Later, the elf walked the party biting butts and assisting anyone who wanted to try being a hamster. Women in sequined gowns toppled around in the scratched plastic globe, then busted their lips or laughed so hard they pissed. One lady rolled it Olympically around the room in high heels with a burst of orange hair, a gold dress, pink makeup on. Photographers jumped out in front of her to shoot this flash of fashion and they jumped away before she rolled over them. I was happy to see them grunting hard when they landed trying to hold their cameras aloft.
“Siedle!” Carol said, “The Haircutter wants his pic with you!”
I had always thought that elves were like unicorns and asteroids and didn’t exist, so I had Carol use up her whole roll of film on us.
“Excuse me sir, let me please get another pic with you,” I’d say and I’d catch him again, feeling dumb like he’s better than me. “Thank you,” I’d say to him, letting him go.
His little high voice was like, “You’re welcome!”
I wanted him to take off his curly shoes so I could see if his feet were curly too, but I somehow couldn’t just say it and ask. My champagne quivered in a bloodless fist—Siedle’s curly shoes passed me again and again—I was thinking: Now! … Go! Ask when he passes by! … Go! All I would’ve had to do was politely point and say, “Hey are your feet actually curly?” But I never did. Later in bed Carol said of course his feet aren’t curly, “Don’t let anyone find out you’re a bigot please.” I never saw that pogo stick woman again, though every time I saw a construction worker on a jackhammer I thought of her.
Private Particulars sold for $XXX,XXX.XX to a German collector named Hanz Polke, who has the type of breath that spreads out like a fart and who’s bald, but for a little tuft of hair on top like something to hang him by. The sales number went into the New York Times, along with a picture of The Haircutter and Carol beside an orgasm pic. People outside the lines of the art scene got all colored: “Did you get a load of those artist freaks?” “Who, The Haircutter? I just invited them to the gala.” “Shirley Steinfarb! You take too much Xanax and you damn well know it.” And things started changing.
There’s The Haircutter lying fat-stuffed on a table. There’s New York swishing cars through the cold mouth of Sixth Avenue. It’s nighttime in April. There’s one lamp on in the room. Carol clacks her high heels over to her purse to get a gold lighter and a cig. The room air presses very very gently on her cheek telling her before she flicks the lighter which way she’ll turn her face for the flame. She inhales, bats her lashes, rattles her thin gold watch higher up on her wrist.
The Haircutter says, “You’re so perdy we should take you to be put in a museum.”
She says, “I can’t believe how fat I am,” each word chewing on smoke.
Carol crosses the room again, her breath smelling like pubic slop, and cig, and lipstick, and her new perfume called Bad Influence. She kisses her John goodbye, “Ciao, Puss.” When the front door slams, Puss’s stomach rattles. A spider sinks from the ceiling to tick on its string beside John Reilly’s long-lashed girly eyes—he’s no longer a free man.
Ten floors down, Doorman Diego says, “Bye, Miss Carol.”
“Bye, Love.”
Her black high “hills” tick-tock on city grit, her rump responds accordingly. She hails a cab by whistling like she’s seen done in movies. She looks out the window while she rides, snapping pics with her little black camera. The destination is a rotting brick building that houses million-dollar works of art. Like a clam and a pearl, Carol thinks as she leaves a blond hair and a light fart in the taxi. Pigeons part just for her—she smiles like an actress. Friends of all shapes and sizes greet her fawningly when she enters the party. Is there jazz playing? Or is it all about laughter and lighters flicking? Does one even notice jazz when in each partygoer there’s a chorus of words to memorize, of gestures to pretend you were the first to do? Uptown, the spider watches The Haircutter do a set of push-up reps for the first time ever. H.C. feels proud about it for two weeks after, telling Doorman Diego, “I’m actually working out now? It’s been good,” nodding, twitching a breast like he’s seen done in movies.
