Busy Monsters

by William Giraldi

  “Morris Hammerstein,” I said to him that day on his semi-shaded front porch, “I have come seeking lessons on how to woo a certain woman into forever-with-me. I’m told you’re the best, a Semitic Casanova with a Negress bride. Please help.”

  “Very glad to meet you,” he said, although he sounded unsure. “Sandra told me you were coming.”

  A minute or more must have passed as we looked at each other’s clothes. I noticed the well-watered plant next to the door, a gardenia, I think.

  He said, “Can I ask you a favor?”

  I told him to ask away.

  “Please don’t write about me or my family. We’re intensely private here. I just read this week’s piece about Sandy and the UFO, and I don’t think you were fair to her. She’s really not like that at all. That’s not Sandy.”

  “Morris,” I told him, “I was there, you weren’t. She was put-upon and pathological, and those are just the p’s. As for not writing about your family: you have a deal. But as to the English word fair: perhaps cut that one from your repertoire. I myself recently looked it up and the OED didn’t seem to know of its existence.”

  The way he stared at me and didn’t speak: like I was Turkana Boy come back to life with a hand axe for a gift. He had a lovely home, though, precisely what I had always imagined for Gillian and me: a high gable front with three bedrooms, one-car garage, ample driveway, all tucked back in a Christian cul-de-sac. The sky out there loomed large and blue.

  “One more thing,” I said. “I agree not to write about you and your family if you bless me with the estrogen info I’ve come to acquire, also knowledge of what Jack and Jill might have discovered on that hill we hear so much about.”

  “I’ll try,” he said. “What else can I do? You’re here now.”

  We continued on the porch beneath those mighty Colorado skies, neither of us pleased, but one of us—the gangrened Jehovah’s Witness—certain that some sort of discomfort was possible.

  “So,” he said finally. “You’re a writer.”

  He wouldn’t invite me in.

  “I’ve been told my sentences salsa.”

  “I have a nagging suspicion that only about forty percent of what you write is true. I also think your people all speak alike, or at least you and Friend and Romp.”

  “Well, Morris,” I said, “style can be infectious. Look at blue jeans. I am friends with Friend and Friend is friends with Romp.”

  “Also, if I may offer another opinion: most of the events in your memoirs occur outside the scope of normal human possibility.”

  “Normal? What’s that? Sounds Mesopotamian. And not a single instance in my chronicles disobeys the laws of physics. I defy you, sir, to find one.”

  With I on the bottom step of the porch and he on the top step, I realized he was in the perfect position to karate me across the teeth, if that urge should so strike him.

  “I don’t need to,” he said. “Tom Clancy does not disobey the laws of physics, either. Would you care to defend his multiple transgressions against trees?”

  Multiple transgressions against trees. I was beginning to adore this fellow.

  “My yarns,” I said, “are propelled by the mysteries of human longing, which are essentially feminine. Clancy’s are propelled by the ego, which is essentially masculine and destructive.”

  “This from a man with guns. By the way, Mr. Homar, I will not allow guns on my property. I have a child.”

  “Morris—if I may—be gentle, now. I’m wounded in the soft spots, the spiritual equivalent of what Keith Richards looks like.”

  Hearty laugh here. He had television teeth.

  “Charles—if I may—you weren’t even born when Exile on Main St. came out.”

  “But still. I’ve heard it. Friend is a fan of Mick’s lips.”

  Why couldn’t this progress smooth-like, without hindrance and feelings hurt? Why is everything so hard?

  “I agreed to help you, Mr. Homar, but as a favor to Sandra. I’m asking you to respect my family.”

  “As I said, Morris, you have a deal. All I know about women I learned from my own erratic and hellward breast. Plus the huntsman Romp taught me about gals of African origin. Maybe you can tell me if he was right.”

  “I hope that Romp person was indeed inhaled by a Bigfoot, because I found his insight into black women reprobate. I had to hide that week’s issue from Wanda. Her opinions can shake concrete.”

