While watching TV, I flipped through the novel Cuming Attractions by “Primo Teev,” leafing through its stiff, stale onionthin pages, glancing at all the typos, misspellings, lazy clichés and incorrect syntax. I was absolutely amazed that it went on for hundreds of pages. The older I got, the harder it was to even scribble out a shopping list.
To judge by the crooked yet deeply embedded type, it looked as though each letter was nailed deep onto the page. It was probably pounded out on some mad heroin rush. Another fly-by-night, get-rich-quick scheme. I remembered Primo telling me about an old friend of his who had worked in a porn-writing mill run by some freak who was later rubbed out by Sammy “the Bull” Gravano. Primo described how young kids, fresh out of NYU, anxious to see anything in print, even under a pseudonym, wrote the lewd crap standing up, typing it out on filing cabinets because they didn’t have desks or chairs to sit in.
But that’s not how I pictured this manuscript’s conception. I could almost look through those sperm-tinted pages and picture Primo twenty years earlier, sitting naked, sweating, and trembling, a strict two-finger typist, punching the keys on some ancient Underwood reclaimed from the street. A ribbon and life desperately in need of a change.
Porn novels are no different from Harlequin romances, crime thrillers, or any other genre novels. The characters are usually stock and formulaic: the virgin, the seducer, the villain, the hero. Instead of romantic encounters or murders, they have their quota of sex scenes. It was easy to see why Primo was never able to sell it. Not only was it idiotic and loaded with errors, there were only four lame sex scenes in the entire book.
The phone rang. I picked up to hear breathing. I knew it wasn’t obscene, but I gave the caller the benefit of the doubt.
“Mary.”
“Joey?”
“Yeah, I’m sorry, I just ran up the stairs. Listen, I met a real sweet old guy looking for a dog.” He had recalled me bitching about getting stuck with Numb.
“I should take you up on it. I can’t afford him, and I’m never with him enough. I always feel guilty.”
“So what’s the problem?”
“I’ve bonded with him.”
“So unbond.”
“It might be a female thing, but once you’ve bonded, you can’t unbond.” My call-waiting beeped. I excused myself and clicked over to Tattoo Man. I told him to wait a sec and clicked back over to Joey. As though a thought was escaping, I heard him whisper, “But I don’t bond.” I wondered if he was thinking about his wife and kid.
“Joe,” I said loudly, letting him know I was there.
“Oh, I got to run.” He sounded embarrassed.
“You know my band is playing in a few weeks. If you want to come and see me perform, you’re invited.”
“Are you ever going to scatter Primo’s ashes, or did you bond with them too?” he asked, slightly impatient. I was amazed how many unfinished details of my life he had retained.
“I just want to let enough time go by so that if this isn’t him, someone will call me.”
“Listen,” he said in a calmer tone, “I’m going to be away for a few weeks, I’m traveling out West. I’ll call you when I get back.”
“Where are you going?”
“California, Vegas. Around. Business.”
“We’ll go for dinner when you get back. That way I can get my gift.”
“What gift?”
“The gift you’re going to buy me on your trip.” That was my way of saying good-bye. I clicked back over to Howard, and we agreed to meet at the usual place. I collected the canine and the manuscript and bought a cup of coffee en route.
As I got into the inner gate of doggie hell, I saw him waiting for me, playing fetch with Fedora.
“You really go through these pages quickly.” He flipped through Stark.
“They’re actually great therapy,” I confided. “When I see how bad everyone else’s writing is, my own self-confidence increases.”
“Everyone says that at first. But after you’ve finished your first ten manuscripts, and realize your writing still stinks, you’ll get over that.” He sounded as though he were speaking from personal experience. I handed him the reader’s report. He gave me two twenties and a ten. Opening the envelope, he glanced at my report.
“Are there any new manuscripts?” I asked.
“No, thank God. We’re all done.”
“Done? I thought publishers were always looking for works?”
“Well, this is a contest for new works.”
“A contest!”
“Yeah, the DLP Organization was left some money to set up a memorial contest. They put out calls for manuscripts in a bunch of journals and writing programs around the country and got about fifty submissions.”
“What category?”
“It’s wide open. It just has to be a first-time author submitting a manuscript-length work, around fifty thousand words. In addition to getting published, the author gets a five-thousand-dollar award.”
