I must have lived with four La Donnas in the last six years and sometimes I thought I was destined to have twice as many in the next six. I seemed to float from one bad, heavy relationship to another, like a trapeze artist swinging from one suspended bar to the next with no net below. And I wasn’t saying I was any prize either. I would be just as bad for them as they would be for me. But as bad as all my La Donnas were, what preceded them was a hundred, a thousand times worse; the sad case of Kenny Solo—Kenny living alone. Two years of a howling loneliness, a hunger that wouldn’t let me sleep, wouldn’t let me relax. For two goddamn years almost every night I would go to bars, to diners, looking for ladies. That’s not true. I would just go through the motions mainly so at some point I could go home satisfied that I had at least tried. And that was seven nights a week. Every night I would drive myself out of the house with a crazy feeling of “I’m missing it. It’s all happening now. She’s out there right now, you jerk.”
Before Kenny Solo, I was- Kenny Groupo. I lived a year with guys. That was another nightmare. Purple walls, gummed stars on the ceiling, no toilet paper, Pork Chop Hill mounds of dishes in the sink. Communal towels that smelled like rat death and assholes; no privacy, no privacy.
And before that I lived with my parents.
I felt like I hadn’t found it yet I hadn’t made my move yet.
Something was scaring me about getting down. But something was coming. Sometimes I would wake up high as a kite about some intangible something. Sometimes I would walk down the street and feel all of a sudden like I could burst out of my skin with joy. Little rushes, tastes in my mouth. Something was in the air with me. Something was coming for sure. Something had better be in the air with me; I was thirty goddamn years old.
Riding downtown I had a fantasy of coming home and La Donna telling me she was pregnant. “Kill it,” I would say.
I was not in the mood to walk around all day, kissing ass, hawking room spray to shut-ins. And if I wasn’t in the mood to do what I had to do I was a goner. My job would turn into a nightmare. One thing I had learned in the last few years was that people picked tip where you were coming from immediately, and if you were knocking on doors with a look on your face like who flung it and left it you would have so many slammed doors in your kisser you’d get windburn. And I had a face like a neon sign, too.
The bus left me off by the diner. The minute I swung open the door I got hit with that diner smog and that pain-in-the-ass crackle-hiss soundtrack of frying eggs and home fries. I started down the narrow aisle between the red vinyl booths and counter stools, my sample case, like a bad conscience, smacking into my calf with every step.
“Kenny, you look like shit.” Cheeseburger George the grill man looked up from pushing around his cholesterol disasters.
“Thank you, George, have a nice day.”
The Bluecastle House boys were sitting at our table in the far corner. Al Fiorita, Jerry Gold and Maurice de la Creep, sitting there in their jackets and ties squinting and wheezing from a combination of cigarette and griddle grease smoke. They hadn’t seen me come in. Fat Al was in the middle of a story. Charlene blocked my path taking an order from two ugly Catholic School girls in maroon stadium coats. I could see Charlene’s bra and slip outline’ through her waitress whites. She was emaciated and tall. Sunlight blasted through the wispy ringlets of her teased hair. Charlene always reminded me of mummies—she had high cheekbones, pinched lips and weird middled-aged skin, taut and glossy, as if she preserved it in diaphragm jelly. I touched her back. “Excuse me.” I leaned toward the girls. “Do you mind if I borrow your waitress for a few minutes?” I gently squeezed Charlene’s shoulder. “I need to have sex with her.” Charlene, clucked, slapping my arm with her order pad. The girls giggled and snorted into their fists, and I moved on down the line.
“So anyways, I ast this guy if he got a couple of minutes, you know, so, ah, we could talk about mis.” Al winked up at me and continued. “An’ he says to me, ‘Bawh? Ah doan hayv tahm to shake man dick after ah take a pee, an you wan a coupla minutes? Hayl no!’” Jerry and Maurice broke up. Al basked in their laughter, sat fat and sassy like a vanilla pimp in his Windsor knot, matching cuff links and tie pin.
“Hey.” He raised an arm to me, still glowing, “Death of a salesman!”
“Death of a salesman you.” I smirked sliding in next to Jerry. Some joke. I parked my case under the table and poured myself some coffee.
