The Fuck-Up

by Arthur Nersesian

  During the chilly January days, the coldest days of winter, after the weeks of being indoors, I was stir crazy and spent as much time outdoors as my circulatory system allowed. In the mornings I would take the train back to the East Village and wander around. All those air-conditioned stores that I would cool off in during the previous summer’s swelter were the same stores that I warmed up in during those frosty days of winter.

  “Strange,” Helmsley commented out of the blue one chilly morning. “Your generation is the first in years that hasn’t produced a convincing subculture.”

  “How about punks, what do you call them?”

  “Unconvincing. Now, you take hippies. They had a talk, a literature, central figures, splinter groups—a vision. They were political and they were even anti-fashion. Punks are kind of a negation of growth, at best a fad.”

  “That’s not true. Punks have a music, and a style.” But he had a point. I did feel that this was an inopportune time to be young.

  “The only ones who have any kind of legacy are those who have. There’s no distinguishable counter-culture…”

  “What’s in a counter-culture? It isn’t that important,” I responded, sick of hearing him bad mouth “my age.”

  “The counter-culture eventually becomes the culture. Max Eastman, a commie as a youth, was a power-broker when he got older. Angry young men eventually get the reins, still have enough steam in them…”

  “Change the subject.”

  “See, you’re so apathetic, you’re an old man. You should have more of a youthful identity.”

  “Youthful identity?”

  “Sure, did you ever see the film Woodstock? You should go to some Woodstock. Where do the young folks gather? You should go there.”

  “Where do young folks gather?” It sounded like a Peter, Paul and Mary tune. With all the free time on my hands, I decided to hunt down some young. I got off the R train at Broadway and Eighth and slowly walked down the east side of Broadway. The street was a bustling youth industry. Chic teen stores, stocked with the latest fashions-for-juniors crowded the block. I flowed in and out of each one, pulled like a cork on the consuming post-adolescent sea. Tower Records, appropriately located at the end of this succession, on Fourth Street, was the apex of teen exploitation, the drain at this ditch.

  With MTV-tuned televisions posted every ten feet or so, hung up high but aimed downward precisely at eye level, allied with Dolby-blasted music, this was too much for a youngster to resist. By and large, I found the whole rock ‘n’ roll racket sordid. Motivated by a shameless ocean of dollars, basic adolescent compulsions—principally sex and violence—were serviced. Catchy tunes and sappy lyrics were wound together, moronic DJ’s repetitiously played them out, and by the time they were on Casey Kasem’s “American Top Forty,” most kids felt like pariahs if they didn’t own the selected album.

  Flipping through twenty years of rock albums—the hippie albums of the sixties, the disco motif of the seventies, and on to the punk appeal of the eighties—you could see the development of fashions. The contemporary hype was colorful androgyny, which allowed a kind of guilt-free flirtation with homosexuality. One could feel strange attractions to these semi-boy, semi-girl entertainers that looked like sexy Dr. Seuss creatures.

  It was after five, and the rush hour was in effect. While wedged between angles of sweaty anatomy in the Brooklyn-bound R train, I was subjected to bland disconnected lines of conversation.

  “The man’s not for you Dana, he’s a sex pig.” Another lady as tall as she was wide, squeezed next to me jerkily and pulled off her yak-like coat revealing a sleeveless, tasteless print dress. Like a fish in a filthy aquarium, I kept gasping upward for air. When the train screeched into Rector Street, she fell on me just as I was inhaling open-mouthed. Her bearded armpit sunk into my mouth; it tasted like a Big Mac.

  She unloaded with a herd of people at Whitehall Street, the next stop. Carefully I maneuvered myself into a more guarded position by the door. A girl with an accent and a bunch of luggage was talking to a spindly, oily fellow who looked like a future presidential assassin. “Listen to me, all you have to do is go to Twelfth Street and ask for Miguel. Tell him Tanya sent you. He’s promised me it’s yours.”

  “But I have no idea how to manage a movie theater.”