“Holy shit.” That should cancel both my credit card debt and the balance of my defaulted student loan. There was nothing like being broke.
“I got suckered into this insipid readers’ project at a bulk fee. I needed cash bad,” he explained. “Now it’s over, and I’m free. And you know, you’re lucky, the two manuscripts you got were among the better ones in the stack.”
“So one of those two is going to get published?”
“Well, there were others, but they’re about the same.”
“Suppose I wanted to enter this contest?” I heard myself saying.
“It’s too late,” he replied. “Deadline was a month ago.”
“There’s no way you could slip a late manuscript in?”
“You have it now?” he asked.
“I can have it ready in a few days,” I said hastily. I was one story short of being finished.
“Let me get this straight. You’re going to spend the next three days writing a fifty-thousand-word novel?”
“Of course not. It’s a collection of stories, I already wrote them,” I revealed.
“I have to turn in these last two manuscripts tomorrow before five o’clock. Give it to me by then, and I’ll say it got lost and I’m submitting it late.”
“Tomorrow!”
“Hey, you’re already four weeks behind the deadline.”
“Shit.” I thought about it and remembered reading in the Paris Review Writer’s Interview series how French mystery writer Georges Simenon—who published over four hundred novels—had batted out his fastest potboiler in twenty-six hours. I had a little more time than that to write just one story—my Kinko’s installment. It sounded so thrillingly impossible, I told him I’d have it ready for him.
Then, as I dashed home, I realized that I had band practice tonight, and our big show at Mercury Lounge was tomorrow, on top of everything else.
I lit a cigarette, turned on the TV, and for the first time I played with Numb. There were just too many distractions at home. I threw on my clothes, grabbed a pen and notepad, and dashed out the door. Alt.café was too grungy, Starbucks too crisp. Limbo too cool, the Cobalt Colt was just right. When I walked through the door of the place, though, I heard a female voice declare, “Oh shit, well look what the colt dragged in.”
I did not need to look up to know it was Zoë holding an espresso. She was having a smoke, not a good sign. She responded to my cigarette radar by saying, “This is medicinal.”
Without a word she pushed back the chair across from her. I sat down and pointed out, “You’re not allowed to smoke here.”
“These are dietary.”
Since I was an occasional sneak smoker myself, I restrained myself from saying that the weight slings right back afterward, plus you get a side order of cancer.
“How’s the great love?” I queried.
“Still humming along,” she replied with an unenthusiastic smile. The honeymoon looked to be over.
“How’s doggie woggie?” she replied.
“He left me for another bitch.”
We talked for another five minutes until she was done with her demitasse, and together we rose and exited. It wasn’t until I was outside that I remembered the whole point in going there was to write a story. Other than setting it in Kinko’s, I didn’t have a clue what it was going to be about, so I was grateful to procrastinate.
We chatted our way up to Houston and over to Kinko’s, our common link and sore point. She peeked in to see if Jeff was about, I waved to Scott the über-copier. He dashed over between customers.
“How’s it hanging?” he clung tensely to dated clichés.
“Fine, how are you, Scott?”
“Just fine” he said sweetly, slipping his hands into his pockets.
I did likewise, where I found some gum. When I offered him a stick, he blankly responded, “I’d prefer not.”
This remark reminded me of the Melville short story “Bartleby the Scrivener.” Before the days of carbon papers and Xerox machines, scriveners copied documents by hand. This story is set in Wall Street offices of the 1850s. Bartleby is a quiet, hardworking copyist. One day, when told to do a transcription, he responds like Scotty, “I’d prefer not.”
For Bartleby, this is a passive act of rebellion—he is a man, not a machine. His employer tries to understand his reluctance but cannot. When Bartleby is fired and told to leave the premises, he refrains, “I’d prefer not to.”
He is eventually arrested and sent to jail. In the final scene, when his employer discovers him dead in the prison yard, he tells the prison guard, “He’s asleep with counselors and kings.”
My story would be a modern-day homage to Melville set in Kinko’s, based on Scotty, a human Xerox machine who wants to work. He grows jealous and subsequently sabotages the newer automated machines.
“What’s the matter?” he asked, seeing me smile uncontrollably, my eyes full of twinkles.
“Can I kiss you?” I asked in appreciation of his automatism.
