The floor was a shiny black plastic that had been in place since the 1940s. It came up in places as little bubbles that crackled when you tapped on them. The fireplace hearth was marble—fit for a panther to lie by—and had gold pokers and a grate that watched you like a monster with an underbite. I had my outfits in the closet, and your basic hygiene products on the bathroom sink. I had papers and Old Auntie’s record player with a simple selection of recs. I had my scissor, which I’d bought at a barbershop straight out of the barber’s hands. There was Old Auntie’s leather couch in a corner by the fireplace, and a telephone stand in the foyer probably with Old Auntie’s earwax still in the hearing holes on the phone. There were cars honking ten flights down, and old-timey music coming from the apartment above where the singer sounded like he had a dinner roll stuck in his mouth and didn’t care.
That’s the sound that Carol and I could faintly hear as we carried her crap down the hall to my door. Then the old sound of my keys turning the lock, “Ah, home sweet home.”
The apartment was hot and fuzzy. I took her in by the shoulders and guided her around, “This is the main room. This is the kitchen. These are the tables. This is The Chambers—” She shrieked when she saw the sawed sleigh bed with its stained sheets. She stepped into the bathroom and opened the medicine cabinet, which I hadn’t done since moving in. She saw cobwebs and a dead spider and Old Auntie’s denture glue in there; I was so embarrassed. She lifted the red sheet that covered the bedroom window, breaking cobwebs that connected it to the glass. Outside, the wind growled like territorial cats. She went to wash her hands in the kitchen and snarled at Old Auntie’s portrait. “I bet her ghost’s in the wall spyin’ through them eyes.” Carol made me take down all the bedsheet curtains in the main room and she opened a window and whipped her hair in the wind, “It needs to keep us on our toes!” She wiped down the leather couch I had never sat on, then made it so the tables fanned out from it on both sides. It made you be able to walk freely around the room and stop to sit on the couch if you wanted to.
All this she did while I, casual as a con man, taped up the slit-hole where my hairboard was kept.
“Whatcha doin’?” she said.
“Oh this hole gets mold comin’ through here that’s bad for the lungs, so it needs to stay taped shut. I took it off before I left town cause I knew we were gonna get a heat wave. You know—tape meltin’ to the wood here? Not good.”
Because I liked her and wanted to keep her.
I said, “Hey them sheets on the bed are just stained, they ain’t dirty.”
I looked at her and she wasn’t even listening—she was choosing a rec to play, “Ooh fun! Records!”
I kept on with my task, covering my secret with Old Auntie’s duct tape, her dead cat’s hair and piss-box gravel still stuck in the ridges on the side of the roll.
We cleaned the apartment like it had never been cleaned before. I sanded down the sleigh bed. We even thought to scrape gum off the undersides of the tables that had it. We bought food, flowers, firewood, and wine. (“Ooh wine!” she’d said.) Carol found the stand of Old Auntie’s that I’m pretty sure was used to hang an IV bag from, and she wheeled it up to the bed and hung a fern plant from it. The tentacles wept halfway to the floor.
“What was once used for death is now a breathing organism,” Carol said and I was like man it’s nice to have a woman’s touch. But she came to use that plant as her bedside ashtray. She’d stub out in it, and it’d swing and smoke like that thing for Catholics.
I had to go to work. I had worked at the poetry shop for a short time, then the law office for six years. I sat alone on a swivel stool in the empty basement of a thick building in Midtown and had tubes pointing at me in a 360. My job was to remove a canister from a tube when it lit up to redirect it to another tube and press a button for it to get sucked up into the body of the corporation where someone received it in their office. Spinning circles and counter-circles, using my hairy arms to do an ape’s task, in the darkness of that workspace I’d think: This isn’t real! That situation with Carol up there! My life has a second heartbeat in it now! I still had to go shit all the time—that love sickness thing. I kept telling myself, “You do not have to poop again, you just pooped.” But alass, there I was running with my pants half-down to and from the private john I had, yelling at those blinking tubes, “I’m comin’!” I’d shit with the door open, looking across the empty dungeon at my tube circle, grunting, “Just a sec …!” The john had a pink shag seat cover that matched the reason for having to shit—Love, and even matched the types of shits they were—girly. Because there wasn’t much left to shit out after a while—it even made a sound like a girl going, “Blech.” But I’d laugh at the sound thinking, Carol!, as if she’s teasing me, trying to make me laugh. I even pretended it was her who’d picked out that pink shag seat cover in an alternate life where she’s the janitor. Seeing it alone when I wasn’t on it—in its own shaggy foo-foo world—I fell in love with it like family, understanding fully what it’s like to have a baby girl.
