The Fuck-Up

by Arthur Nersesian

  “Hold on there. There is one thing.” She led me into a back room. “Look at this.” She pointed out a large rusty pot filled with stagnant water.

  “Why don’t you dump it?” I replied, not knowing what else she might have wanted.

  “Because the roof’s leaking, stupid.”

  “Okay I’ll make a report of it.” And again I turned to go.

  “Hey stupid, how are you going to make a report on something you haven’t seen?”

  “Huh?”

  “Don’t you think you should check the roof? It might just be a leaky pipe or something.”

  “It’s not necessary,” I said. I didn’t want to go up to the roof.

  “Check the roof!” she insisted. Then she led me to a steel ladder that was bolted into the wall. I climbed up the ladder that led into darkness. In the darkness I realized that a metal hatchcover was tied down with thick hemp ropes. I undid the ropes, shoved up the hatch, and continued up to the roof. Outside it was dark and drizzling. I walked around the roof awhile. It was dirty and littered. I accidentally kicked through a rusty tar can. At the very rear of the roof I noticed a rattly old fire escape. But it was too dark to see any cracks in the tar so I climbed back down the ladder and reknotted the ropes.

  “Yep,” I told the projectionist, “there’s definitely a leak.”

  “Well, get on the ball and fix it or expect a grievance from the union.”

  I hurried downstairs, away from the projectionist and out of her testy domain. It was a flash lesson in the value of warm secure boredom. When I went by the box office, the lady told me that I had two calls: one from Miguel checking to see that all was well, one from Marty. He left a number. When I dialed it, an older male with an accent answered. I introduced myself.

  “This is Sergei,” he only gave his given name. “So you are the young man whom Marty recommended.”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, when can we meet?”

  “Whenever you like.”

  “Tomorrow at noon then.”

  “Perfect.”

  “Do you know Caramba?”

  “On Broadway.”

  “Very good, brunch. It will be my treat.”

  “Wonderful.”

  “Oh,” he suddenly exclaimed. “I’m looking at my appointment book and I realize that I have a conflict. Damn, damn. And that would have been perfect, too. Let’s see…” I could hear him flipping through small pages. “Damn, I’m overbooked. Meet me at Caramba for a quick meal, and if we haven’t resolved things you’ll just have to accompany me on my next appointment.”

  “I don’t mind,” I replied, as if I’d been asked.

  “Wonderful,” he replied, and that was that; I still didn’t know this “celebrity director.” No sooner did I put down the phone than I realized the upcoming problems. I had no money, no clothes, and nowhere to spend the night. I had already borrowed what little petty cash could be spared for dinner, and I had already borrowed against my first paycheck from Miguel.

  If worse came to worst, I could spend the night in the theater, on the office floor, and scrub my clothes clean in the sink so that I could look half-presentable tomorrow. But I was looking more and more raggedy. The right sleeve of my jacket and the left bottom leg of my pants were cut off.

  Paradoxically all I could do to fight off the anxiety was flip through Miguel’s Village Voice, a paradox because the Voice usually gave me anxieties. First, there were the cartoons, Feiffer’s and Stan Mack’s Real Life Funnies. Arthur Bell had just died and Musto had not yet put the edge to his column. With Newfield, Hamill, and Hentoff it had a solid crew of writers, but they usually left me feeling politically incorrect. Then there were the film reviews; this week both Sarris and Edelstein found something subtle to attack in blatantly bad films. And then the Literary Supplement and eventually you wound up in the classifieds. The personals were fun, but apartments were foremost in mind. If Sergei’s apartment fell through, the only chance I would have of staying within a half-hour radius of the Village was a roommate situation. I quickly skimmed the prices, but even the shares were above my impoverished means. I did notice two relatively low rentals. But upon reading the specifications, I saw I didn’t fit in. The first one read: “SWM 40 successful architect seeks SF age 20 to 32 to share bedroom of luxury West Village Condo, rent $210/month. Send photo to P.O. Box 878…” The other went: “Companionship and good times, WM willing to share one bedroom upper West side low rent in exchange for light duties, candlelight breakfast for two.” Getting an apartment in the city was serious business.