“Sure,” he said, baffled. I grabbed him and gave him a big lip-smacking kiss.
“Well, okay,” he said, his head filling with blood. He must have figured his age-worn salutations sounded like love poems when he said them. With a new dose of confidence, he dashed back to the counter to attend an awaiting customer.
A group of skinny chicks who were waiting to have their dance cards Xeroxed seemed to disturb Zoë. I think their thinness compelled her to ask, “Want to go for a run?”
“Sure,” I replied, feeling elated that I knew what I was going to write about. We agreed to go to our respective homes, squeeze into our gym gear, and then she would pick me up. Numb gave me an uncomplimentary look as I pulled on my jogging bra, T-shirt, and leggings and waited for Zoë. During the last New Year’s hangover, we both tiredly resolved and joined health clubs. But that was months ago, and to my knowledge, neither of us had gone.
“I have a guest pass, so let’s go to mine,” she said, which was fine. I was glad to go to another club first to lose a little weight before heading to my own gym.
Both of us were wearing trench coats and sunglasses over our getups as we walked the few blocks. When we arrived, the clerk looked at Zoë’s ID and summoned up her computer file. It turned out she only had a week left on her three-month membership. A muscular, ponytailed, polo-shirted sales stud hoofed over with a clipboard and tried lassoing us fillies into renewing with him. No thanks. We escaped to the women’s locker room downstairs, where we hung up our coats. Self-consciously we entered the large open area where men and women on black rectangular mats stretched their rubbery, slippery bodies. Zoë smiled, took a mat, and did something like a sit-up. I feebly followed her lead. We each did about ten of them before we just lay on our backs making groaning noises.
“Let’s get our fat butts upstairs on that terrible treadmill before we have a coronary down here on the mats,” she huffed. She was right. It looked less pathetic to die up there.
Tiredly we struggled up the stairs. Although there were no manstruments to mount, we had the good luck of finding adjacent machines in front of the ceiling-suspended television set. Neither of us had remembered to bring our headphones to hear the TVs, so we were only able to watch the music videos. Initially, ambitiously, we both plugged 6 m.p.h. as our running speed. After a few optimistic minutes, I almost slipped and was terrified of being dragged to death on one of those stationary devices. Zoë too was winded. The speed mysteriously slipped down to 4 m.p.h., and we both felt ourselves on a mechanical forced march clutching the front grip bar for dear life.
“What are you up to later?” Zoë said, grasping and gasping.
“Nothing,” I huffed back, dripping. After ten minutes, Zoë jumped off her torture machine. I punched the pause button and—eureka! We were slim.
We both went back downstairs and put our old trench coats back on. Though we were sweaty, we both preferred to shower at home.
“Oh,” Zoë said, instantly excited. “We’re meeting with Sako tonight, before the party. You’ve got to come.”
“I have to write tonight.”
“Just for thirty minutes, so you can meet him and he can call you. I’m telling you, you’re going to be so happy that I set you up.”
“I don’t want to be rude, Zoë, but if he’s anything like Jeff—”
“I know you don’t like Jeff. He’s everything Jeff is not. You’ll love him!”
I repeated that tonight was emphatically out of the question because I had to write. I couldn’t tell her that I also had band practice.
“Come on, you need to eat anyway. It’s not going to kill you.”
“I’m going to be really tense tonight.”
“All the better. Guys love a bitch. And this guy likes you. If you like him, you got a shot at something.”
Probably as a subconscious form of sabotaging my literary submission, I consented to join them for a quick double dinner—ten P.M. at the yuppie Italian restaurant on the corner of Fourth and Second. Eat and retreat, I reiterated. She assured me that was fine.
It was seven by the time I got home. In addition to a hangup call, I had two messages on my machine. The first was from Helga Elfman, who said that she had learned that Sue Wott had earned roughly three thousand dollars from the paintings Primo painted.
“With paintings that only a white man could paint and get nothing for,” she said testily. “An Asian woman ends up making a bundle—that’s the damned art world for you.”
Numb was doing jumping jacks, giving me that fish-eyed look that said, if you don’t get me the hell out of here and drain me, I’m going to piss on your shoes. So I forsook the shower and nap I desperately needed, leashed him, and gave him his ten minutes in the prison yard.
