Demonology

by Rick Moody

  —The one young man who started that restaurant on Washington Street. I knew him when he was just a boy. His parents are very proud of him. Very proud. Told me that he got the idea for it from eating sandwiches over to the Jersey shore. This goes back a ways. My own boy was in the armed forces then.

  —Mrs. Vincenzo, you shouldn’t talk.

  —I’ll talk if I want to.

  —Buddy just move off a couple feet, here, give the lady some fresh air, the paramedic remarked to Aaron, over whose face then passed a dark cloud of rejection. Meanwhile, adjacent, the operator of the crosstown bus, on the radio, —A fender bender type thing. A flat. Young lady been nice enough to give away some of her soft drinks, and the kids? They all drinking sodas. Some playing cards.

  —You want me to get that open for you? Offered the guy on the hood of the station wagon, motioning at M. J.’s front door. —Could open that easy. Just need a credit card or something. Let me do it.

  Every northeastern town had its eccentric with the artificial tan. Many of these characters got their tans from local tanning salons, and Hoboken had a tanning salon, but it was on the uptown end where M. J. rarely traveled and anyhow she believed that tanning salons involved irradiation. Fair of skin, as her family were all fair of skin, she was from a long line of ivory that in winter looked delicate and in summer looked unhealthy, people of the ice, this ancestry of Anglo- and Irish-Americans who by birthright didn’t have to live in towns that were built up on swamps as Hoboken was, she was white, and this gentleman on the hood of the station wagon was tanned through some means, through an applied juice, a poultice, an Egyptian henna or some such, which he attempted to mete out over himself evenly, under cover of night, in a harsh bathroom fluorescence.

  —I’m supposed to be having a party in less than an hour. The guests are coming really soon. Where’s my boyfriend? He’s supposed to be here.

  —You just need a credit card is all.

  So his neighborliness revealed itself as an attempt to get to her credit cards, which, in any event, were her parents’ credit cards, namely a Visa card issued by her parents’ bank and an American Express Platinum. All of the money, or requests for money, flowed back to that originary trunk, as all her parents’ money flowed back to the central bank and its charter for which Washington voted, when president, in 1791. All money referred to the original money of British feudal lords, which, transferred, supplemented, by plastic cards, karats, ducats, nuggets of gold, stock certificates, bonds, computer printouts of mutual fund holdings, was nonetheless merely a recognition of the origin of money, held by people who did not tan well and who did not need to apply juices to their pale veneers. She assumed, moreover, that all original money was stewarded by men, because women were held to be forgetful and given to mercurial temper and who were anyway inclined to leave the control of money to others, who had pockets. The men were all in a bar someplace, mired in self-hatred, flattering courtesans who would look hideous in the morning, they were pondering the box-office dominance of a certain Austrian bodybuilder whose accent made him sound startlingly like a fascist; it was almost impossible not to imagine that this Austrian, who may possibly have used juices to tan his veneer, was a fascist. She used to come home at night and Gerry would be sitting at the kitchen table with the local phone book open and she would ask what he was doing, and he would say, Reading the phone book. She would ask why he was reading the phone book. He had no explanation, he was just reading, and when again they were attempting to think of people to invite to the Mad Son Electric Opening Gala, he’d turned to reading the white pages, unable to make contact with her in a way that satisfied either of them, uncertain, even, what it was to make contact; Gerry improvised, Looking for rock stars, because there were these Hoboken bands and they just lived up the street, they all had day jobs, one guy copyedited for one of the larger publishing houses, and you used to see them on the buses going into Port Authority and Gerry was thinking he was going to invite these celebrities to the Mad Son Electric Opening Gala, but then he never did, nothing came of it.

  —You don’t have your own credit card? M. J. said. —Because I’m not sure I want to sacrifice one of my credit cards for a lock. I mean, they’re not really mine, anyway. They’re for emergency use, and if I lost one, I’d have to notify the bank.

  —Suit yourself, the tan man said.