On Saturdays, we’d drink a bunch of coffee and do music on the record player. I signed up to have Old Auntie’s telephone turned on so Carol could call her mom to shout, “I can’t barely hear! We got jazz on full blast!” She’d cozy up on the couch to write more for her space adventure novel. She’d ask questions like, “Does Woomalee Amatrist sound too pretentious for a title or does it sound creative?” or “I’m gonna make three themes in this and not just one. Is that my call?” She’d sometimes try to write a poem to share at the open mic night we went to on Sundays. She had this whole list of city things she wanted to do—she got ideas from a magazine called Now York. (“Where’s my Now York?”)
That first time she decidedly said, “We’re going to a poetry club and I’m wearing all black—don’t judge me!” I saw her profile lined red by the light of that embarrassing stage, and she was so impressed, so humbled, that it made me squirm and feel homesick. It was like, Hey, Carol what about us! She never did get up to share a poem. (I said, “Aren’t you gonna do one?” and she tossed a hand, “Oh noooo. I didn’t realize the caliber.”) After the first time we went, I caught her reading Woomalee Amatrist when we got home. When I walked in the room, she shoved the manuscript under her pillow and slept on it until she thought I was asleep. Then I heard her carefully slip it out like the tooth fairy and very slowly put it under the bed. She was beyond impressed by those open mic nights. We went back and went back. She asked people, “Hey, do you know what time this starts?” knowing perfectly well what time it started. Sparking conversation became her thing. Walking toward the subway afterward, she’d lift up off the ground, choking on her squeals, and I’d have to hold her down huffing like an alcoholic overaged balloon salesman. “You can’t know what you’re missing till you know what it is!” she’d say. “John, those are my people! Let’s go to Xavier’s reading on Wednesday! I think he was the best, but I liked that Asian girl too!”
Carol carried a watermelon home from the store, saying “DANG this is fun!” when H.C. pinched her rump. Carol made potato salad, saying, “I carried a watermelon,” in all different ways. She said her period looked like a hatchet wound, and laid a whole day shivering in bed while I slipped chocolate bars under the door, proud to be so mature. We were freshly arrived in New York and our new relationship was in fragrant bloom. We weren’t used to each other yet, so when I did a spittle piece that landed on Carol’s plate, she ignored it and only blinked, keeping eye contact. We were courteous and complimentary. We’d make love and say, This is like nothing else, This is like our bodies were meant for each other, We’re like puzzle pieces, and This is like fate.
We boarded a subway train and sat down smiling, holding hands. The conductor said, “Next stop West Fourth Street, transfers to the A, B, C, D, F, and M trains, stand clear of the closing doors,” and while he said that speech, I looked at Carol and mouthed along with his words, not missing a beat.
“Nuh-uh!” she said,
shocked and laughing.
“I just saw your hangy-ball,” I pointed into her mouth.
“Eww,” she said. “My uvula? I don’t like that mine’s pointy.”
We rode on, and at West Fourth street we transferred to the F train. And while waiting on the platform I swelled with love for her. In the storm of our approaching train I said I love you to the back of her head. I said it again, and she turned around like, “What?” and I said, “I got somethin’ in my eye.” We boarded and sat across from a bum who smelled like hamster bedding and who was humming in a voice so high I thought he was a woman until Carol got done looking in my eye.
