Now, thanks to thousands of drug addicts defecating in hallways and the stock market crash, rents had gone down. Thanks to drugs it was a slum again. Stores only opened if they sold something cheap like Pepsi or shampoo.
There were never pictures of the Depression paraded in the newspapers anymore. And they were probably no longer displayed casually on television specials as symbols of the past. Doc didn’t have a television but he could predict that sort of thing. He just didn’t need one. He could always tell what was on TV when he heard more than two people in a row say the same strange phrase in the same way. He knew that they had just seen it on television. A few weeks later everyone would have those words written on their chests. When he needed a program he just went for a walk.
The stairs. The door. The steps. The street. That’s how it went. Then he’d be shocked at how sweet the cherry blossoms smelled, right in the middle of all that junk. Why were there blossoms of anything in February? A sound. A dog. A woman with a beard. Two running nuns. A secondhand shoe. The sadness of being alone in the house for a while. The way the rain smells any time of year.
“I want to get these images out of the freezer,” Doc said later, safely back at home. “I mean, the ice.”
He needed to sit around. Then he had to eat. He had to. He was embarrassed by eating. He knew he wasn’t doing it right. It was the wrong thing or the wrong way. It was supposed to be a socializing habit. Doc made a whole salad and then was too tired to take even one bite. So he had a corn muffin-salad-mayonnaise sandwich instead. No toaster. No microwave. No toaster oven. No electricity, remember? His practice was going well enough for basic necessities but that did not include repairs. The fridge was plugged into the living room but without kitchen-based electricity, the appliance question was moot.
The minute the last piece of food was off the plate he started walking, chewing toward the sink to get it out of the way. He was angry because it wasn’t right or enough. So, Doc took out his green box of recipes and started flipping through the index cards. He dropped it often, so they were not in very good order.
Sweet Potato Cheesecake, Baked Dip and Shake Chicken for Seven, Chicken-a-la-Mac, Chicken-a-la-Orange, Chicken Parisienne, Chicken and Rice Scrapple, Oven-Fried Chicken Drumsticks, Shrimp Bites for Six, Spaghetti with Pork sauce.
Some of the sections had headings like PIE.
PIE:
Chicken-Vegetable Pie, Chili-Hominy Pie, Deviled Ham and Cheese Pie, Double Corn and Meat Pie, Egg Custard Pie, Frozen Pumpkin Ice Cream Pie, Jell-O Pecan Pie, Peanutty Crunch Pie for Eight, Peppermint Pie, Potato-topped Hamburger Pie, Sausage-Beef Pie, Yam Pie.
Under VEGETABLES there were
VEGETABLES
French-Fried Rutabagas, Curried Succotash, Squash Bean Boats.
He decided to read some ingredients.
THOUSAND ISLAND DRESSING
1 cup mayonnaise
2 Tbl chili sauce
⅓ cup milk
2 Tbl sweet pickle relish
1 chopped hard-boiled egg
Combine ingredients and stir.
Doc noticed how white his legs were. Thanks to the ozone people couldn’t sit in the sun anymore. Caucasians had always been the ugliest race and now there was really no way out.
FRENCH DRESSING
1 cup Hellman’s mayonnaise
½ cup Mazola corn oil
¾ Tbl sugar
⅓ cup wine vinegar
1 Tbl dry mustard
Beat oil into mayonnaise. Add remaining ingredients.
Combine and stir.
SPAM PATIO DIP
3 oz Spam
½ cup sour cream
1 ½ tsp horseradish
Stir.
Then he looked under DESSERTS.
DESSERTS:
Berry-Merry Sweets, Choco-Mocha Sponge and Snow.
This food meant so much. It came from the most dangerous magazine in the United States of America, Family Circle.
THREE MUSKETEERS TREASURE PUFFS
1 pkg quick crescent dinner rolls
2 Three Musketeers bars
Separate dough into triangles. Place a piece of bar on each triangle. Wrap around candy, completely covering it. Squeeze edges tightly to seal. Bake at 370 degrees until golden brown. Serve warm.