With the showers of spring, I started accepting it. Carol and I liked different things. I liked that my writing papers shriveled in the mist coming through the window in front of my desk; I liked that when it rained, the smell got puffed up by the heat—if I were a lady I’d get out some test tubes and beakers to try to make a candle out of it; I liked to write in peace; I liked that I could walk around the house and see Carol’s things because it reminded me that she lived here and would be home soon; I liked cracking a can of Coke—I liked the cold feel of it in my hand; I liked sitting as long as I wanted to on the john, or “The Namesake” as I called it once to make Carol laugh. One afternoon I’d been sitting at my desk doing who wrote novels in 1979 in Asia when I thought, “It’s been a while since I’ve seen Carol.” I got up and hiked my belt up around my stomach and descended the three kitchen steps and went to The Chambers to see if Carol was in the bathroom—she was usually in there “getting ready” if she was home. I found her curling her hair, topless. Her puffy pink nipples matched her lips. And when she sprayed each curl with hairspray she scrunched her face up in protection and all her wrinkles flashed, and I thought I’ll love her with no lesser power once those wrinkles are stamped permanent. I thought, Get old, get fat, I’m here to love you anyway. She winked at me in the mirror and said, “Stargazin’?” I did a grin all sincere, “Sure as hell am.” Carol Haircutter: two hands dangling off the mechanics of two wrists. She clears her throat more often now. Looks like she’s on a postcard from Paris. But scratch her chin and rodeo dirt will smell up off the paper.
“You look damn perdy like that,” I said.
“My period’s about to burst outta me any second.”
I walked away to go do Asia in ’80.
The rain started coming down in sheets.
Carol called, “It’s clappin’ hard out there, huh? My poor hair. Maybe I’ll have people over here tonight?”
A month later, every table was covered in bottles, clothes, trash, paintings people left, balloon animals, our wilted roses, half-eaten steaks with ashtrays dumped on them, panties everywhere—some with used maxi pads in them. Lines of “coke” laid on my precious tables—one line laid on a negative pregnancy stick. There were drum snares coming from an unseen radio, there was a small fire in a bucket with a diary in it. There was a snot rocket that looked like a Hershey Kiss—the lining of a nostril with a snot tail for the little tag sat lonesome on an empty table, and someone had written near it: “The Sneeze”, there was a goldfish, there was a ten-foot pole for someone to not touch someone else with.
I’d wake up to the sound of a fly stuck in the main room, until I’d adjust and realize it was someone talking. Damp heat came up off piles of people as though they were fresh piles of dog shit. I’d make my breakfast, and when I farted they’d crawl across the floor with beakers and tests tubes trying to make a candle out of it. Carol sauntered out in her red silk robe saying, “Morning, X X,” getting everyone’s first and last names right. She’d spend the day eating with them, clipping toenails with them, braiding their armpit hairs, while I picked up around the house with a garbage bag, thinking Charlie Quick should be doing this. One day, a lady in a corner with a pigeon on a leash stood up and left, and I saw that her nest had been made of Woomalee Amatrist.
“Hey Carol, check this.”
I gathered the 92 pages. They were stained and crumpled with boot prints and pigeon shit.
Carol and them were meditating. “We’re as light as a feather, as stiff as a board,” she said with her back to me.
Slump-shouldered H.C. shuffled son-like into his bedroom holding Carol’s manuscript.
I put it in order and read it on the pot. I thought, How’d we get into this mess? I was The Haircutter and I liked it. Carol Mary Mathers was a sci-fi writer. Now it’s Carol with a ribboning cig, charming parties of pe
ople into hypnosis with the unintentional elegance of someone who’s driving and charming at the same time. Now it’s H.C. writing in his closet with a candle and a sack dinner. (“Don’t no one go in the closet—my man’s workin’!”) The yellow-suited cowboy tauntingly spins. I set Woomalee on the floor and dropped my pants and sat back down. While down the block, a journalist sat lamp-lit and alcoholic, hunched like a semicolon over a typewriter writing about the new art world star: some fatty weirdo who, in each splatter of paint, shows artistic umph and poignant understanding. While said fatty weirdo shat a hard fart into his toilet saying, “Splatter that.”