New York: the hustle and bustle, the bags of trash, the fast-moving loud-talking people mixed with cloudy-eyed people at the ends of their lives walking like prunes holding groceries. The shaken world spilled on the color grey—the people that landed and built their buildings and peddled their wares while eating their flavors of stinking foods fuck in foreign tongues right next to each other, separated by a wall a granny could punch through. New York: the little Italian part hugging the Chinese part, the suited Jewish men with their curlicues bouncing. Skyscrapers rise dick-like, like dicks covered in jewels showing off. Tourists shoot up the centers to stand in the heads to take pics of other jewely-dicks whistling, “What a man-made marvel.” A hippie lady sits on the spit-strewn sidewalk coloring in the word abusive on a sign: Left Abusive Man. Sally forth, pigeons flapping out of your way. Pass a musical genius on the corner playing violin like it’s the tool used to call heaven and God is on the line. Unsupervised school kids kick his coin cup and run away screaming, holding pizza. Young men drink from full-sized containers of juice. People look up, and people who pass them look up to see what they’re looking at; people take pictures, and people who pass them say I’ve taken that exact same picture before. Trash bags blow through the streets and say Thank You on them. Lightning branches above buildings in which politicians conduct the world, perhaps even the lightning. Nannies push babies like swaddled bundles of hundred-dollar bills. Tomato, tomahto, tornado—call it what you were raised calling it, but here it’s all the same. Every last one of us looks at the same numbers when we look at a clock, the numbers are just in different fonts trying to make our worlds seem unique. How many people in New York are seeing it for the first time? How many people have lived in New York their whole lives and can’t afford vacation? How many people are just letting their dog stop to sniff another? One owner smiles down at them, the other owner stands quarter-grinning, looking around.
How many times did Carol and I meet after work on a certain street when I got to watch her walk towards me from half-a-block away—saw her blushing and looking down at her functioning legs, looking up at me, then down, then around semi-seriously, then down at her legs again, holding her lips in her mouth till she arrived at me squealing? You walk in the Fashion District arm-in-arm with your fresh new Love and when she sees a man selling belts she tugs at yours saying, “You wear your belt kinda high, don’t you?” And that’s the day you realize you’ve been wearing your belt mid-waist. In the mirror at home you move it down to the smell of the flowers you can’t stop buying. They quiver, “Voila!” Every table has a vase of them in a certain stage of rot—New York: you and your girlfriend like to spend. Check the bank account and see that it’s so low a goldfish couldn’t even swim in it. You peek in the purse of your Love while she’s showering and see two twenties and a bank card and you wonder when she’ll start paying for things. And then slowly, slowly, the two of you get to the place where you start talking about things like that, though you never actually did talk about that—it comes at the same time you spit on accident at dinner when you’re talking and she points to where it lands and laughs. Comes at the same time she says, “Yes, fuck it!” when you’re “makin’ L.” Comes at the same time she automatically grabs the cart at the grocery store because she knows pushing one makes you feel absurd. New York: you’re laying in bed with your Love and a cockroach drops from the ceiling onto your chest. Hind legs like a frog and a loud crunch when you kill it. And later, when you say, “I’ll make a fire, it’s cold in here,” and Carol says, “It’s cloudy with a chance of cockroaches,” you think: Impossible! She can’t be so perfect and so funny and so happy to be with me! You were right: impossible.
We couldn’t walk an avenue without stopping to kiss. Two flowers blooming in each other’s faces—one with a longer stem. I used to cut hair from couples who did that.
She liked to wear baby-pink lipstick. She wore that when I watched her lips say, “I heard you in the subway. I love you too.”
I rolled my eyes, “Better call the press.”
I love you. Three threaded words that turn you neither more woman nor more man. They’re veritable spurts of semen—drops of concentrated relief, release. That’s it. While Carol says it when she shows the $100 piece of sushi between her legs. While I say it when I see a singlet of her golden hair slip like a tip to the furniture, or when I see a singlet hanging from my beard and leave it there. “Aw, I love you!” Three threaded words that mean, “Thank you so much for letting me touch you whenever I want and for not thinking I’m gross even though I’m a shriveled piece of snail meat without no shell!”
Carol Mary Mathers never eats the last bite of her banana because it “has that piece of poop in it.”