  “There’s nothing to it. It pays well and it’s the easiest thing in the world.”

  “But I don’t even have a work visa.”

  “Listen, I told you this before—just make up a social security number. They never check; if you’re really worried pay someone a couple of dollars and use theirs. Everybody does it.”

  “What’s the pay?”

  “Five bucks an hour.”

  “Well, let me think about it a couple of days.”

  “Say,” the girl said, peering at the digits of her watch. “My plane leaves in fifteen minutes. Where is this train to the plane?”

  “It’s supposed to be at Jay Street,” the greasy youth replied as our train pulled into Court.

  “Get off here and walk to Jay,” I warned her. The doors opened and both of them looked at me strangely.

  “This train doesn’t stop at Jay Street,” I yelled as I hopped out between the doors sliding shut. As the subway slowly tugged out of the station, I watched the girl’s face turn to panic, and she quickly questioned people around her. There was no way in hell that she was going to escape from the city today.

  As I walked out of the station and down Court Street homeward, I felt sorry for her because she had unknowingly just given me a job. If that oily kid could do it, so could I. He was not sure he could handle it and was going to think it over for a couple of days. Think away, oily boy I’m going to grab that job tomorrow. As I walked, I wondered what kind of theater it could be; it had to be either a second-run or a repertory theater. Those were the only ones that would pay five an hour and hire someone with no prior experience. If that schmuck could do the job, I certainly would be able to handle it.

  The next day, I spent as much time as I ever had in preparing a good appearance. I wasn’t sure as to where on Twelfth Street this miraculous theater would be, so I took the IRT to Fourteenth and Seventh, got off at the Twelfth Street exit, and started walking.

  The first theater I saw was the Greenwich. While working at the Saint Mark’s, I heard that these conglomerate theater companies were very “by the book.” They certainly didn’t hire people off the street and make them instant managers; you had to work your way up tiresome and tedious ranks. I passed by that theater, heading east. The subway export said, “Just off Twelfth Street,” which might’ve meant Thirteenth. Since the Quad, “four theaters under one roof,” was on Thirteenth, I checked it out. Going up to a glass screen with a hole in the middle, I asked if there were any jobs available. Someone yelled no, and on to the next theater. Back on Twelfth, between Fifth Avenue and University Place, was a small repertory dive called the Cinema Village. I figured that this had to be the one. I went up to the outdoor box office. A cool brunette was sitting on a stool. I gave her a foreknowing grin. I knew that one day we’d be great friends, we’d maybe even sleep together. It would be funny, one day, to look back on this first time when we saw each other. When she finally looked up from the curriculum she was reading, she snapped her gum.

  “Hey there,” I finally shoved my face up to the dome-shaped hole where cash passed hands.

  “If you want a ticket, it’s four bucks.”

  “You know, dear, I’ll give you a pointer. You should be nicer to strangers. One day they might be your employers.”

  “If you’re waiting for someone do it over there.” She pointed away from the door.

  “I’m here to see your boss.”

  “One second.” She picked up a phone and mumbled something into it. In a moment a short stocky guy in his thirties with curly hair and wire-framed glasses appeared.

  He opened a big glass door allowing me into the lobby. “I’m Nick Miedland, the manager. Can I help yo
u?”

  “Yeah, do you know Tanya?” I said in a low voice.

  “Yes,” he looked nervously at the box office girl, “what about her?”

  “She sent me.”

  “Tanya?” He said looking behind me.

  “Right,” I murmured as I moved farther down the lobby away from the bitchy ticket girl.

  “Tanya said you had a managerial opening for me.”

  “She said that? Well, I’m sorry but there are no openings.” I gave him an insider’s smile.

  “Come on, Nick.” I took the liberty of using his first name. “Tanya said just yesterday that there was an opening.”

  “One second please,” he said and then looked behind me. He addressed the girl in the ticket booth, “What’s all this about a manager’s opening?”

  “What?” she replied.