  —I don’t give a hoot if he was the greatest singer of the century! Mrs. Vincenzo shouted. Aaron rocked beside her in recognition of her oratory. —I’m saying he ought to come back and visit the town where he got raised up. Doesn’t make good sense. My boy was in some trouble here in town before he went off to the services and I still lived here with the neighbors and the friends who seen what I’ve been through. They understood my troubles. This is where I’m from. I’m not going to be from anywhere else.

  —Mrs. Vincenzo, said one of the paramedics, —would you be willing to get into the ambulance now?

  A dispute broke out between the kids playing cards, a black kid and a white kid and soon several others had gotten into it, and they held the white kid down and they pulled off his sneakers, probably cost $37.50 apiece, tied two laces together, the kid cried out No! No! but they held him down. Now M. J. noticed that harvest of sneakers, draped on the power lines. The instigators flung the sneakers up, tried to get them to drape over the lines. Please, no, those are brand-new sneakers! They were calling him faggot, because what else did you call a kid, you called him a faggot, that was the worst thing you could be. She looked at Aaron to see if he registered this, whether a lifetime of being mostly hated by your peers was enough to be a predictor of madness and alcoholism, but Aaron had wandered toward the crosstown bus and was now disputing its route with the driver.

  —Must not use the crosstown bus very often, the driver said, —because it’s been some years this bus here been going down Madison. Other bus goes down Washington, so now people on this side of town, they don’t have to walk so far, like the people on the other side, they mostly don’t have to walk so far.

  —Maybe it’s not your house, the guy from the station wagon remarked.

  —What did you say? said M. J.

  —I mean maybe you’re trying to get me to bust you into a house doesn’t belong to you.

  —Want to see my driver’s license?

  —Could be this isn’t even your street. Maybe somebody else lives here. Drivers license? Hey, you can buy one of those.

  —That’s really rude. What you’re saying is just rude.

  The face of the tanned guy(she supposed now that he was called Norbert), indicated a substantial cruelty heretofore concealed. She could tell that he would not be a resource in her hour of need. Meanwhile, the cars on the street in a furious klaxoning. The ambulance, the crosstown bus parked side by side. Police beside paramedics. A fireman wandered through asking if his services were needed. At the corner, a traffic cop who had appeared to wave rush-hour flow onto Seventh Street had recognized a friend among the assembled. He stepped out of the intersection to chat with this rotundity of sweatsuit. Traffic languished. Next, there was a street vendor, one of Hoboken’s sellers of ices, with a cart and a dozen bottles, chipping away with his pick, loading on raspberry syrup; around him three or four friends heaving crimson dice, talking fast in a froth of Spanish and English: results of first games of the football season, difficulties of wives, how a couple of Anglos in the wrong neighborhood gonna jack up the rents, this town where they had gotten halfway through demolishing the ferry terminal so that they could put up top-dollar developments like amusement arcades, shopping centers, luxury condos, you could neither take a ferry from the terminal nor use the location for anything else; it was the Committee for a Better Waterfront versus the people who had lived there since they were kids, played stickball on the blacktop over by Observer Highway; the people who lived there were mainly for devel opment, even if it brought nothing to them but wrecking balls and Food Courts; and this very theme had now erupted on Madison Street, befo
re the flickering holiday lights of the Mad Son Electric Gallery of Hoboken, whereupon a BMW-owner, wearing Ray-Bans and a yellow power tie, climbed out of his convertible, and took it up with the men by the street vendor, and yet they all agreed, everyone agreed, You think it’s a bad idea to have a beautifully designed series of buildings down there, and some shops, with the Empire State Building, right cross the water? The men, in their basketball jerseys and worn baseball caps, jeans and construction boots, wordless, That’s a good idea, the young urban professional continued, which will improve real estate values in the neighborhood. Its better for the tax base. There will be jobs. Strapped himself back into his car, satisfied with urban planning, and there he sat, immobilized in traffic.

  —Over my dead body a bunch of trees down there on that water! Over my dead body! We don’t need no more parks! We got plenty of damn parks already! That’s just going to cause filth from pigeons and rats! We need tax monies! observed Mrs. Vincenzo.

