Every day is dyed its own hair color. The next day a depressing blue was cast. While lying in bed that morning, lamenting the loss of my job and band, I was yanked up by an annoyingly polite series of knocks upon my door. After two months the brand-new roommate wanted out. Caroline’s rice was cooked.
“Dorn and I found a place together in Park Slope,” she cheered.
Aside from learning that Dorn was gay, she was also going to find out that most people are lovable at a distance, up close it’s a whole ’nother story.
“Even though I was supposed to give you a month’s notice, I’m moving out today, but I’ll still pay you.”
The idea of living alone for the remainder of the month was nice, but the bleakness prevailed.
“Are you okay? You look really depressed.” She seemed concerned, which was similar to kindness.
“I just lost my job,” I replied tiredly.
“Someone told me they’re hiring people over at the Strand.”
The Strand was not just a bookstore, but a local workfare program for unemployed white slackers. They’d sit hidden in the narrow aisles on crates of books, until some bitter, rectal manager behind the inner desk yelled, “Books to go down.”
Needless to say, I couldn’t sink that low. I thanked her for her crappy advice. It was time to get back to my permanent career of temping, but not today.
The blues spread over the strands of the week and darkened as I accepted my fate and waited for my savings to run out. Perhaps as a supreme act of self-denial, I started writing again. If I could control working-class people and moderate fictitious suffering, everything seemed okay. As coffee cups littered my house and turned into ashtrays, I turned all the women in my novel into divorcees, widows, or never-marrieds. Like my own mother, though, they were all single parents.
Details breathed out of my fingers. Plots sprouted subplots. The major characters engendered minor characters. For the first time in what seemed like forever, I felt the joy of writing and stopped feeling unemployed.
Compared to playing in a band, writing was lonely business. Numb curled around my feet, and whenever I stopped typing, he’d look up at me lovingly and yawn. That week, I also had a remarkably guiltless conversation with my mother about nothing in particular, since I refused to divulge any details that she might use against me. Sako called and asked if we could meet again. Even in John Hughes’s world of teenage love, no one sucked a foot or danced around in naked ecstasy. I had to think about it. Scotty called to give his condolences about my getting fired.
“I’m sorry that Jeff is such a mega-idiot, but he’s really going through hell about his breakup with Zoë,” he concluded.
Norma called me and said when she finally sobered up, she had heard about what had happened at Brownies—about my being ousted—and she was sorry. No longer beautiful or crazy. I was now ugly and sane. She told me Sue had canceled the show at CBGBs and two other dates she hadn’t even told anyone about.
“You don’t think there’s any chance of her forgiving me, do you?” I asked, knowing the answer.
“She doesn’t even allow us to mention you,” Norma said. “She is starting auditions for a new bass player tomorrow, and this time she swears that anyone who even knows Primo will be tossed down the stairs.”
After she hung up, I thought, Primo could be selfish and petty, but he wasn’t malevolent. Whatever harm he did to Sue, he did out of weakness and sloth. Like a mutt you picked up at the pound without knowing its history, Primo was a rescue boyfriend. Any woman who was hurt by him only had herself to blame. And that slipped right into Sue Wott’s greatest frailty—her reluctance to accept blame.
Toward the end of the week, when I felt supremely entitled to some good news, Howard finally broke his silence and called me. “Can you meet me in ten minutes? I’ve got something to tell you.”
Eight minutes later at the dogrun while I waited, I figured he was going to tell me my stories had been rejected. After all, if I had been accepted, he would have told me on the phone. When he showed up, he let his dog loose and walked up to me with sad dog eyes.
“Don’t apologize,” I rushed right in. “I took a stab. No big loss. Art is about rejection.”
“Did anyone notify you?”
“No.”
“Well, no one told me you’ve been rejected either,” he said.
“My book hasn’t been rejected?”
“Not to my knowledge. All I know is, the editor called to ask where the manuscript came from and why I hadn’t done the reader’s report. I told him that it was in the stack of works he gave me, and I overlooked it. Then he gave the manuscript to another reader. About a week ago I heard that it got a good report.”
“Why didn’t you tell me a week ago?” I asked, always dying for any positive tidbits.
“I didn’t want to get your hopes up.”
“So why are you telling me now?”
“Because you’re asking,” he explained. “But this isn’t the reason I called you here.”
“Do you remember some time ago when you told me about that friend of yours, Joey Lucas?”
“No.”
“Remember you said you didn’t know anything about him and I mentioned running a superficial background check?”
“Frankly, no,” I replied honestly. I’m sure it all happened, but my memory was heading right down the toilet.
“I told you I had a friend who was a private investigator.”
“Oh, yeah.” The light flicked on in my brain.
“Do you know how old your neighbor is?”
“Around fifty. Why?”
“And he was born in Hoboken, right?”
“I think so.”
“Do you know if Joey is his given name or if he had a name change?”
“WHY?” I demanded.
Howard handed me a page from a small spiral notepad with three names scrawled on it:
Joseph Lucachevski, 1025 Washington Ave., born 9/11/45, died 7/20/77
Joey Lukas, 123 Clinton St., born 2/7/28,
Joe Lugars, 218 Eighth St., born 11/29/58.
“Holy shit,” I uttered.