  Opinions that can shake concrete? Was he making fun of me now, too, just as Romp had in my bathroom? And must all academics dress alike? Why the pressed khaki pants, penny loafers, and white button-up shirt (with a pen in the pocket) on a Saturday afternoon?

  “Wanda, I take it, is your wife.”

  “My chocolate champion, if you please, Mr. Homar. But yes. Come in, and prepare your plasma for voltage, your knees for quaking.”

  Okay, now I knew he was poking fun at me—who puts plasma and voltage in the same sentence?—but I had neither the daring nor the wherewithal to begin a row.

  “Kind sir,” I said, “lead the way.”

  ON TO THE lesbian named Jo—Wanda’s sister’s lover—who arrived not five minutes after we had entered the house and began our necessary save-me chat. Wanda’s svelte, head-shaved younger sister Shavan liked to roam, dabble, defy expectations with white women: she dressed like a slattern and talked in a voice that made you lean.

  Almost immediately upon seeing Wanda that day—this was the first time they had met—Jo couldn’t breathe, her heart was performing dangerous feats of acrobatics, and she just stared, stared—like someone recently back from battle who can’t stay the blasts. There was a lot of standing around and not speaking. I tied my shoes that didn’t need tying. Jo, by the way, as you might have expected, dressed like a GI and spoke in a way that suggested cigars.

  Wanda’s sex-beckoning dark beauty could eclipse any stage show—in fact Morris had just begun telling me as much, and how a man should go about handling the fray such beauty makes—but he had never before seen it strike a human with paralysis. Wanda dressed summery, was the very incarnation of what you mean by olfactory. Her voice sounded the way a velour bathrobe feels.

  We were in the kitchen now (nice cabinets and granite countertops). Jo leaned her beefy frame up against the stove and stood slowly shaking her lesbian haircut as if in disbelief. She attempted to compose herself with yoga breaths.

  Shavan asked her what was wrong, and Morris, now at Wanda’s side in the kitchen, said, “What’s happening around here?”

  Their eight-year-old daughter, Mocha—of course they named her Mocha; what else would you have them name their gorgeous gal with skin the color of cardboard: Mocha Hammerstein, it just spills from the tongue in glee—said from behind us, “Daddy, there are strange people in our house.”

  “Yes, sweetie,” he replied. “This is Mr. Homar, don’t be rude; he might write awful things about you. And that over there is a lesbian with an issue or two.” And then, to Wanda, nodding at Jo, “What’s wrong with her?”

  She whispered, “Shavan says she’s in love.”

  “Right now? With me?”

  “I don’t think so, Ham. With me, apparently.”

  Morris informed her, informed us all, that she had been in the house for only ten minutes.

  “Love at first sight,” Wanda said.

  I said, “I’ve heard about that in pop songs and on some late-night TV reruns. It’s a verifiable occurrence.”

  Over there by the window Shavan and Jo were whispering to one another like venereal nuns.

  “Well, this isn’t right, dear,” Morris said. “Not right at all. Especially not when we have a guest. Charles Homar is here and he has his pencil and pad in hand.”

  “The poor thing appears sick,” she said.

  “Poor thing?” Morris asked. “She’s two hundred pounds and has a tattoo on her forearm.”

  Indeed: the tattoo looked like a cancer splotch.

  Morris said, “A poor thing is thin a
nd sickly and shakes in the rain. This is not a poor thing in our kitchen.”

  “Wanda,” I said, “I concur. If you want to see a poor thing, glance my way. I make betterment seem somewhat beside the point.”

  Some more minutes of the awkward and unusual, of the silent dilly-dally enjoyed by the discomfited. The lesbian and her mental illness she confused with love were interfering with the forecast I had come for.

  And then, imagine this: Jo gets hostile with Morris. All he said was, “What seems to be the problem, Jo?” and she snapped, “Don’t get in my face, little man.”