  Autumn, county fair of tonalities. People filed out of workplaces, out of tenements, onto stoops. Last time they could do so for months. Leaves clogged the street, the sewer lines. Where had these leaves come from? They were three blocks from the nearest tree. Northeast storms had blown through earlier, as storms did this time of year, and the limbs of the trees, those that remained in the Mile-Square City, were picked clean; each new gust brought a dusting of yellow symbols of decay. Clearly, it wasn’t only M. J. who made a poetics, a worldview, out of a drop in the temperature and a diminishment of light. Itremble like an aspen leaf, Nijinsky said. Her parents’ house had beautiful autumns. When the weather was fine, she practiced out on the lawn, while the man next door clipped graying blooms from his once bright hydrangeas. She bobbed above the clean lines of a box hedge, perfecting leaps, faint with hunger. She was always hungry. She was always cold.

  The tawny huckster with the scheme to break and enter, Norbert, accepted her offer of a Major Video, Inc. lifetime membership card and began working on the lock, which seemed to involve scoring the paint job on the door frame with the edge of the plastic lamination. Gerry Abramowitz had his own Major Video card. This one could be sacrificed. From desperate sprees of video rental Gerry returned, in his usual nervous way, uncertain, taciturn, with a home festival of science fiction films and teen sex comedies. Talk to me a little bit, she asked. He’d laughed. He stayed up watching films after she’d gone to sleep and left early with his stack of bibliographical index cards. Her locksmith pro tern tried buzzing the tenants on the first floor. He bent the video membership card until it had a veiny fracture in it. M. J. was almost certain, in the light of streetlamps, that guests for the party had now begun to assemble. There was a couple in bowling shoes and Hawaiian shirts, his and hers, hair slicked with the grease of the period, Tenax or Vaseline; there was a guy with heavy tortoiseshell frames and a secondhand madras jacket. All bantering. M. J. would not meet these, her guests, on the front step, locked out, having given away Diet Coke and orange soda. It was humiliating.

  —The Carnival Tradition, from Bakhtin, said the madras jacket.

  —I thought it was Bakunin, said the woman.

  —That’s anarchism.

  —I know what anarchism is. You’ve got your B’s confused.

  —We could go to the Middle Eastern place, you know.

  —Uh, no civilization endures without temporary suspension of the rules of civilization.

  —Let’s wait a few more minutes.

  —Got a cigarette?

  Whereupon the door to the building next to M. J.’s opened, being 619 Madison, known drug location, according to law enforcement circles, known for its potent smok-able form of cocaine. They had never given her any trouble over there, in the known drug location. They were vital and spirited American entrepreneurs. The door, a flimsy old composite affair, into which had been installed cheap stained glass, from Sears, swung back, and out of it came the dream within this dream, a cherub, a teenaged boy from next door, a Hispanic young man, an Edgardo or Jose or Miguel, perhaps, a fraternizer with users of the potent smokable form of cocaine, but with a perfect Hispanic celestial quality that he, young Angel, would have until he was older, had put on a few pounds, become a working stiff, traded beauty for dignity; for now as perfect as a boy in Hoboken could possibly be in pressed jeans, black work shoes, James Dean windbreaker, expertly tousled black hair, having strode out of a jailbreak movie, carrying somebody’s turntable, she couldn’t help thinking that he was stealing the turntable, and when he saw the crowd outside the front door, he turned, as if to rethink the plan, to secret himself indoors, away from the authorities. Did anyone still buy LPs? Even that store down by the PATH terminal where the gruff stoner with sideburns and ponytail wordlessly dispensed obscure rock and roll on vinyl —Syd Barrett, Lothar and the Hand People, the Nazz —even that store was on its way out; so why would Angel, the Hispanic cherub, steal a turntable?

  She started down the steps toward him.

  —I’m locked out here. Next door. And I got all these people coming over to see our new gallery here, and I’m wondering if you might know someone in the building here, or maybe —

  A premeditated recognition on the part of Edgardo or Miguel.

  —I gotta take this over to my friend’s.

  —Oh, come on.