This was special food. Food intended for special family occasions. It came from the time when America had dreams. When Americans didn’t mind being geeky and weird because soon the whole world would be that way too. It didn’t mind eating slop because America would make slop important. Slop would have meaning. Slop would mean power.
Whatever happened to upward mobility? Doc suddenly remembered. It only seemed to apply to immigrants from very poor countries and even then they had to work twenty-four hours a day for one or two entire generations. It seemed virtually impossible for anyone else to become richer than their parents no matter how hard they tried. It didn’t change if they were CEOs or on the welfare roles. All the children were worse off.
Then Doc remembered that he had been promised video telephones by 1980. He forgot why.
Doc put the slop out of his mind and cancer, its logical conclusion. Instead he went to buy a scoop of ice cream at the corner store.
God, their flavors were really complicated. They were all based on muddy combinations like Chocolate Super Fudge Crunch Raspberry Swirl. Or else it was allusions to popular culture, like Cherry Garcia. If you weren’t a Grateful Dead fan, you wouldn’t know what you were eating.
“Excuse me,” Doc asked the clerk politely. “Don’t you have any ice cream with only one word in the title? And one without any sexual innuendo please.”
Later, at home between patients, the phone rang.
“Doctor’s office.”
“Anna O. here.”
“Anna.”
“Doc, will you come with me? We’ll make it session number three.”
He felt sore in various places.
“Anna, if you want me to come you’ll have to pay my full rate.”
“Ten bucks an hour!”
“That’s right. You know I’m going to be spending the whole time listening to you talk.”
“Thank you, Doctor. This is going to be my greatest birthday, ever. Thank you, Doctor. Thank you.”
Chapter Twelve
Anna was flipping through the newspaper, bored at a receptionist job. Being a true New Yorker she had always turned first to the obituaries. It was a well-worn habit left over from when that was the only way to get an apartment. But now it helped her keep up with her friends.
Oh shit, she said. Jack died.
Jack died and Anna missed it.
She’d last seen him walking down the block the spring before. No, it was warm but it wasn’t spring. The cherry blossoms bloom too early now. It must have been February.
“Anna!”
“Jack, how are you doing?”
“Well, Tim is dying.”
“Yes.”
Jack was really short. He had fiery red hair and dirt on his shirt.
“Yeah, Anna. He was just on Good Morning America two weeks ago and seemed so immortal. Now he’s got lesions on his lungs. I want to see him every day but you know how Tim is. He has to entertain. I’ve never officially said good-bye to anyone before.
Jack was smiling through all of this. His manner was conversational.
“The thing is, Anna, it’s all getting so normal. I mean, the first group that died - well, they didn’t even know what was happening to them. Then the second group was all waiting for the miracle cure around the corner - Q, Ampligen, egg whites, bloodfreezing, aspirin. Running around from doctor to doctor trying anything. But this group - we all know it’s probable death. There’s no mystery anymore, no romance. There’s no way out. I mean, ten years ago if some thirtythree-year-old fellow died, his whole friendship circle would be devastated for years. They’d never get over it. Now it’s so normal to die at thirty-two. We abandon them when they’re halfway into that purgatory between hom
e and hospital. We don’t even wait around for them to die anymore - too many others standing in line. Last night I walked into a room where a quarter of the men had lesions on their faces. Some had small lesions, peeking through thinning hairlines like a little kiss from God. Others had those big porous oozing ones. My black friends’ lesions are black. They were walking around with lesions holding little cocktail glasses and flirting. Oh men, they can’t admit to being frail, even when running back and forth between the flirt and their diarrhea. Now Tim’s dying. And his dying is so different from Phil’s dying. Vito left instructions for his memorial service - he picked out which Judy Garland clips should be shown. John Bernd went so long ago now.”