  Yes, she called him little man, in his own home. Never mind that he wasn’t even in her face—rather hard from the opposite end of a capacious kitchen. This touched a nerve in him, I could tell, and I would be informed later that he had been picked on psychopathically while he was a youth, Irish and Italian hoodlums named Mikey and Ralph tickled by making him eat mud. Here was where his preoccupation with the cosmos began: while Mikey and Ralph were tying him to a tree with clothesline rope and trying to dump a shovelful of dirt and earthworms into his underwear, he’d point his chin up to the sky and imagine the constellations, the comets burning like bullets, supernovae swirling. It was a meeting of brawn and brain and sadly brawn carried the torch. I felt for him.

  “Excuse me?” he said to Jo, in that way that really means, You must be crazy talking to me like that in my own house, which was what he should have said.

  He had rights, damn it, and I nearly said so, but I was trying, really, not to intrude, just stand in the kitchen with them and watch the misfortune of others, pleased it was not mine for a change.

  Wanda said to Morris, “Leave it alone, Ham. Shavan will deal with this.”

  “Yeah,” Jo said, still scowling. “Leave it alone. And just let me talk to Wanda. I want to be alone with her for a minute.”

  Shavan didn’t say anything to that; this perplexed me. She was clearly frightened of this career lesbian, and this perplexed me more: why would you want to befriend or take as a lover someone who frightens you? Nature is clear on this point: fright causes a creature to flee. So did it follow that Shavan was not a creature, or perhaps an anomaly in the animal kingdom? Morris adored his sister-in-law—he told me so—but she was missing the chromosome that permits a person to be foursquare when she needs to.

  Wanda looked at Morris and shrugged—such well-defined deltoids—then patted his upper back gingerly; she was calm in times of crisis—that much was clear. Morris told me about the time he had witnessed her exiting a department store inferno as if she were modeling Gucci on a runway. Their photo appeared in the newspaper the next day: behind them were the flames and beside them frantic faces—Morris’s included—and there was his Wanda, applying lipstick without a mirror.

  “Lunacy,” he said now, looking at Jo. “You can’t do this. Get control of your chemistry.”

  “You don’t understand,” she shouted, and nearly took a step toward him.

  Heedless and done in though I was, I was prepared to do battle for this stick-figure astronomer, in defense of middle-class domesticity and American wholesomeness. This was injustice, and Morris had trouble abiding it. The solar system is a finely tuned mechanism; laws govern motion. The solar system does not tolerate abnormalities in fixity; nor could he. Also, a man is not an insect; you cannot step on his head with impunity. I’d been saying this all over the country.

  “Jo,” Morris continued, “I think you should leave. This isn’t natural. We have a guest here and he needs our attention.”

  She said, “If your guest is the same Charles Homar of those Gillian stories, then he isn’t worth your effort. He’s a misogynist and homophobe.”

  And then she turned her glare on me and claimed, “I have certain friends who want you dead.”

  “Josephine or Joanne,” I said, flanked by Morris and Wanda, “you flatter me, really. Stalin wanted certain writers dead, too, but only the best. Some of them turned their own hands against themselves—a chap named Mayakovksy, I’ve heard, also a good witch named Tsvetaeva—and I’m trying to avoid that. Thus far I’ve had only minimal success. As for the homophobe remark: I’ve marched on the lawn of Connecticut’s state capital building in Hartford jabbing a handmade sign that said LET ALL THE RED-BLOODED BE FREE TO WED. Keep in mind that the root word of my home state is connect. You Sapphic hunchback.”

  “I’ll throttle you,” she said, and I think I swallowed the little orb of fear in my gullet.

  “Jo,” Morris said again, “please remove your oddball self from the premises. I’ll have over to our home whomever I please.”

  “I’m not going anywhere, little man. Let me talk to Wanda, I said,” and again another step toward him, toward us.

  This lesbian was driven and jittery, here to hobnob and stand ground.

  “Okay,” Wanda said, “I’ll talk to you, Jo. Ham, honey, why don’t you go back and continue talking with Mr. Homar about his Gillian and her squid—”

  He cut her off here, not something he was wont to do very often—that was obvious—but he did not have run of his lungs and spleen.