  With the buzz of the intercom, I was informed by the box office lady that the last show had begun. It was time to calculate the final balance. In the box office she counted out the money in the till. It came to five hundred and twenty-four dollars. It was a good night.

  Touching the stack of cash sent a jolt through me. Over the past two years, I had learned the fullest value of money. The American Dream for me wasn’t leisure, just day-to-day survival. Soon I was told the film was over. I cosigned the cashier report, turned on the inside lights, turned off the front marquee lights, locked the turnstile, and said good night to the box office lady.

  I took the cash into the office, locked the door and recounted it. It was then that I noticed the tremor in my hands. There was something very philosophical about money. I filled out a deposit slip, bound the whole thing together with a rubber band, and stuffed it into a night deposit bag. I was about to zip and lock the bag, but I couldn’t bring myself to do it. I opened the bag and took out the money. It was tightly stacked and banded—it felt like a truncheon. I held it in my hand for a moment, just weighing the heaviness of it, the power. I unbanded the bills and put them in my pocket. It wasn’t close enough to me. I put the money between my shirt and my chest. But then a sound or something awoke me. The money wasn’t mine, it was a piece of costume. I took the money out of my shirt, rebanded it, and with the deposit slip zippered it back into the night deposit bag.

  The automatic turnstile dial amount was framed in the wall; I transcribed the number and checked to make sure the amount was correct. Every time a patron entered the theater, through the turnstile, the digit increased one. A speck of dirt was caked over the tenth digit. Using my fingernail, I scratched off the dirt, the tiny square of glass moved just a bit. Jotting down the figure, I subtracted it from the matinee figure; it came to one hundred and thirty-one, the number of patrons that had come tonight. Multiplying that by four, the amount came out correctly to five hundred and twenty-four bucks.

  What prevented me from taking that money? Or at least part of it? First, there were the Spanish-speaking cashiers, but their memories were always a clean slate the next day, never remembering or reporting anything of yesterday. The only real safeguard was that dial in the wall.

  It started as a curiosity that crystallized into a hunch. When I scratched the tiny frame of glass and realized it was a little loose, I found that with a great deal of tedious angling the glass could slip up just fractions of an inch. But this was just enough space to wedge a straightened paper clip. The paper clip caught into the tiny teeth of the right cog. I flipped the clip up and the small dial turned back a digit. Each time it turned back a digit, it meant four dollars were mine. It was like turning back the very hands of time.

  A sudden knock at the door shattered everything. “Who’s there?”

  “Day’s done, see you tomorrow.” It was the irate projectionist.

  I realized that it was time to lock up the theater so I quickly inspected the place. Although no film was on the screen and the lights were turned up, there were still guys doing it downstairs and in the auditorium, so I turned the house lights up full and yelled that the theater was closing. I could hear pants being buckled and, slowly, guys filed out. After a moment, I checked the place again: empty. I turned off the lights, pulled down the drop gate in front of the theater, and locked the glass doors. I returned to the office and locked the office door.

 
; With a tempting money supply before me, I needed something other than my own desire to calibrate the flow of cash into my pocket. On the day-to-day desk calendar it was procedure to dash down the amount of money we totalled each night. I spent the next hour summing up two averages. I summed up the average amount that we had brought in every night for the past month, next I figured out the average amount we took in every day this week. It took me about an hour before I realized that sitting in front of me was approximately two hundred dollars above the average amount earned each day that week, and approximately a hundred dollars above the average amount earned that month. I decided to pocket two hundred bucks, and dismiss it as an unprofitable night. I rewrote a new cashiers report, and reforged all the signatures. While in the middle of this, there was a soft knock at the door.

  “Who is it?”

  It was only Thi, the night porter, another false alarm. After leaving, I walked to the night deposit on Fourteenth and Broadway and made the drop. Heading up Broadway, I made a left on Twenty-third and walked over to the fashionable George Washington Hotel, just north of Gramercy Park. It was a far cry from either the filthy YMCA or Helmsley’s hell house.