“Hey.” Al nudged me. “Maurice got a joke. Maurice, tell him your joke.”
Maurice chortled as he scratched furiously at his head, loosening enough dandruff to snow in Buffalo. Poor Maurice. He was the ugliest, grossest dude I’ve ever met. Nose hair, face creases, and bad breath. Thirty years a Bluecastle House man. They sent him into neighborhoods with lots of half-blind, senile people. He was a living memo to me to find some other line of work, and fast.
“What’s the Greek national anthem?” he gloated.
“How the hell…”
“Never leave your buddies’ behind!” He almost screamed with glee. Al and Jerry started laughing again, not with Maurice, as the saying goes, but at him.
“Don’t fuckin’ tell me, tell Cheeseburger George.” I nodded toward the grill.
“Cheeseburgers.” Maurice chuckled. “When I was in Italy, all the whores called the white soldiers Cheeseburgers, the niggers were Hamburgers. They’d say, “No cheese-a-boorgers joos a ham-a-boorgers.’ They loved niggers.”
“They only said that when you were around, Maurice.” Al winked at us.
“No, they had a special name for Maurice.” Jerry wiped his lips. “Alpo.”
Maurice half-cursed, half-laughed, along with everybody.
“Kenny, guess what?” Jerry lightly slapped my arm. “You know that coconut room spray? I sold six cans yesterday to a synagogue on Essex Street.”
“Okay, boys and girls.” Al emptied two huge cardboard boxes of ketchup-sized foils onto the table. I stared with disgust at the familiar blue-green wrappers.
“Awright, what’s, the story here, cream sachet again?” I picked one up and flipped it back into the pile. “That shit don’t move, whata they always givin’ us cream sachet for?”
“It moves,” Al said confidently. Fat Al. He was one of those “successful” salesmen. He even had a magnetized plastic ivory dollar-bill symbol on his dashboard.
“C’mon, Al, I had two hundred a these last week. I think I gave away twenty. Whatever happened to those liberation Afro Pics?”
“Where you gonna go with Afro Pics in the West Village?” Jerry grabbed two enormous fistfuls of sachet and stuffed one in each of his sport jacket pockets. When he stood up he looked like a pack mule. It always amazed me how little people cared about their appearance. Especially in our line of work. It took such little effort to make yourself presentable. If you didn’t think enough of yourself to look groomed, how the hell could you expect anybody else to dig you?
I laughed out loud and everybody turned their heads to the window to see what I broke up about. Less than an hour ago I was freaking out because my existence made me feel like a gerbil on an exercise wheel, now I was rifling with equal intensity about good grooming. Life was wild.
“Hey, death of a salesman!” Maurice gave out a horselaugh that would embarrass a horse and flipped a cream sachet foil into my lap.
When I dropped out of college all I had was twenty-five credits to go. I always wound up thinking about that on mornings like this.
“Let’s go, head ‘em out!” Al got up from the table with an exaggerated groan, lugged his green alligator case from under the table and we all followed him down the aisle like an executive road gang.
“George”—I flipped a cream sachet foil onto the grill—“you look like shit.”
When we hit the street I was not in an up-and-at-‘em mood. I didn’t even think I could sell a blood clot to a hemophiliac but I lucked out on my first shot—scored for a twenty-dollar sale on Bask Street to a kind-faced o
ld German lady in a faded floral housedress. She had sandbag breasts and big red hands. Those hands looked as if they were in raw meat all day. She lived in a long, dimly lit apartment with clunky dark wooden furniture, brocade covers over everything and about six thousand prowling cats. We sat on facing sofas, me with the case and her with those huge meathooks folded calmly in her lap and a ruddy creased smile on her refugee face. She bought everything I showed her—hand lotion, room spray, an ironing board protector. She never said a word, just nodded for “one” when I asked, “Now how many should I put you down for, one or two?” When she bought a Car-Vac, my portable car rug vacuum cleaner in a can, I knew she was just buying all that shit so I would stick around and keep making human noises. That stuff always tore me up. I would always get those lonely older ladies who would buy anything I had to sell just to have my company. If they ordered something, not only would I have to sit there to sell it, but I would have to come back the end of the week and deliver it And they would always have cats. Millions of cats. I was allergic to cats, too. I hated them. I’d sit there on some overstuffed cat-hair couch running my bullshit, sneezing my brains out, eyes like red stars, and these poor ladies would be holding their own hands nodding nodding nodding, smiling smiling smiling, sometimes silent like the German lady, sometimes gushing out the spew of their sad sad lives, getting up, bustling around with their bookcase bebinds, offering me tea, coffee, sponge cake, cheesecake, pound cake, cupcake, kugel, babka—you name it. And half of them couldn’t even speak English.