One normal night, when too many people started taking my pic in my own home, I took my cue and went to the fridge and got my sack dinner, then I gathered up some writing supplies, and went to The Chambers. And when I opened my closet door Hanz Polke was in there masturbating. I put a sign on the front door after that: Please everyone come over less often. I don’t like it. Signed, The Haircutter. The sign seemed to work, because one night I noticed no one was home. I looked around and noticed a TV under a table. I turned it on and sat down. While Carol walked the light-throbbing, lettuce-wilting streets of New York, I watched a blond lady show me her part and go, “I’m embarrassed about my thinning hair!” I laughed so hard I threw a nearby pizza at the screen.
It took me a while to notice that there had been something under the pizza. When I stood up to get a Coke from the fridge, there was an envelope of photos on the floor labeled “John and Siedle.”
“Who’s Siedle?” I said, as I opened the envelope and my scalp shrank in horror. They were pics of me holding an elf and it had the face of a sixty-year-old health nut who rapes people. It was from a land far far away, and I was holding it, vulnerable and happy. What had I become? My belly button felt like someone was sticking their finger in it. My arm hairs rose. I threw the stack of pics out the window. I vowed to stick to humans and animals from then on; I’d have interest in nothing in between, not even robots, no matter how essential they became. I went to The Chambers and into my sock drawer where I kept the envelopes of photos labeled “Sex Pro Doubles.”
What sex? It had always been her obsession more than mine, but now when I entered Carol she felt like a colt scrambling up and standing for the first time. It often hurt her so bad we had to stop. While the dick of fate carried on: it fucked and fucked us. When she came home, I showed her the old orgasm doubles from the sex project and said, “Whoa, your face looks perdy like this!” She ran away crying.
Summer. Sun shining on the brick wall message: I love you Carol. Heat muffled the car sounds, and bird chirps came through lettuce crisply. All we had left were mornings in bed. I would lay listening to the drain drip in the bathroom while she slept hard. I’d watch her neck tick, sometimes in beat with the drips. I’d lift her hair, like lifting cooked pasta, and look through its glittering strands to focus on the brick wall message out the window—I love you Carol. Then I’d refocus on the strands—back and forth, sometimes in beat with the drips begging brass instruments to release it into proper song. That’s all we had left in the way of what’s intimate. Even still—I felt attached to her by a stalk, and I’m not talking a dick. She was an extension of me, and I of her. Even still—I started cutting her hair and storing the locks in my sock drawer. It gave me merely a pre-cum’s worth of the old rush: everything wasn’t enough. I remembered a time when I didn’t do sad. I wanted to jump off a sea cliff now. Die by a hard slap from Mother Nature. See The Haircutter’s lifeless body bobbing and coldly decomposing like his heart.
One day, she burst through the front door screaming, “Oh my God, Scott is doing the coolest art project ever!!!”
I bellowed in my underwear and nineteen-day beard, “HOW DARE YOU USE ONLY HIS FIRST NAME!”
Her face blew off its skull and she darted to The Chambers. I worked my way up off the pile of clothes I lounged on when I watched TV. She was shivering like a bunny under the bedskins. I tip-toed in like a fairy’s godmother and caressed her curls saying, “There there!” in a high voice. She bought it. She was like, “Without you snappin’ off my head, can I just tell you somethin’ I wanna share since I think it’s cool and poetic?” Her puffy child’s face with its matching voice was poetry enough. I thought, Hell, what’s wrong with me? I thought, Here’s this little Girly I love trying to tell me her interest. I sat and listened to her talk about Harp’s new project. My face fought so hard not to snarl it had to snarl just for the fight. I gripped the mattress and watched her hairbrush the whole time—it was sitting on her dresser like a rat spine.
Scott Harp did a press release announcing his new art project, which he was calling a “heartache hunger strike” entitled: Flee, Thee. For thirty artistic days he would be locked in a glass box inside the Thank You Gallery, nakedly exposed to the public for all to see his probably-large penis and his starvation. After the thirty days, Christmas would smash the box with a mallet. Harp would be allowed a stack of crackers and a glass of orange juice once a day so he wouldn’t die. There would be a discrete toilet in the corner, and a glass chair center-front that he’d sit on, staring into the depths of heartache abyss. He said in a statement: I have been experiencing a heartache so keenly felt as to render me depressed for the last five months. The purpose of my project is to purge my body and mind of said heartache by meditating on it being a dependence-based egoic attachment that needn’t be fed. He would go into the box in two days.