  Even though rooms were cheaper by the week, I wasn’t sure how long it would be before I could move into Sergei’s house. Money was still a handicap, but I had recuperated much since earlier that evening. At the bar in the lounge, I had a couple of whisky sours and relaxed. After a while, I took the elevator to the tidy room; there I stripped and slipped between clean, cold sheets. I tried but couldn’t sleep.

  I thought about Helmsley and his twisted beloved one. Trains of thought jumped tracks while I waited for sleep. Eventually I ended up at that old and familiar terminus. I always ended up thinking about death. Looking up at the strange shadows along the clean ceiling, I thought about how one day my awareness and everything about me would be no more.

  A moment later fresh morning light poured into the room, and I was aware only of being in a strange room. I had this sudden panic. I needed to know the time. I called downstairs and the desk clerk said it was nine A.M. While dressing, I considered the two appointments of the day. The first appointment was with the director, and then I had to try to get a lunch date with Glenn. The trick was looking both punkishly gay for Sergei, but afterwards older and responsible for Glenn, the career women. It was still early and I didn’t have to evacuate the room until noon. I checked my key with the desk clerk and left to hunt for a punk wardrobe. In the clothing shops of Twenty-third Street, I purchased all those styles of clothes that I had always ridiculed—black, torn, tight, and aggressive looking. Even in the early eighties they were passé. I saw a line of male cosmetics while passing by a drugstore. The counter girl gave me profuse advise on what mascara to buy, then applied it thickly and held up a mirror before me. I looked like a vampire, but it was probably exactly what Sergei was looking for. She also sprayed me with a new body scent called Truce and put a touch of a cologne called Bondage gently behind my ears.

  Hair was still one of the most important canvases of fashion, and in order to be convincing, I needed an authentic haircut. I got to a pay phone and called the Astor Place Hair Cutters; that was the haircut place. A couple of years ago, the Astor Place Hair Cutters was just a couple of older barbers going out of business like most other old-fashioned barbers, but apparently one of them snapped his fingers one morning and learned how to pander to the fashions. Some guy on the phone said they had an hour’s waiting time. It was too long.

  I walked around the area until I passed one salon, which had a sign in the window. It read, “Special, this week only, $25 for any fashion plus a free nipple piercing!” The walls of the place were lined with posters of punks, and all the barbers were ambisexual punks. Squeamishly I rubbed my chest and entered. Until now, I had only patronized the barber college on the Bowery where a haircut cost only three bucks. I put haircutting on the same parallel as fingernail clipping and tooth brushing. Twenty-five-buck haircuts seemed ludicrous, but I rationalized it as down payment for Sergei’s apartment. I chose the flashiest barber, a guy who had the colors of the spectrum running down his mohawk and, sitting in his chair, I nervously asked him for his most daring concept.

  “Daring concept?” he asked. “Heel and sit.”

  “I’m just a bit nervous,” I confessed. He leaned the chair back and fitted my head into a sink. He shampooed my hair, wrapped it in a towel, patted it dry, and then started clipping. Initially I watched him in the mirror, but after a while, I couldn’t bear it. I looked away at the shelf where he kept all his accessories. After about ten minutes, he started up his blow drier. Fashion, which I had neglected so long, was finally taking revenge on me.

  “Finished,” he finally said. “Now remove your shirt for the piercing.”

  It could have been worse. I looked like Billy Idol. My hair stood on end, electroshock style. All that junk he kept pouring into my scalp was peroxide. I was bleachy blond.

  “Divine, no?” He displayed me to the other hair virtuoso who, due to the absence of any other clients, inspected.

  “What about the nipple piercing? It comes free.” With a tiny, long acupuncture-type needle he pointed to some kind of local anesthesia.

  “No, thanks.”

  “How about a nose piercing?” He wanted to stab some part of my flesh. An ear piercing, I thought, would erase any final doubts Sergei might have in his terrified little mind. A dangling earring would be a banner of my fashion-at-all-expense attitude. “How about an ear pierce?”

  “Fine.”

  “I’d like it done with a new needle,” I requested.

