THUGLIT Issue Nine

by Jen Conley

  They had me incinerating second copies of outdated highway accident yearbooks for a week. I worked under a fat, pasty girl from Binghampton in New York who, no matter where you were, if you overheard one of her conversations, she would be saying the word Binghampton. I never got that close to her but I had this feeling that if I did she'd smell like toe cheese.

  I suppose I bore this girl some ill will after all in addition to my theory about what she might smell like, and after a week of incinerating highway statistics, I took that girl's bagged lunch and dropped it into the flames with a flurry of DMV spiral notebooks from the 1970's called Vehicular Death by Driving Category. She didn't appreciate that at all. She'd had it all planned out, you see. She was on a diet and everything in that bag was there for a reason. If she didn't eat that fat-free turkey breast on wheat bread and those celery sticks and that half a stewed peach she was going to be fat forever. I watched her set into a sort of rain dance around the shelves under her computer terminal where she'd left the bag. It wasn't long before she started crying like she'd left a baby cat on a train. I pushed my dolly way back into Gov Docs where that man with the Snickers bar lived and jerked off onto some state health compendia.

  Green had a fiancée, a Vietnamese-American girl who worked as a graphic designer for a small press that specialized in critical theory. Jenny Naaktloper represented one of their writers, Abdul Al Jaleed, who became famous for a day for a lyrical essay he wrote on the aesthetics of terrorism. He was Green's. This girl, Green's fiancée, designed Jaleed's dust jacket, which had a bloody dove on it soaring into a pure blue sky out of a lake of smoke and rubble.

  Lovebirds don't make me feel good because I know that in the West our mores are shot and most serious relationships will end in small claims court, a trauma not just for the parties involved but a mess for whoever is sitting on the other end of the couch listening to them. I'm talking statistics. Serotonin poppers and psychoanalyzed fools don't come cheap and it gets my blood up to hear these stories, to be made a voyeur and a consultant when I am at heart a believer in the scourge and hot coals.

  Green and this oriental girl of his might have been a perfect match, but years down the line there would be rifts—chinks in the armor of their love—and it would be painful to watch Green, who cares so much about what we read, suffering that way. I did my best. At least I didn't mean her any harm. And who is to say, in the heat of the moment, who wants what when? We are all fluids vestigially contained, more blood than skin. We are meant to spill and be spilled. Look hard enough into the recessed tissues of the human brain and you will find a second reptile brain growing off it, like some carnival sideshow attraction that is ultimately responsible for much of what we do.

  And yet there was something about my overture and performance that disturbed Green's fiancée at a level I realized I might never be able to understand. She left Green's apartment, his grey silk sheets, for good that morning. In the shower I used Green's verbena and oat protein soap from Provence to clean my asshole.

  Then Bernie Madoff went belly up. Manhattan was the last place I wanted to be in a fiscal crunch. You're talking about an island of two million office people whose idea of hell is budgeting cab fares and happy hour margaritas. Still, as the teen vampire people went away, I stayed on. A stable of mediocre but dependable professionals ate from my hand is why. I bought a second Kaiser Idell desk lamp for my office and put it on an Isamu Noguchi coffee table ordered directly from the Museum of Modern Fucking Art. I watched Will Vinton Christmas specials on a loop on my Leica Pradovit projector. I made my writers watch at least one episode too before I would engage them in conversation, even if it was just to let them go.

  As I rose in the Naaktloper hierarchy (and Green stagnated with his Canadian short story writers and German translators of Holocaust fiction) I began to realize that my shortcomings as a human being were only slightly distorted reflections of my strengths as an agent. Jenny must have realized this too. She put me in charge of avant-garde foodie culture, where no one could do wrong. From avant-garde foodie culture it was no jump at all to post-modern cuisine. I built my team there.

  But Green stayed too. I hadn't seen this coming. Why Green? He was no cash cow. Far from it. His writers would occasionally garner him mention in a literary journal of some repute but there was never anything big. I began to suspect that Green, a year after his break-up, was fucking Jenny too.