Anyway, after she bought the Car-Vac and introduced me to seven or eight cats—and you have no idea what an absolute schmuck you feel like nodding hello to a cat—I had to split. I felt as if there was a big hairy angora stuffed comfortably inside -each lung and I wasn’t so much breathing as leaking air. I even started sneezing blood.
But I made her day. Every day on the job I made somebody’s day. Made that human connection. There were more lonely people in New York than in entire European countries. And every day I found at least one and pulled her back into the real world for thirty minutes. As much as I bitched about cats and crazies, making that connection hit the spot with me. I got a nice little high every time I scored a lonely. Without getting grandiose about it, it was a side benefit that sometimes made my work tolerable. But there was an element of half-assed compromise in that aspect of my life too. Because, despite the good moments, the bottom line was that I still had to sell them some bullshit ironing board cover or hand cream. And I spent a lot of time knocking on empty apartment doors or spieling to jerk-offs.
The German lady was followed by a half-hour of nothing, then two back-to-back sales on Greenwich Avenue and then I totally lucked out. I caught three housewives kibitzing in the home of a fourth. When I announced through the locked door that I was the Bluecastle Housewares man I heard one broad say, “I don’t know about Bluecastle Housewares, but I can sure use a man.” They all cracked up, the locks were unlocked and I was home free. I was the absolute master of the soft-core innuendo. I knew how to come on saucy but not smutty, naughty but not filthy. I could read a person’s tolerance level for the risque as fast as it took an expert to pick your watch while shaking your hand. I didn’t waste any time with these four. I whipped out my foaming hand lotion and demonstrated it by rubbing it first into my hands,, then into their hands. I said, “It’s also good for a couple of other things, but I won’t go into that,” and gave an X-rated wink. I had no idea what the hell that was supposed to mean, but they had a group apoplexy. I walked out of there a half-hour later with a forty-dollar order and my gut sloshing with coffee.
So it was almost noon and I had written close to eighty dollars. That was a decent day right there. Usually I would try to write up seventy-five to a hundred dollars a day,” pull a five-day week, take home two-fifty to three hundred, and I was happy. I was no freak for money. I wasn’t going to Red China for a vacation or buying a brownstone. I didn’t have kids, my place was within my means, La Donna chipped in some, I had nice clothes, -so with an eighty-dollar morning I was very happy. If I scored for fifteen, twenty dollars more early in the afternoon I would knock off and go to a movie instead of busting my mates for the extra few bucks I might make over that. And that’s the way I was. I didn’t have it so bad. The job was okay. Better than most. And if I took a year out of my life and finished college? Then what? What was I supposed to become, a social Worker? Would I go to graduate school? Would I become a $60,000-a-year ad exec giving blowjobs to the Cheerios account representative so I could keep writing jingles? Bullshit. And teaching was a nice little pipe dream, but unless I was willing to do the South Bronx, who was hiring? So big deal I read books. So did a housewife. Besides, I had the diction of a neighborhood bookie, and my degree was geared for business administration. So, later for that. I made more money than most college graduates, did more good for people, too. And I didn’t feel inferior because I didn’t have my degree. I was smart. I was one of the smartest people I knew. I didn’t need a piece of paper to tell me that.
So I was feeling good. Feeling more like a person, a talker, I went back to the diner for lunch. I ordered good food. I didn’t eat garbage. A nice strip steak, some cottage cheese and Tab. Kept myself good and tight, lots of protein. Fucking Al might have been King Shit when it came to sales, but I’d still be doing a hundred and fifty sit-ups a day when he’d be pushing up daisies.
