons? Or scenes of coworkers gossiping around the watercooler about the intern’s terrible behavior at the holiday party, or a panel of you getting high with your college roommate in your parents’ backyard before Thanksgiving dinner, or a scene of you introducing your boyfriend to your parents, him awkwardly shaking your father’s hand in the garage, or a scene of the two of you at a diner two years later, you crying into your ice cream after deciding it’s best to split up, another of you in bed that night, trying to hide your tears from the man you just had sex with, whom you only just met and don’t love, or another of you cyber-stalking your ex on Friendster—a light blue crayon could fill in the light reflected off your face as you stare at the picture you’ve been cropped out of, the one he’s now using as his profile photo. Color it pink, where it says “single.”

  Oh, I come up with lots of ideas and I start to wish Felix would leave in order that I get to them. And then I start to worry that he might leave and that I might have to get to them, and then I just get quiet and overwhelmingly, unidentifiably sad.

  Usually Felix can sense these moments and he’ll rush to tell me a joke so as to curb me away from asking him to leave. I’ll resist for a while and then, eventually, I’ll laugh. But it won’t feel good because it’s terrible to laugh when you’re not happy. It feels like hell, which I imagine as a great party where everyone appears to be having a wonderful time. So I’ll mope around, trying to keep my face solemn in line with my mood while Felix blows straws from his nose.

  Then he’ll decide to cook if he hasn’t already. While Felix gets into it in the kitchenette, I deal with my hangover by staring at the wall and smoking cigarettes. I’ll drink a can of warm beer that I opened last night before falling asleep, or I’ll put my feet up next to the computer and check my email again. I’m on all of these mailing lists so I get all sorts of junk. It’s kind of annoying, but I don’t take myself off the lists because I enjoy all the notifications telling me I have six new messages. If I didn’t get the junk mail, I would rarely get any mail and that would just be too depressing. This way, when I go online I’m never disappointed, but have all this stuff to do. All these Words of the Day to learn. All these ads for penis enlargement pills to delete.

  I learn the definition of gallimaufry—“a hodgepodge; jumble; confused medley.” I select five spam emails and move them to the trash. I press Delete Trash. Felix begins to sing the Growing Pains theme song. I join him in the kitchenette for harmonies. When we’re finished, I ask him what he thinks I should do about so and so, if he thinks he’s going to call me, or if I should call him first and then just pretend he called me, pretend to want to get off the phone already because I’m so busy, and then ask him to please stop calling all the time. Felix says, “Breakfast is served.”

  I help him bring the plates into the living room, and we eat on top of the open backgammon board. Then Felix searches the ashtray for a roach. We get high, play a round of backgammon, and go for a walk. If Felix can’t find any weed in the ashtray though, then we’ll take his parents’ car—if he’s come directly from his mom’s place upstate, he’ll usually have her PT Cruiser with the seat warmers parked around the block—to his dealer’s apartment in Brooklyn, this guy named Forrest who also went to NYU.

  I hate showing up to someone’s home empty-handed, so before we go I’ll take some stale cookies out of an Entenmann’s box and wrap them in aluminum foil and ribbon as if I baked them myself. Or, if I haven’t any cookies, I’ll make a card for him on my drawing table, with a little drawing of me naked holding out flowers and saying, “I love your shirt!” You’d be surprised how much Forrest appreciates it. He basically loves me, but only because I’m always leaving just as soon as I arrive. He always insists on kissing me on the cheek or hand just before I go, as if I were some delicate thing. I get into it, too, and bat my eyelashes and say, “Oh, Forrest!” Almost everybody loves to be addressed by their name, I find. It’s such a simple thing, and yet most people neglect to do it.

  I love the drive over the bridge on the way there. There’s a great fullness that occurs when crossing city bridges, like you’re pressed right up against the surface of your life and can feel all its varying textures. For a few minutes everything comes into a strange focus and you just know it’s one of those moments that would be pivotal if a movie were made about you. One of those moments that would be featured in previews—you looking out the window, thinking about something or other.

  Just as often, Felix won’t have any money to buy weed, and it’ll be too early to go over to a friend’s place to smoke theirs—if they’re not at work, they’re still sleeping or doing who knows what—so we’ll just go downstairs and hang out in his mom’s car for a change of atmosphere while we wait for someone to call us back.

  We sit in his parked car, listen to music, fiddle with our individual seat heaters, and comment on the people walking by and their suitability for potential romantic encounters. Felix says the toothless bum on the corner outside the Tasti D-Lite is my type. I tell Fe
lix I had thought so too, but it didn’t work out. Then we change parking spaces if alternate side of the street parking is in effect and go back upstairs to my dukedom and dance to “Macho Duck.”

  II

  1

  I first met The Bastard at a dorm party in college. He was drunk and people were saying things like, “Who’s that?” and “Oh, that’s Felix” and rolling their eyes while he fell down, broke things, and danced to the sounds of traffic coming through the window. Apparently he got that drunk at lots of dorm parties and was getting something of a reputation for it. People thought he got too drunk. Regardless, he was unquestionably having more fun than anyone else, and when he got tangled in the Christmas lights and began quoting Tron, I said as much.

  Later that night, my roommate May and I smoked a joint with him in the bathroom, and when the joint was close to finished and we both declined a last drag for fear of burning our fingertips, Felix demonstrated how to smoke a roach into nothing but ash. It was almost magical the way he just let his fingers go, like a magician making a whole rabbit disappear.... He doesn’t remember any of it.

  The first time we met that he does remember was a couple of years later. May and I were at Three of Cups for a birthday party. With red Christmas lights, crummy sofas, and skulls punctuating the liquor bottles behind the bar, Three of Cups was at that time very popular among the NYU crowd. Though Felix had graduated a year earlier, he had been scene-partners with the birthday boy, so he was there, too.