  “Course.”

  After the stylist numbed my ear, he took the needle to my lobe. I closed my eyes, bit my cheek and while counting to ten, felt a pinch. Then I opened my eyes again. He was swabbing away a drop of blood.

  “We have a little training post. But what I want you to do, is clean your lobe tonight with soap and water.”

  “I will.”

  “Promise me.”

  “I swear,” I assured him. I then put twenty-five bucks in his hand and picked up my bags.

  “I accept tips you know,” he said.

  I gave him a dollar and left. I felt the tiny gold drop in my lobe and, passing by a cheap jewelry joint, I bought an earcuff from an Indian salesman. While trailing back to the hotel, I was aware of someone walking behind me staring. I blushed so hard that I felt feverish. Dashing into a department store, I bought a pair of sunglasses. When I went to the cash register to pay, I noticed a bunch of preteen girls giving me the eye. One of them finally said, “Hi there.”

  I wasn’t sure if they felt my androgynous look was free of sexual threat, or if they regarded me as a child might regard a clown. I silently paid and left.

  When I finally got back to the hotel, I asked the desk clerk for my key. His eyes widened and, he asked, “What the fuck happened to you?”

  “How do you mean?”

  “Nothing,” he replied, retrieving my key. I indignantly grabbed the key and went up to my room, where I put on all the clothes and accessories. It was eleven o’clock. The trip downtown by cab would take no more than ten minutes. For about a half hour all I could do was stare gloomily at my new self in the bathroom mirror.

  Finally, after my brooding fit, I went outside. A thrift store was across the street, so I popped in and purchased a cheap and heavy army coat that draped down to my knees. I also bought a black knit beanie that I could tug over my disastrous head and pierced earlobe. All that, with the sunglasses, erased all identity. The salesgirl shoved everything into a Unique shopping bag, where I also shoved my former clothes. I then hailed a cab and was let off at Great Jones and Broadway.

  Before entering Caramba’s, I noticed a black-stencilled message; it read: “People starve on this block.” At the rear of the place, past all the yuppies around the bar, Marty and the director were seated, sipping aperitifs. The great director didn’t bat a lash at my get-up. Apparently he expected it
, but I could see Marty gently bite his bottom lip.

  “Enchanted,” I said, softly shaking the tips of Sergei’s fingers. I didn’t recognize him. I took a seat, shoved the Unique shopping bag under the table, and plopped a cloth napkin on my lap. “I’m famished.”

  “This is Sergei Ternevsky” Marty said, finally unveiling his last name, and allowed a pause for appreciation. I vaguely recalled drunkenly watching an experimental film that had showed one midnight at the Saint Mark’s Cinema. It was a dumb satire about tools.

  “As I suspected. I’ve seen your films and may I say that it is hard to imagine what cinema would be, were it not for your contribution.”

  “Moving along,” Marty commenced. “Sergei would like to know something about your background.”

  “Well, it’s probably going to bore you to tears. I was raised in Queens, the only son in a Jewish household. A passive father, and a domineering mother. After high school, I got accepted to the Fashion Institute, you know, FIT on Twenty-seventh? And well, here I am.”

  “What became of your last residence?” Ternevsky asked.

  “It was a sub-sub-sublease that sunk. Currently I’m back with the folks.”

  Then a tenacious silence leapt on us like a hedgehog and gnawed away. They both just looked at me. I felt a gathering tautness, so I took the presumptions, “I came to terms with my sexuality at a relatively young age.”

  “I have no interest in that,” Ternevsky replied, and then he added, “You say you’ve seen my films. Which ones exactly?”

  “Well, I’ve always worshiped Phillips and Flatedges.” This was the boring experimental film I’d sat through. It was done in the sixties and parodied documentaries. It was a history of the screwdriver.

  “Sergei’s in production on something similar currently,” Marty mentioned.

  “No, really!”

  “It’s an attempt to bring philosophy to the screen,” Marty explained.

  I nodded enthusiastically. I was about to say something like, “Bringing philosophy to the screen is a good thing,” but decided against it.