  Jenny told me no, she'd never taken Green up to the penthouse. She said Green wasn't really her type. I couldn't see this either. Did she not like tall? Coordinated? Well-endowed? Green was all three. I have always been able to intuit a reservation nesting closely under the skin and I could see Jenny's "really" giving way easily to Green's reluctant charms. It made me mad. I would shout at Jenny. I would punch her even, lightly in the belly, and still she wouldn't put me on a Greyhound bus back south. Jenny needed to have the guts fucked out of her every now and then was why. She needed to get fucked like that and then thrown out on the sidewalk holding just her panties and an umbrella, and that is the truth. If Green was giving it to her, I would give her double. I took injections of saw palmetto berry just to make her sore.

  I always knew I'd never find any religion. I knew it from the very beginning, when we'd go to church on Sundays to listen to what the preacher had to say. Our man had a face so red it looked like it had been buffed with a heel scraper. I knew I'd never find any succor there because while the preacher was preaching I'd be looking at the insides of his stomach. I'd picture the preacher's stomach hollowed out like a jack-o'-lantern and mushy with webs of his disease hanging down like scraped mouth meat. I'd put a double handful of stomach worms in there with razor sharp teeth meant to eat away at the preacher's guts. He'd try to contain it, try to pretend that he was happy with the Lord, who was watching over him, putting him in his suits and laying meat down on the table, but who had in fact forsaken him, who couldn't give a rat's thin ass what happened to the preacher and his gut full of worms. So I knew I'd have to walk far away from there. I just never figured I'd find redemption in Lebanese cuisine.

  I'd just finished reading Jaleed's book. I'd just finished wiping my ass with Jaleed's preface, literally, when the thought registered with a rare clarity that if terrorists could be redeemed by Jaleed's second-rate philosophizing, then in cuisine we were looking at redemption on a scale that would boggle the mind. I saw the terrorist, the throat cancer victim in Peru, the Indian bare-ass and the Manhattan account executive squatting barefoot in a tent pulling at flat bread, nothing working but their reptile brains, their lips moving like bird beaks over burnt sesame and olive pits. Put enough of them in a room together and you've got your revolution, your mass orgasm, a religious tide headier than the strictures of the Jew or the Muslim, the Baptist Christian praying at his clapboard Christ. I knew you could make a buck peddling that kind of junk.

  It hit me hard and I stayed in bed that morning with a legal pad and a pen. I went back to work three days later and made Jenny invent me a new niche creative non-fiction subgenre I would call Universal Foodism.

  A Universal Foodist was no environmentalist. He did not necessarily wash himself with Castile soap and wear a porkpie hat and push an $800 stroller. He did not care particularly about third world exploitation or the Kyoto Agreement or why we weren't in it. He was after knowledge in the biblical sense. He would know his food as well as Noah knew his daughters.

  When you get into hummus in that sense you're lost. I shelved my Leica projector and replaced it with an Oster Fusion Blender, the one you see flashes of on chef reality TV instead of a can of Pepsi or a Nike tennis shoe. My office began to take on that smell, of chopped coriander and liquefied sesame, of softening garbanzo beans. I experimented. In no time my second Kaiser Idell looked like it had been destroyed by a sloppy paint crew.

  Don't think it was easy. You will grind and grind and never get that consistency all the best food writers tell you is out there waiting to be experienced in some out-of-the-way cor
ner of the souk next to a button seller's shop in Sour. My writers began to avoid me, accounts began to ask for my receipts, but my book, the book I needed to find someone to write, was taking shape in my head.

  And then Green was sent in. He became the leader of some team I was now part of. That day I didn't feel good. I felt bad and I blamed Green.

  The series was called Shoe String Pocket Guides and Jenny had put Green in charge of the pitch we would make to Shattered Bone Press, then a holding of Grove-Atlantic. There would be 25 titles, geared to Yankees who washed themselves with Castile soap and wore pork pie hats and pushed $800 strollers. The Shoe String Pocket Guide would make these people feel financially constrained enough to feel hip. It would direct them to a brothel that had actually been tested beforehand for STDs, to a possible Al Qaeda meeting site and then let them choose. Beirut would be one city on the list, if Shattered Bone could sneak a writer in through the anti-aircraft gunfire.