After lunch I sat, I relaxed, I had coffee and read the paper. Maurice came in. He sat down across from me, flipped his order pad on the table and twisted in the booth to flag down Charlene.
“Relax, Maurice.” Charlene was wiping the counter and spoke to him with controlled distaste.
Grabbing his pad, I did a quick tally of his day’s sales: sixty dollars. I won. One order caught my eye. It was for eight shower caps, paid in full.
“Hey, what’s this?” I turned the pad to him. “Eight shower caps,” he chuckled. “Yeah, I see that Who the hell buys eight shower caps? Whata you doing, you workin’ seniles again?”
“Nah, it was a girl. I showed her all the different colors she could get and she liked them all so she got ‘em all.” He laughed. “Char-le-ene,” he singsonged, tickled with himself.
Anytime I felt low all I had to do was compare myself to Maurice. But sometimes I wondered what he had been like twenty years earlier when he was my age. Or better still, what was I going to be in twenty years? Well, shit, at least I wouldn’t be like Maurice. But what did that leave, Fat Al? Maybe not that way either. But one thing I would be, if things didn’t change, was a fifty-year-old Bluecastle Housewares man. No good. No good at all. The notion nauseated me, wrenched me out of the diner and back to work.
It was pushing three-thirty and I hadn’t made one connection since lunch. I was in a rage, in a panic. I got into the nervous habit of squeezing my crotch, like I was applying a tourniquet. That afternoon became a disaster. I blew sales right and left. I was surly, impatient—as if it was their fucking fault that I had to stomp around in icy February weather selling that bullshit and the least they could goddamn do was buy the crap, for Christ’s sake.
At a three-story brick building on Eleventh Street I finally decided that this was it, whatever I did in that building was it for the day. There was no elevator and the hallways were somebody’s idea of the future. They were wallpapered with what looked like silver foil. There were only twelve apartments. No one was home in the first eight. A real nelly faggot came to the door in the ninth; a short, skinny, limp wrist with a sinus cold that gave him a nose like Rudolph the reindeer. He kept schlepping on his beak while eyeing the contents of my case through the six inches the chain lock allowed. He closed the door on me without saying sorry or no thank you, and I was stuck with all my cans and boxes sprouting around my feet like mushrooms. I muttered “Faggot” louder than I meant to, but I doubt that he heard me, and I had mixed feelings about that fact.
The name on the next door was Gordon. At that point I wasn’t expecting anythi
ng miraculous. Even though I felt sorry for myself, I was also feeling a little better because after two more doors I could go home.
“Just a minute.”
She sounded young and I quickly tucked my shirt into the elastic band of my shorts to flatten my gut Three chains unlocked, the door swung open, and hey hey there she was, about five-ten, long red hair like Rita Whatever and wearing, no lie, a nightgown. It was two-forty-five in the P.M.. and she was wearing a nightgown.
“Yeah?” She was half-smiling as though she had just woke up from a nice dream, and she leaned her head sleepily on the door frame, totally relaxed, totally un-paranoid about me.
. “Hi! I’ve got a free gift from Bluecastle for you!” What a schmuck. I raised my sample case slightly and pointed my chin at the apartment door. “Mind if I come in?”
“Oh yeah? What kind of free gift?” She yawned and rubbed the heel of her hand into her eyes. ” ‘Scuse me.”
“We ran out of whips and vibrators.” I pulled out one of those shit-ass cream sachet foils from my jacket pocket and held it up casually between two fingers, like an ID.
“Hawaii Five-O, ma’am, mind if we come in and look around?” My best shot.
“That’s not much of a gift.” Her skin was lightly sprayed with acne scars and a vaguely sour morning mouth smell drifted over to me. Nothing turned me off like bad breath, but I knew morning mouth was unavoidable.
“It’s a door opener; I got better stuff in here.” I tapped my case. She wasn’t that nice-looking. It felt very important to feel that I kept thinking about morning mouth and how someday we were all going to die no matter what.
She slowly turned from the door and walked unsteadily into the living room. I followed her in. The light from the living room window revealed her legs through her nightgown, and I immediately got one of those boners that start from the heart For a fast two seconds I rubbed my crotch viciously behind her back, clenching my teeth and looking like a psycho.
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