She said I was manly, I wasn’t fat. I had never thought of that.
One morning she was sitting at the kitchen table while I was doing up some eggs and she opened a book to a random page and read it to me. She paused at paragraph breaks to sip from her coffee, and the snap that came from swallowing then parting her lips to speak—I was soothed and coddled and my eyes drooped and I fell in love with her on another level: as a boy does with his mother.
She quit smoking for me. Instead of smoking, she’d close her eyes and meditate on the burn of one, and if I spoke she’d say, “Shh! I’m having a cigarette.”
I’d run to the work phone on blink breaks to call her:
“I miss you! It’s only two o’clock!”
“I miss you too! I never wanna let these butterflies go!”
Sick stuff like that—all that Love crap that makes you say to the camera as you’re hailing a cab, “Save your breath, I’ve seen a movie before.”
Here’s what you do to keep a good girl like that: support your bunny rabbit and take her to see poetry. Watch people on stage with pimples and beer-breath roll their eyes in self-disgust when they flub. Watch them unconsciously tap their foot to the off-beat of their words, watch their stance be like a cricket that got stepped on but survived. Watch Carol quietly say, “It’s okay!” wincing with prayer-hands covering her eyes. She cares. When musicians are on the street begging, she gets as close to them as she can. She crosses her arms and pops her legs backwards and nods. She turns to me at clap breaks saying, “This is my kind of town, man. My kind of town,” when normally she never says “man.”
One day, when I got to work, I was waiting for the elevator to take me down to the basement and my boss made an appearance. He’d gone grey since the last time I’d seen him.
Says, “Mr. Reilly, I’ve got to let you go.”
I say, “Who’s going to do my job?”
He says, “Robotic arms.”
I say, “But it’s been six years, and I’m good at this job.”
And he says, as he’s putting an envelope into my human hand, “Well it’s the year 2000 now, and we’ve got computers for most about everything.”
And just like that, I was fired because of some robotic arms.
I went straight to the bank and faced the screen. Two hundred dollars. I went to the teller and deposited my check saying, “Can you put double that amount in?” She cackled back with her hairstyle like a nest of snakes on her head, “Honey if I could do that I’d be rich myself!”
I walked home with $1,873.16 to my name. Then when I got home I had to write a check out to the poet girl because it was the first of Octo
ber the next day. I was like, “Onnnnnne thousaaaaand siiiix huuuuundreeeed annnnnd zerooo over one hundreeed,” with my fat hand and my favorite pen. So there. All that to say that I had $273.16 when Carol and I were at our happiest.
I had to go out looking for work, but everything reminded me of Carol and of sex. Reading a book on the subway train—the way the parted pages bobbed with the bumps in the track—of course I thought of Carol bouncing on top of me! Her voice sounding babyish and in pain before her horror-movie orgasms. Her saying, “I think my sexual peak’s now instead of thirty-six, I’m serious!” I would smile at my book and sort of coo, then I’d realize I was doing it, so I’d look around to deal with who saw. (“This book’s hilarious!” showing them the cover.)
“I didn’t do anything all day except wait for you!” she’d say when I got home.
I’d lick the tears of ecstasy off her face and call it “Mamma cat.”
“I’m glad you stayed inside all day,” I’d say, petting her greasy hair. “This way no one can steal you away.”
We took a bath and plucked the spider webs that connected the tub to the wall like harp strings, and Carol got out to pee, and then sat on the pot staring at me for so long she peed again. A cockroach walked across the ceiling while hissing like Cupid was covertly checking on us while whistling.
“Boyfriend and girlfriend” became my favorite thing.
Then one day I was walking down the street after dropping off a failed job application—it was on 47th between 5th and 6th—and I was smiling at a thought of Carol, and I stopped dead in my tracks. I realized then and there that I was actually in love with her. I realized that I hadn’t been before. Not at the motel, not even in the subway when I’d said it the second time. But now I was in love with her. And then I realized—really realized—that all this Love stuff was happening to me. To me. It was in my life; it was me. I was lucky. I was new.
The Haircutter Page 7