  “This gentleman claims that you’ve been telling him about some kind of manager’s opening?”

  “No, not her,” I corrected, “Tanya told me about it.”

  “This is the only Tanya I know.”

  “I must have the wrong place,” I muttered.

  Without a further word, he turned and went back to his office. Two Tanyas in two days, what a fluke. I smiled apologetically at the present Tanya as I left, but she only gave me a nasty expression. At least she had a job. As I walked away, I felt increasingly foolish. Half way up the block, I turned and yelled back, “Fuck you, Tanya!!”

  I didn’t know of any other theaters on Twelfth Street and wondered if I’d gotten a bum steer. So I wandered down Twelfth and stopped into the Strand Bookstore. There, I took the elevator up to the seventh floor to drop in on Kevin. Helmsley had introduced me to him a couple years earlier, when he was working part-time in the basement and had just entered some Columbia master’s program. Over the years, Kevin had slaved his way up to the rare book room. Whenever I wanted to buy a book, I brought it up to Kevin and he would purchase it for me with his employee discount. We talked a bit about books and finds. Eventually he had to get back to cataloguing books, so I went downstairs and browsed a while. Fortunately nothing caught my interest. I wouldn’t have been able to afford anything anyway. I wandered with increasing worry along Twelfth, eastward. At least, if all else failed, I had enough to get a slice of cheese babka at Christine’s Coffee Shop on First Avenue.

  At Third Avenue, on both Twelfth and Eleventh Streets, NYU dorms were erected around 1986; students rinse the area. But back in the early eighties parking lots filled the sites. The emptiness was a marketplace for prostitutes. They would hook their tushies on car fenders waiting for a trick. I remembered their tight bright clothes were making promises that their wasted bodies couldn’t keep, and for a while I watched the middle-aged, fat-assed men decelerate their long American cars with Jersey plates and consider the day’s slim pickings.

  The morning had started with hope for a good job, but that belief was slowly sinking with the sun. Each of the blocks went by without a theater. In despair, it seemed somehow appropriate that these lost souls were stationed here. Each of them must’ve had a day like this when their hopes started strong and erect, but slowly, one by one, all possibilities dwindled until they wound up on a street like this one, watching other girls hanging their sides on fenders like meat on a hook, waiting for a buyer. Seeing this they must’ve figured, “I’ve got nothing else going,” and then joined the others.

  Looking northward up Third Avenue, I noticed a guy walking with a pretty blond boy in a sailor’s outfit. Together the pair walked, arm in arm, heading toward the sleazy porn theater half a block up. The entrance of the place was circular and covered with dirty brown shag carpet, a giant orifice. Above it proudly flapped a flag: “The Zeus Theater.”

  Quick as a fart came the revelation. This was a theater near Twelfth Street! Even though AIDS was widely known, this was about a year or so before the Post ran headlines like “Grandma Dies of AIDS.” The hysteria was still a ways off. Between the NYU dorms and the pandemic pandemonium, the Zeus Theater had little chance of survival. It was closed down in the late eighties. Instead of taking the view that I’d be exposing myself in a pathogenic porn theater, it looked like just another offbeat job.

  So I pondered for a moment with a renewed hope. Could this be the place? And if I did go in and was offered a job, would I take it?

  My affections were never inclined beyond females. But this was a job and I was broke. I had dropped out of college just before my graduation. I had no marketable skills, no connections, and no real ambition. After a succession of degrading minimum-wage jobs, I finally might luck into something with a salary, in which I’d most likely be unsupervised.

  Checking both ways, just to be sure that no past pillars of my old Midwestern community were lumbering by, I followed the middle-aged man and his Ganymede inside. They paid and together they romantically squeezed through a single angle of the turnstile. I looked through the dirty bulletproof Plexiglas and saw an elderly olive-skinned lady sitting on a stool.

  “Excuse me,” I yelled through four small vertical slits.

  “Please turn it,” she interrupted, pointing to the turnstile. “They only turn it once.”