“You’ve been to a lot of funerals, haven’t you?” Anna asked.
“Oh, Anna, you don’t know the half of it. I’ve been to so many AIDS funerals I haven’t been doing much of anything else. I’ve been to funerals of mediocre people who were eulogized as geniuses, funerals of geniuses where there was no one adequate to eulogize them. I’ve been to open and closed caskets, funerals where you have to get there an hour early to grab a seat, and funerals that no one else cared to see. I’ve been there when there’s so much Jesus Christ you can’t even find the corpse. I’ve been to funerals where anyone could speak and funerals where only famous people could speak. Funerals where the speaker blamed the death on the mourners, funerals where the speakers praised the mourners for fighting death. The way you reacted when I told you Tim is dying, will you be that casual when it is my turn?”
“No,” she said. “I will cry and cry.”
And she did.
These are the simple facts of death, Anna thought later when the immediate sadness had faded. She was shocked at how easily it could be accepted. She was shocked to have so many dead friends at the age of thirty-one. When she was a girl, many people thought that Americans would live forever. They ate breakfast squares and freeze-dried orange juice just like those fucking astronauts. They reserved places on the first civilian shuttle to the moon. Earth didn’t matter then. We could always go somewhere else. Nowadays, most people wonder if they’ll ever get old. Living becomes an obsession. A dream.
Chapter Thirteen
Doc was sitting up one morning eating his cold Pop-Tarts. Here it was, April and already summer. It was summer again while people could still remember the last one. They started killing each other immediately and getting very irritated. Something about the wanton brutality made Doc associate freely to that damn woman in the white leather.
Embraces remembered or still vaguely hoped for.
“Oh no,” Doc said. “This is a memory that is too much to take. It is the illusion of something that no longer exists but still should exist.”
Trying to escape this melancholy manifestation, Doc went back further in his mind, flipping through images until he could relax with a benign one and watch between commercials. Nostalgia is so much more palatable than real feeling.
Okay, there were certain truths he couldn’t face. But there was still some comfort for Doc when he remembered, from time to time, that he was basically a nice person. It was all because he listened. He listened when people spoke so he knew what they cared about and what they needed. Without listening there is no love. There is nothing. Doc knew this. He hated interrupters. He despised them. They don’t let other people say their words. They lock them up. They stop them every time. Just like that woman in the white leather.
What did she have that made me feel so much?
(There are so many inadequate responses to a question of this nature. It is hard to see the precise shapes of things. The precisely stacked boxes of air and boxy trucks that bring The New York Times. It’s hard to sum up those people who pass you on escalators. Some people have sex by putting fishhooks in each other. Couple this act with a simple understanding of the basic function of all living creatures to expand and contract. Now, try that with fishhooks.)
But there was still more to listening. It can’t simply be waiting until the other person is finished before you talk. Listening means not having something to say back until after they’ve told you everything. Even if the other spoke in code, all Doc had to do was take it slow. For example, if someone said,
“I just shot up heroin,”
Doc knew that they had just shot up heroin.
Doc looked out the window. Sometimes in his imagination a bad person did good things and was redeemed. But was the bad person actually Doc himself, awaiting another’s benevolence? Or was the bad person someone else, and so he’d have to forgive her? It was so hard to know/decide. If only they could talk things over for a minute so he could remember how awful she really was.
Doc had a dream. Three white people were standing on a street corner. All were junkies. One, a man, had shot up so many times that there were bleeding track marks and needle pricks in his arm. There was an inadequate bandage soaked in blood. He was standing in casual conversation with another drug addict who held a bloody syringe. A third was staggering toward them, on the nod, finally impacting his arm on the other’s needle.
At first Doc thought it had something to do with penetration. That was how he had been trained to think about things. But after some time it became clear to him that using drug addicts as metaphors was perfectly natural since they were a normal part of his environment. It would be like someone in Nebraska dreaming about the plains. Then he realized that this was a dream about three different states. About having too much. About having something to give. About being in need. When it came to listening, of course, Doc was all three of these people.