  The turntable, balanced precariously on wrought-iron railing.

  —Can I get over on the roof? M. J. said.

  The rashness of the proposal, maybe, persuaded him to change his mind. What white girl from the suburbs would propose going over the roof? A conspiratorial grin broke out on his unblemished face.

  —Sure, the roof. You could go over on the roof.

  She asked if he would show her how, notwithstanding political implications of wanting to be shown how, wherein a woman asked a man for instruction, affected an unknowing because of the stylized exchange of information that might follow; she still liked it when a guy would show her how, whether it was how to program certain technological appliances, the coffee machine, the stereo, how to operate a handsaw or how to hit a backhand, and perhaps it would have been that way with Gerry, if he had known how to do anything, but he didn’t know much, a few knots from when he had taken sailing lessons in the suburbs, but he could fix nothing, and once a couple of weeks ago she had found him, inexplicably dangling a hasp in front of the windowsill, as if one could be used on the other, What are you doing with that hasp? He knew about Frege, Austin, Kuhn, but his evasions on home repair subjects were appalling. Can’t we get someone in to fix that? She inflated this evidence, on the front step of her building, into a notational system of romance: you and your lover showed one another how to, according to diagrams, and then when you knew how to, you moved on to the next person, to have them show you how. Once an object in question was fixed, you needed it broken again, or replaced by another, and fast. And the question before her now, by way of reminder, was how does a girl steal onto the roof of her building?

  —Gonna put this back in the basement, Angel said. —Hang on.

  Then he returned. Together they occupied the warped stairwell. Cinder block. Exposed ceiling bulbs dangling from frayed electrical lines. Lead-based paints flaking from scuffed walls. She followed him. With each flight of stairs, their pace increased, their gasps and exhalations, their anticipations, and she not only managed to keep up, but to drive Angel on more furiously, though she’d eaten nothing but a rice cake since throwing up breakfast. At last, they each grabbed the banister on the red emergency ladder; they hoisted themselves up; at last, they pushed back an old rotting hatch; at last, they heard a scattering of pigeons. They were on the roof.

  Night had fallen across the landscape. Dramatically. Beyond the nub of green that was Stevens Institute of Technology at a distance, night upon the World Trade Center, night upon Hoboken high-rises, night upon the spectacle of New York City, night upon the Hudson, night upon the ships of the Hudson, night upon the garbage barges and their peppering of diapers and six-pack hold
ers, night upon the history and politics of the tri-state area, night upon the Newport Mall of Jersey City, night upon Liberty State Park, night upon Edgewater, night upon Fort Lee, night upon the George Washington Bridge, night upon arteries great and small, night upon marshes and blacktops and rail yards and baseball fields and electrical substations. Who could turn from it? Who could neglect it? Night had come, even while the town below undulated with dispute and jubilance.

  Did she say the next words before acting, on the roof, in fresh moonlight, words that had to do with kissing a complete stranger from a different economic class and ethnic heritage on the roof of a known drug location, while the guests for her party were amassing, or did they kiss first, words occurring like spontaneous, retroactive evocations of the riptide of subcutaneous wishes? Where did the thought come from, in this furnace of retrospection? What made her do these incredibly stupid things? Because she’d been hung up for so long, out in front of the building, and was just grateful, at last, to have gotten her ass indoors? Or was it some quality in Angel himself? Wasn’t there a moment when she’d thought about it and realized that this might not be the smartest decision she ever made? No. Things had been connected together, conjoined. There was no fulcrum with which to pry them apart. This was part of what had come before. How blissful not to have to make a particular decision but to yield to what was already as obvious as if it were mixed up with propositions of physics. She thought, or she said aloud, Let me kiss your spectacular Caravaggio mug, and she knew that he knew they were going to kiss too, like candidates for elopement; the kiss was unclear as a romantic gesture, but forceful as an observation on the nature and duration of the month of October and what the end of October meant: onslaught of holiday madness, mixed precipitation, folly in the street, We’re young! We’re beautiful! We’re supposed to make out! He held her off. Let’s get over the fence.