  After I had my way with Green's fiancée, Green withdrew. We stopped drinking together after work. Green did. I kept going to the same places, picking up the same ass. Green had moved elsewhere. I suspect Green's reptile brain had told him what had happened that morning. He might have even thought she'd said yes. He might not have known which was worse. Or he might have smelled me on his sheets or found me on his soap. He never said anything about it. Just once I thought he might have.

  This was after I'd moved out of gay-lez juvie fiction and into avant-garde foodie culture. Michele Broyard, who is a man and is French but speaks better English than I do, put out a book on the philosophy of eating with your feet. It was a compendium more than a treatise, anecdotal, handsomely presented. Everything you needed to move a book among that readership of fools. Broyard had extinct tribes in his book who were competent foot eaters, the handicapped, and otherwise adventurous individuals who went in for this sort of niche eating. It wasn't a bad read, by which I mean I didn't wipe my ass with the preface, and Broyard got a notice in the New York Times Book Review, in a side panel among two other foodie books that were pure trash.

  Broyard mentioned Jenny Naaktloper as the shining light behind his success, by which he meant the piece of ass he was fucking semi-regularly on his New York City runs. I didn't mind. Broyard was French and I couldn't really see myself getting jealous over a Frenchman. The important thing is that Jenny had gotten her ass licked and I got a third Kaiser Idell reading lamp, which I now keep in my bathroom. I left the office early that day with Green.

  Green and I went to Max Fish to celebrate. We were sharing a bottle of Porfidio Anejo and Green asked me to arm wrestle. He'd thrown himself back into physical culture after his break-up and this was all he would really talk about. He said he would regain the body he'd had before he'd fallen into the pit and broken his collar bone and gotten that peculiar way of holding his head. He would condition that out of existence. I had the feeling when he mentioned this that he might have known about my pushing him in too; that he'd realized I was the bad news dogging his days, which he always managed to surmount or escape anyway, and that he was after me now. I was afraid he was going to want to break my arm.

  When it was over, and Green and I were in the hospital-bound taxi, Green with his radius bone hanging from his elbow like a broken chair back, I knew he would never bother me again with these insinuations. Green had managed to snag an ashtray on his way to the ground, a memento of our friendship he would say later. He was gripping the thing firmly in his left hand despite the searing pain in his right and I wondered, if it had been his left arm that I'd broken, if I might not have been wearing the imprint of that ashtray for years to come.

  I agreed to keep the ashtray for Green until he got out of the hospital, but when Broyard stopped by my office the next day and learned that it had come from Max Fish, he insisted on having it. He was a smoker after all, Green and I were not.

  I blamed Green because he had sold himself out. God knows he had no interest in selling garbage like the Shoe String Guides. He should have been working on turning up the next Bolaño, a solid New Directions read that would end up on someone's bookshelf or bedside table as a pretty black-and-white decoration. I blamed him for not breaking my arm. I blamed him for reading Don Quixote and taking pleasure from it. I blamed him for being a Jew and not caring, for not wanting to be what I was. There were other things maybe too.

  I carried that bad feeling around in me for a while until I decided I'd encircle it with some psychic healing. I taught myself to wake up smiling from the joy of all the little things inflicted on others that I could avoid, those who swatted at their daily troubles like a horse with an endless sheet of flies on its flank. My philosophy was I don't care about the flea colonies where you do your living. I wouldn't let you corrupt my air. My philosophy was: better for that man to slip under the Queensbound Express than for me to miss a taxi in the rain—and I'd make sure he knew why.

  So I began to smile as regular as a door hinge. There were times when I felt like a wind-up coon because I'd have a grin ripped so hard across my face it hurt to breathe. But I began to feel good too, like I feel good now.

  Broyard was the man to write my book. I realized that right after Green got out of the hospital. But then Broyard too fell victim to the power of my idea. He booked a one-way flight from Orly to Beirut before he'd gotten the go-ahead from Jenny. Broyard went with an assistant, a research fellow from the Sorbonne. Their destination was Baalbek.