He recalled an instance of failed listening.
DOC
I’m leaving you because you don’t listen.
THE WOMAN IN WHITE LEATHER
You left me because you think my artwork stinks. You left me because of your mother. You left me because you won’t stay in the relationship for the good and the bad.
To Doc, this was a litany of diversions. Why would this lady in leather project all of her imagined deficiencies onto a situation where all she really needed to do was be quiet? Apparently she preferred to be completely despised over simply paying attention. What was she afraid to hear? What was it?
Doc proposed another alternative for this scenario.
DOC
I’m leaving you because you don’t listen.
THE WOMAN IN WHITE LEATHER
(Silence.)
Silence is the constructive response when being told you don’t listen.
(Silence.)
Then Doc would propose.
WOMAN IN WHITE LEATHER
I’m sorry I didn’t listen.
Then she would simply do it. She would let Doc say every word without being rushed. She would let him have a long time to say it. She would not be planning her rebuttal all along. She would ask clarifying questions, not trick ones. But she would only be able to do that if she really wanted to know. If she didn’t really want to know it wasn’t love. If it was, she would have listened and then she and Doc could stay together.
Chapter Fourteen
“Happy Birthday,” he said to Anna O., but she didn’t look very happy.
“I just came from my friend Jack’s memorial service,” she said.
“How was it?”
“It was okay. Actually, I really had to smile because Jack was such a control queen that he planned how we would memorialize him. In fact there was even a moment when we had to sit and listen to Jack’s favorite songs. He made us listen to Steely Dan.”
“What food did he pick?”
“Coffee and danish. When his mother stood up to speak I was really worried because that is everybody’s nightmare - to die and your mother has the last word. But actually, it turned out that she really knew him. Mostly at these services the parent never knew their child.”
“What are you remembering about him right now?”
“You know, Jack really did not want to give up fucking. And when he decided to give it up he was v
ery, very sad. He had let someone fuck him without a condom and they had talked about it later for an hour and a half. Each one saying that it was the other one’s responsibility. Jack said that because he was being fucked, he wanted to give over completely and leave the other guy in charge. The other guy said that because Jack was the one taking it, it was Jack’s responsibility to protect himself. After that Jack gave up fucking. I think the hardest sex act in the world to live without would be oral sex. Doing it, I mean. What about for you, Doc?”
“Kissing.”
“Well, if kissing spread AIDS we would all jump off the cliff. What’s that, a bomb?”
“No, Anna, it’s your birthday present. Happy birthday.”
It was wrapped and thoughtful. It made her happy. Doc could tell. Presents make people happy if they are given with caring. They require some forethought.
“Oh, Torah Personality Cards, my favorite.”
“They’re pictures of famous Torah scholars,” he explained. “Hasidic boys trade them like baseball cards … probably.”
Then they headed down into the subway and had a seat. Well, it wasn’t quite as easy as all that. By the street entrance to the train there were seven people asking for money. There were people standing by the token line asking for money. There were people by turnstiles asking for money. Once through the turnstiles, there were people on the platform asleep or staring, urinating and stinking of rotting flesh. When the train came and Doc and Anna took their seats, it was the Motel A Train. The A had the longest route in the system and so the guests can take the longest naps.
While they were sitting, a number of people came by selling Street News, but none of the passengers wanted to buy it because savvy New Yorkers knew that it was a scam. It had no articles about the street. It was just a way for a publisher to sell his paper without having to pay minimum wage. Then another bunch of homeless came through selling copies of the Daily News, which had been on strike for months and months. The bosses, not being dumb, distributed the strike-breaking copies free to homeless people, who immediately tried to resell them, making themselves de facto scabs. Now, this situation really tested Doc’s sensibility. He had to decide which was more moral - buying a paper from a homeless person or not buying it.
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