I wasn’t a hundred percent sure if he was born in Hoboken or what year he was born, but 1025 Washington Street was the address where I had spent the first ten years of my life. He lived right above us. It would have been too much of a coincidence if there was another Joey Lucas or ethnic name that it had been derived from. According to the record in my hand, Joey had died twenty-two years ago. So who the hell was this man who over the last few years had become one of my closest friends and most trusted confidants?
“There must be some mistake,” I uttered, nodding my head.
“You want to go on a date?” Howard asked, as I wondered who had intercepted me on the Internet—that cyber-funhouse of false identities and pedophiles.
“There’s a good movie at the Angelika” he added, vividly underscoring male insensitivity.
“Fine,” I said thoughtlessly. He imparted time and place coordinates, and I walked disjointedly home, where I felt my mental floor collapse under me.
I called Joe’s number and carefully listened to his greeting: “This is me, leave a message.” A long beep signified a full tape of unheard messages, and I hung up before leaving one. There had to be some simple explanation for this. Howard and I met for a pizza at Two Boots and headed to the Angelika Film Center.
We were early as we walked down Mercer Street, so, passing a used bookstore we slipped in to waste some time before the film began. Howard looked under Literary Criticism, as I veered through Fiction, hoping to distract myself from Joey’s false identity. While browsing a small shelf entitled Erotica, I spotted a collection of six pornographic paperbacks, all with lime green covers, published by Journey Men Press. They had funny titles: Billy Club Cops, A Finger in the Dyke … Before my brain completely registered it, I let out a howl: Cuming Attractions, by Primitivo Schultz.
“Oh, fuck!” I wailed. The notion that Primo’s offensive drivel had actually made it into print, and I couldn’t even get a story in a decent literary magazine, filled me with a great and sudden rage. I snatched it from the shelf and opened the pages.
“What’s the matter?” Howard called out. It was his book all right. Before I could even think about it, I tore the paperback down its aged spine.
“What the hell’s going on?” the clerk called out. Howard came right over.
“Nothing, I’m sorry,” I said, suddenly realizing what I had done, trying to link the two parts together.
The clerk came over and, yanking the two torn halves out of my hands, he charged, “This book was part of a set! We had the entire collection, do you realize that?”
“It’s disgusting porno,” I replied, sounding like some puritan.
“Look, we have a First Amendment, lady.”
“No, I didn’t mean that. It’s just that this book is so badly written—”
“Hey, I don’t give a fuck what you think!” The clerk was obviously enraged.
“How much does it cost?” Howard asked meekly, before the situation could spiral out of control.
“Twenty-five dollars,” he shot back, quoting the price from nothing other than some internal system of outrage. I had eighteen dollars, Howard added seven others.
“I’ll pay you back,” I assured him. He shrugged.
“And don’t come back!” the clerk shouted as we were leaving.
We walked silently to the corner. Howard softly asked, “Who is Polly?”
I looked over and saw that he was reading the dedication page of the novel.
“Another nitwit like me,” I said, feeling like a total idiot.
“Do you want the book?”
“No, thanks,” I said and asked, “Would you mind if we skipped the film?”
“No,” he replied and slipped the torn paperback into his pocket.
“I feel like such an idiot,” I said, after a few minutes of silence. “I really have an awful temper.”
“You were probably pissed about the whole Joey thing.”
“That doesn’t excuse what I did,” I said. “Primo didn’t do anything wrong. And nothing is worse than destroying a book.”
“He could have told you he wrote it.”
“He told me he was a writer. And I found the fucking manuscript. Hell, I read it. It was awful. There weren’t enough sex scenes and … I just assumed it was rejected.”
The evening ended with us both walking our dogs. When I returned to my apartment, Sako was smearing another message on my message tape, begging me for a second date.
I picked up and thanked him for the experimental evening of sensual pleasures, but I simply couldn’t risk it again.
“Why?” he asked, “If I acted a bit disorderly—”
“Actually, you gave me a bad case of athlete’s foot,” I lied. He apologized, recommending I use Dr. Scholl’s powder, and hung up.
I went to bed and tried to sleep, but Joey’s identity had worked its way back into my head. I finally decided to try something that Zoë told me she had once done in discovering a boyfriend was cheating on her. I called Joey, and when his machine picked up, I plugged in a series of unsystematic permutations in an effort to crack his three-digit code. The first several times, it was to no avail; I was automatically hung up on. It wasn’t until the fourth attempt that I got a strange beep and the sudden swish of the tape rewinding. Finally the swishing ceased, and it began to replay, “Hey, Rudy, did you or did you not say Aqueduct at ten? I’m waiting for you, you fucking gumba.”—beep—“Goddamn it, Staf, I hear you dislocated Jimbo’s arm. I fucking tole you, if he can’t work, he can’t pay you.”—beep—“Hey, Mister Stafiglianno, I was hoping if you didn’t mind, maybe I could pay you just two hundred this week and the rest next week.”—beep. The messages unraveled.
I hung up and called him back: “You cocksucking coward, if you ever call me or see me again, I’ll fucking kill you!” I slammed the phone down and started weeping. I didn’t care that he was some kind of strong-arm. Rudolph Stafiglianno, who I always thought was dead, was my father.