  “No way,” he said. “There will be no talking between you and this man-woman. I’ve asked her to leave and that is what I expect. The mortgage is in my name. I am a professor of cause and effect, and a student of all that’s proper. Children and animals admire me. How am I doing, Charles?”

  “Very well,” I said. “I like the part about cause and effect.”

  This was the point at which Jo said she would introduce Morris to the fearsome twins, Ruin and Woe. He asked her if that was a threat and she told him—she told the both of us, actually—that she threatened people daily, was quite skilled at it.

  Wanda said, “Ham, let’s convene in the living room for one moment, please.”

  He would not move; his and Jo’s eyes were caught in a gravitational field that would have made Newton groan. My own intestines felt the tension and I thought: This is delaying my personal growth needed to secure mine Gillian. The sister Shavan shrugged as if to say that this oily unpleasantness upon us was out of her hands. I thought her not admirable in the least.

  “Please let’s talk a moment in the living room,” Wanda said again, and this time she took Morris’s elbow with some force and would not be refused.

  I followed because, with my highway-numbed brain, what else could I have done? Chatted with the lesbians about Gertrude and Alice, or maybe the newest model of Harley-Davidson chopper?

  Mocha was there on the sofa with her ear cocked toward the kitchen, cute little pigtails poking up in question marks. As Wanda consulted with Morris in the corner, I sat on the sofa next to the lass and asked her about how love works in the fourth grade. I believe she said something about Saint Ignatius of Loyola and the spiritual warrior he was, and this somehow made sense to me. (She was, I realized later, the same age and height as Bartholomew when he died.) Mocha was now lacing up the new boxing gloves her mother had bought for her recently in an effort to teach her self-sufficiency and how to punish violently all those who transgress against her dignity. The carpet beneath my sneakers looked shampooed.

  “Mo,” Wanda said from over there, “please don’t bother Mr. Homar. He’s riven.”

  “Wanda,” I said, “this is no bother. She speaks sagacity I haven’t heard since Connecticut lowered real estate taxes. I believe she’ll be president or at least vice.”

  “Mocha,” she said, “Mr. Homar is only being kind. Please go into your room and practice piano. I want to hear your Chopin.”

  Mocha did not budge but looked over at her mother with those oblong brown eyes that will one day mean cardiac catastrophe to many a hapless male.

  “Mo, the next time I ask it will be with the back of my hand, little girl. Put down those boxing gloves and get gone.”

  Their daughter bolted from the room and Morris looked like his chest was throbbing for the lamb; her being in danger of physical harm from her normally placid mother was really the fa
ult of this intrusive lesbian in their kitchen. I knew we’d see bloodshed before long. That’s what happens.

  “Ham,” Wanda pleaded, “why don’t you and Mr. Homar go out back to the picnic table and you can show him the view of the mountains and talk there?”

  “I really don’t understand this,” he said.

  “It might be my fault,” I said, falling back into the cushion. “Wherever I go, sturm und drang seem to follow and then pitch a tent. Maybe I should leave.”

  “Nonsense,” Morris said. “This isn’t your doing, Mr. Homar. Just please give us a moment to clear this up.”

  Before Wanda’s good sense had the chance to reach Morris or me, Jo appeared behind us and said, “Did I hear boxing gloves? Let’s put them on, little man.”

  “I beg your pardon?” Morris said.

  “I’ll box you for her. We’ll settle this.”

  Settle this? What this?

  Earth was just then quite possibly caught in the tail of a comet, and as a result our precious normality had been altered. After this day Morris would clearly have to rethink the Milky Way and his puny place in it. This was melee and scandal, very much how he had felt, he said, when Dylan went electric in ’66 (a year as unfamiliar to me as are the culinary arts in an igloo, seeing as how I would need another decade entirely to get myself born).

  The three nonlesbians in the room glanced at each other and then at the boxing gloves next to me. At least one of those nonlesbians was expecting a reality TV camera crew to bust through the door with declarations of Ha ha.