  I turned it and yelled back in, “Is Miguel in?”

  “A segundo.” She replied in an accent, and then yelled into a cheap intercom.

  “You wait here.”

  I stepped to one side, turned away from the door and waited. After the turnstile spun a couple of times, I turned to the entrance and watched those coming through. They were mainly businessmen types, family men who didn’t fit my naive idea of what gays looked like. A door finally opened and a very young man with only dark peach fuzz for a moustache introduced himself as Miguel and asked if he could be of any assistance.

  “Yes,” I replied, shaking his hand, and in a conspiratorially low voice I explained, “Tanya sent me.”

  “Oh, I’ve been waiting for you. Come this way.” He led me around the turnstile and down a narrow hallway in the theater. “So how’s Tanya faring?”

  “Fine, fine.” The whole place was darkly lit. Occasionally I would brush shoulders with some passing patron. Finally stopping at the end of the corridor, he opened the door and flipped on a light. His room was a modified closet, the fluorescent bars of light revealed a macramé Yin Yang calendar, a small refrigerator, and a tiny television set.

  “One second,” he said, flipping his desk lamp on and turning off the fluorescent flood. He offered me a group of film canisters as a seat. When I sat, he leaned back in his swivel chair and began, “So talk to me.”

  I told him my name and gave him Helmsley’s address and then explained that I had theater experience at the Saint Mark’s. About to elaborate on my theater know-how, he interrupted.

  “I don’t want a resume.”

  “Pardon?”

  “I want to know what you’re thinking.”

  “About what?” I asked.

  “Just about.” And he leaned back further in his swivel chair and set his thin arms on the rest of the chair and threw his head back.

  “Well,” I said, leaning forward on the dented canister, “I’ll level with you. I’m in dire straits for a job, and I’m probably not qualified, but I am willing to put a lot of energy into learning, and I guess that’s really what I’m thinking about.”

  “Well.” He grinned. “Let me first ease your tension. You’ve got the job. Now, I’d like you to feel unencumbered. Go ahead and shake out your arms and legs.”

  He started shaking his arms and legs demonstrating how it was done. I followed him. “Now, tell me how you feel and what you’re aware of.”

  This was all very weird. “I feel very happy.”

  “Is that precisely how you feel, pleased as opposed to satisfied?”

  I thought about it a moment and replied, “Well, I am exceptionally pleased, but as I adjust to the news of being hired—security, authority, responsibility—as this sets in, I taper off into satisfaction.”

  “Good, ve
ry good. Okay, now I want you to close your eyes and think about this: I was only lying to you. I’m sorry, but you simply don’t have the qualifications. I simply can’t give you the job.” He then paused. I thought about this a moment: punch this guy in the fucking face and get out of here. But then I realized that to him this was one big controlled setting.

  “I am unhappy.” This guy wanted me to do some kind of Isadora Duncan dance, symbolizing and acting out feelings. “I am shrouded in constant shade, waiting for liberation. I am a barnacle forever stuck to the bow of a ship.”

  “Good, good.” He nodded approvingly. “Now you’ve got the job again and you know that you have it. But you’ve experienced the knowledge of not having it.”

  I paused and didn’t know what to do next. “So?”

  “So what does this knowledge offer you? How do you see yourself here?”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “I want to see not anticipation, but action. I want to see you working here tomorrow, right now.”

  “You mean you want me to envision myself working here?” I looked over at him and he just watched me. “All right, I can do that.” I closed my eyes and tried to see myself walking through my theater. “Yep, there I am.”

  “What are you doing?”

  “I’m handling the many chores and duties that occur in the course of a given day.” Then opening my eyes, I asked him, “What kind of chores and duties occur in the course of a given day?”

  “We’ll go into that later, right now I want you to explore your anxieties.”

  “Huh?”

  “Look, you don’t realize this, but you are on those dimensions simultaneously. Recollection is just calling forth those moments. Think about it. With any given situation there’s usually a predisposed action.”