I immediately went to shave.
Here’s Carol and me out that night with all the yappers and swooners and perfumers, all of them saying, “Eat up, Scotty! Try this!” I walked straight up to Harp and grabbed the nearest piece of food and stuffed it in his mouth while he was in the middle of saying hi to me.
Everyone erupted, “Oh my god, The Haircutter’s here!”
Carol said, “Scott, we should sit with you!”
I roared, squeezing Carol’s ass hard, “Why are you being nice to him?”
“Because he’s my friend! These are my friends!”
The wolf man punctuated her statement with a gluey wink. I chucked a bread roll across the room and it landed in a bread basket while two people were kissing; they parted heads and the man picked up the roll and buttered it. Harp lifted his wine glass and wept on his cheesy reason for going “in the box,” while The Haircutter got up and laid on the dinner table, face-down on top of everyone’s plates of food. Stuff burned me lightly here and there on parts of my body while I heard Carol plead, “John, stop, please.” A couple people clapped, but not many. When I stood up, some mashed potatoes fell off my chest and I saw Harp just ignore it—he lifted his glass for Cheers. I spent the rest of the night mumbling who wrote what and when they wrote it, and two people followed me around, scissor-stepping with their ear as close to my mouth as they could get it—a man in a top hat, a woman with curly hair that looked wet but when it brushed my hand I felt it was dry and rock-solid.
When we got home, I showered, and when I came out Carol was “asleep” even though I could see smoke rising off a stubbed cig in her fern. I got in bed and saw if she would say something but she never did. I turned around so my back faced her, and the bedsprings responded accordingly. A siren wailed and turned the walls red. Carol’s stomach growled. I turned around and whispered, “Are you hungry?” She didn’t respond. I heard her pillow when she blinked. I turned back around and settled in. The bedsprings responded accordingly.
CHAPTER FIVE
HUSH, HOWLER—HUNT
Harp had been in the box some twenty days and didn’t seem to have a bigger penis than me, and Carol said she was so disgusted by the idea of his starving body that she couldn’t go to see, and she’d been staying home with me a few nights a week, so I had been in a much better mood—I’d even given that TV to Doorman Diego.
I was in the kitchen one afternoon doing up some eggs, when Carol came out of The Chambers wearing a green complexion mask, clapping.
She said, “John, I just got t
he best idea!”
I said, “Look at you! What is it?”
“It’s a complexion mask,” she said, and I said, “No, what’s the idea?”
As we laughed she (suspiciously?) took a single teacup from the dry dishes pile and put its sole entity away, then stopped dishes to twist my arm hairs saying, “I got an idea for your next art project.”
I said, “Hell, I forgot about all that.”
She said, “I think you should go out to Wyo like you did with that wolf, but you should be the wolf.”
Right away I said, “I don’t like that at all! That’s someone else’s art project I’d be usin’.”
“Scott’s?” she said.
“Excuse me if you don’t mind me asking you to not use his first name basis?” I said, flipping an egg and not breaking the yolk. I flicked my eyes halfway to Carol to see if she saw—she did.
“Scott Harp, sorry,” she said.
I poked the yolk with my spatula to show how I won’t abide by hearing about him. “It’s bad enough I was used to dump off his art piece like I’m some kinda garbage man.”
“But you loved doin’ the wolf job,” she said.
“Ach. I don’t wanna hear about Scott Harp.”
She started twisting my arm hairs harder, “Well, think about it. You could make somethin’ outta that experience. You could use him back like he used you. Plus—show it’s more your wolf than his?”
And that’s when she got me.
I turned around and said, “Huh.”
She said, “Yeah!”
The eggs chatted in the pan about how they thought we were onto something.
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