  They never found Broyard's head. His eyeballs they did eventually find, in an empty apartment outside Baalbek, nestled in an inner jacket pocket sewed in especially for Broyard's iPad adapter. They were still full of fluid, which meant something to forensics. The project bounced back to Naaktloper. I saw the angle before Green did and had Jenny deep throat me while she was on a conference call with Black Heron Press before I agreed to tell her what I thought.

  I'd never seen Jenny hang up on a potential sugar daddy so I knew she was seeing the same shade of green I was. I thought it might be a good idea to slug Jenny one, just to see where it would put me. I had a list of clients I could get to do what I wanted for my project and I didn't need Jenny anymore.

  It came right out of me like I'd had it coiled up inside since before Jenny was born. I could feel her upper teeth on my knuckles through her upper lip, the soft tissue of that lip forming a wound. My legs gave out. I guess I was a little tense too. Jenny just smiled like a little girl who'd fallen on her birthday cake by accident, like she wouldn't know how to react until I showed her how. I smiled and so she smiled. I left her there smiling like that with the come and blood and mascara sliding out of her blackening mouth. I went over to Green's office and we contacted a face who could hold a microphone in a sandstorm.

  Rupert Murdoch bought the rights over the phone. I got my cut, a handsome sum, Green got his. We'd just gone multimedia and I could see that if I knocked a few more teeth out of Jenny's head, Jenny Naaktloper Literary Agency would one day soon become Naaktloper and Colligan Literary Associates and I wouldn't have to get bloody-gums smooth-talking Yankees in the Hamptons over mimosas and salmon ceviche anymore. We got right to work.

  If you haven't seen Hummus Hunters, eleven million people no better or worse off than you have. It has everything the other reality shows don't: real danger, religion, exotic but seedy locations, and a theoretically endless quest. Green wasn't unhappy. He was going to move in with Jenny, to the penthouse. Jenny had told me this, not Green. We no longer shared these intimacies, Green and I. My philosophy told me not to worry about it. I saw that express train coming instead and the nigger on the microphone speaking gibberish at carloads of office workers with their ears plugged into other voices, the Queensbound Express, and that fellow with no desire to be happy who I'd convince to hug the third rail for the betterment of mankind—which included me and my Kaiser Idells, my Isamu Noguchi and my Oster Fusion Blender and Will Vinton and Jenny's violated mouth full of our mixed fluids, her perfectly made-up face blackened by my fist. I en
circled my jealousy with a cyst of love, a smile a city block long. I knew it would make my position more interesting anyway, charting the evolution of our relationships.

  I invited Green for a drink at the Belmont Lounge the night before his cast came off. We hadn't talked outside the office in a while. He was nervous and I thought I knew why and it made me giddy. I ordered another round of Hendrick's martinis on the wings of this high.

  Green eventually confessed. I told him I'd suspected it, for the reason that he and Jenny were a perfect match and perfect matches are usually just a question of time. He seemed to believe me. I said nothing about Jenny's other virtuosities.

  Green was worried about mixing books with Jenny. I said he shouldn't be. But he was worried. I said I sometimes wiped my ass with our clients' books. Green said he knew and I wondered when I'd told him, if I'd told anybody else or he'd told anybody else. I told him he should probably ask Jenny to remove that camera above the elevator.

  We drank. Green felt it more than I did. His bad shoulder loosened up. It got warm, peppery, inside the Belmont. We were reaching the acme of our happiness that night.

  Then it was three o'clock. I felt like walking. I slipped one of the Belmont's translucent ashtrays into my coat pocket for Green and we headed uptown, passing night owls, old tramps, garbage, neon. Cars made noise by the river, the barges were moored or sliding by. Certain neighborhoods we passed through left a bad taste in the mouth. We gravitated desultorily towards the East River, where Green lived many blocks up. It was hard to imagine that concrete had spawned so much neon and noise.

  We walked passed Green's apartment on 82nd and York and kept walking to Gracie Square and then to Carl Schurz Park. Green was in a talkative mood. He'd decided Jenny and he were a good match after all, but he sounded like he was trying to prove this to himself. Obviously Green had gotten cold feet. He mentioned a few reasons why it should work, why it had to work. Most of these concerned literary habits and literary ambitions. His old pit wound had come back and the air had sobered him enough to think he wasn't drunk. We walked down to the water.