Before I got stuck owning a dog, I used to be pissed whenever I recovered a newspaper from a garbage can that had the pungent surprise of some pet’s scoopings. Now I was the one always searching out a periodical to pick up Numb’s gratitude whenever we went on walks. After he emptied himself, I took him back to his cell upstairs. It was time for rehearsal. I grabbed the bass and headed out. En route, I noticed the various peeled and bubbled flyers announcing the performances of East Village bands glued or wheat-pasted to buildings, street signs, and lampposts. Strange little phraseplays that at best made one smile: Zodiac Love Group, New Wet Kojak, Napolean Blown Aparts, and Mobile Homos were among the few.
“Early,” Sue Wott observed with disbelief when she saw me. “You must be nervous about tomorrow’s show.”
“Actually it skipped my mind, but thanks for reminding me. I was looking for something to fret about.” As we went upstairs together, I assured her that my being early was an unfortunate accident.
“I hope Norma comes soon,” she responded, adding, “I usually pick her up on my way here. She’s really bad with appointments.”
When we got access to our tiny studio, we made small talk as Sue gathered the half-filled Styrofoam cups, paper dishes, and pizza crusts that had accumulated in the course of the rehearsal day.
“So how old is your son?” I began.
“Five,” she responded. This surprised me; I was under the impression she had had her falling-out with Primo by then.
“I don’t see a wedding ring,” I said, hoping not to sound too much like my mother.
“You want to marry me?” she shot back. The girl was a land mine of domestic sensitivities.
“I was just wondering if you were a single parent.”
“I’m half a parent,” she replied without humor. “I have an extremely dysfunctional roommate, Jane, who—despite the fact that it’s her apartment—pays off her half of the rent by babysitting.”
“That doesn’t sound too bad.”
“It doesn’t, does it? And yet, as it just turned out, over the past five months the fucking idiot has been living off the rent money instead of giving it to the landlord—surprise!”
“What does that mean?”
“You want to hear my whole crummy irritating story?”
“You can just cut to the chase, if there is one.”
“The chase: Jane and I have an appearance in landlordtenant court in a few days. At that point, if the landlord fights us we could be homeless.”
“So Primo is not your son’s father?” I asked, deciding to bull her entire china shop.
“You leave no stone unturned, do you?” she asked with a smile. “Actually, yes, he is the father, but that never bothered me.”
“Why not?” I asked, since that was the question that had been pestering me above all else.
“Those idiots wouldn’t let me in,” Marilyn interrupted as she entered our chamber of horrors, shattering our gradual and fragile intimacy. As Sue and Marilyn chatted about this and that, I dipped out and went to the bathroom.
Norma showed up a bit late, which for her was early, and we got started. We’d made a habit of working on about half a dozen songs over and over during each rehearsal. All of them had vaguely the same riff constituted roughly by the same beat and a loosely similar melody. Norma, who seemed slightly feverish, kept overbeating or underbeating her drums.
“My nerves are bad tonight,” she kept saying as she repeatedly dropped her fat chopsticks. She would take the opportunity to tighten one of the shiny lug nuts surrounding her drum, as if that was somehow the cause of her slippings.
While playing the last song in the round up, “Fuck You!”—the third song by Sue that had the word fuck in it—Marilyn broke a guitar string, and since she had replacements for every string but that one, we stopped fifteen minutes before the end of our session. Sue gathered us together to talk about tomorrow’s show.
“We’ve all done this before,” Sue explained to me. “I know this is your first show, but everything will be fine.”
“Im glad you have confidence in me,” I replied, perhaps not sarcastically enough.
“She has it with good reason,” Marilyn joined in. “You’re a successful person.”
“A successful person?” It was the nastiest thing anyone had said about me in hours.
“Sure, you haven’t missed a single rehearsal. And you’re not insane,” she said sincerely.
“You didn’t get stuck with a kid you can’t afford,” Sue tossed in.
“You don’t drink, take drugs, or need some guy treating you like shit.” Norma plopped her comments into this stone soup.
“Nowadays,” Marilyn concluded, “that means you’re a success.”
An age of lowered expectations came with some ready-made benefits. Nowadays the standards had plummeted so far that I failed even at being a failure. I silently packed up. Nothing else was left. They had even robbed me of self-pity.