“WHOEVER SAID ‘SIZE
DOESN’T MATTER’ WASN’T
TALKING ABOUT NEW YORK
APARTMENTS”
A nanosecond later, I awoke to the sound of something very heavy being dropped very near my head. I opened my eyes slowly. Amy and a couple of yuppies were rummaging around in the apartment. I went back to sleep. Later, I awoke to the sensation of having my bed hoisted up in the air and transported across the room. More yuppies filled the house. Every time I went back to sleep, I would awaken only more exhausted and drained. The next time I awoke, the place was packed with yuppies. I could see these were not the old yups of the early ’80s, engendered by the false boom, who died out by the market correction of the late ’80s. These were a deadly swarm of survivor yuppies who had mutated with New Democrats in the Clinton age. Their well-pressed lapels and jackets looked like wings. They were filling the place slowly and insidiously, like the crows in the jungle gym scene of Hitchcock’s The Birds.
I tried to get up, but sleep was an obese bed-fellow, and I couldn’t get out from under her. When I awoke for the last time, the lady of the house was there with only a few of them, the final nominees. They were all walking around inspecting details. It was like a competition of fastidiousness. She was talking to some guy with a tape measure and level. Most of my furnishings and belongings were now tightly packed into the rear third of the apartment, away from the healthy windows facing the street. My bed and I were firmly angled upon boxes. The other two-thirds of my apartment had all these idyllic things, like a prefabricated bar with a small statue of mercury and customized shelving. There were also several boxes of Ikea furniture waiting to be opened and assembled. A Port-O-San in the corner indicated that this was a union job.
They ignored me completely as I struggled to my feet and wrapped a sheet around my naked weight, searching for a grenade among my memorabilia.
“I have the lease in my name and I don’t want any roommates,” I said to one of them. But it was as if I wasn’t there.
“Party’s over, everyone out!” They ignored me. “Hey, what is this? I’m master of my castle, get out!”
“Can’t you see we’re talking?” Amy replied lividly. Grabbing me by the scruff of my loose, bulldog neck, she yanked me into the hall and pinned me against the wall.
“Yesterday, you said some things to me that no man ever said to me before.”
“Did I?” I asked, wondering if she was pleased or angry with me.
“You seemed to care about me. You seemed to be the only man on this whole goddamned selfish island who…who… who was interested in my welfare.”
“Well, sorry if I misled you, but you must make a lot of money. I’m sure you must find my assistance insulting.”
“I didn’t get to where I am today by accepting either apologies or buts. I’ve already accepted your offer, and if you fell down these stairs right now and broke your neck, that offer would be something that made you a much grander human being.” To illustrate my humility, she leaned me perilously over the stairway.
“What offer was that?” I asked nervously.
“You said that if I get a carpenter to do a major renovation on your place, and make it presentable, and pay a year’s rent, you would let me stay for two months. Now that’s certainly not asking much, is it?”
I had no recollection of making any such offer, but two months wasn’t a lengthy duration, and there seemed to be a decent profit in the deal. Man was cursed with a mental wattage that overlit the squalid sublet of his pointless life. That wattage turned good men into serial murderers, pedophilic stalkers, and assorted cult members. Drugs and booze were shades and tints designed to dim that needless beam of consciousness. Ergo, the rental windfall would provide me with beer, pot, and other cognitive rheostats for the entire year.
Additionally, some early morning—perhaps after a shower—her monogrammed towel might slip. At the end of it all, I could claim her hi-tech renovated place, with its saturno halogen lights and pastel-painted walls, a regular pleasure dome. I tried to orally accept her offer, but she said that for my protection she would take care of the legalities. We made an appointment to meet at an office where she would sign a sublease agreement. She didn’t tell me the title of the firm, just the vaguely familiar address. It wasn’t until I got to the rhombus-shaped building that my dread and suspicion were confirmed. It was Frankenstein’s castle: Whitlock Incorporated.
When I asked the horse-eyed receptionist for Ms. Rapap-port (Amy’s last name), I assumed that some nerdy boyfriend was going to work out this sublet agreement. He was probably a specialist in corporate real estate who just happened to be working in the snake pit. When the Satanic Shah, Whitlock himself, appeared arm in arm with my little sublet roomie, my heart blew up like an M-80.
“What are you doing here?” Whitlock spat at me.
“This is Joseph, the roommate I told you about,” she replied.
“Wait a second,” I said to her. “Where did you meet this clown?”
“Be quiet!” he growled. “This is an office; people are making money.” Turning toward Amy, he asked, “Is this some kind of set up?”
“I should be asking that!” I started.
“I gave him a break by letting him work as a proofreader after he tried to kill me,” Whitlock revealed.
“Bullshit. The truth is you have a knack for finding girls I’m interested in and soiling them,” I said, adding, “He doesn’t practice safe sex.”
He punched me suddenly in the gut. For a man his age, it was very powerful, knocking all the wind out of me. Grabbing my shoulder, Amy held me up.
“I’m sorry,” she apologized to me for him—or vice versa.
“Now, Andrew, this is my affair. He has an apartment within my budget range. Remember who you are.”
“Forget it,” I piped in. “I’m not subletting to any friend of this guy.”
“Come now!” she replied. “Enough of this. I want you two to shake hands.”
“All right,” Whitlock muttered, snatching my hand like a pickpocketed wallet.
“I actually thought we were kind of bonding for awhile back there,” I replied as we shook.
“Good boys,” she replied.
“This way,” he said, and shoved me toward his war room. She trailed. His office was an agoraphobic’s nightmare with the latest gadgets of fun and comfort. He instantly began pleading with her while I tried to catch my breath.
“For god’s sake, Amy, let me buy you a place. You can pay me back whenever you want, but don’t do this!”
I silently concurred.
“Sorry, Andrew, but I insist on autonomy.”
“Then for Christ’s sake, buy yourself a co-op,” he pleaded. “Interest rates are nothing now. The real estate market has hit an all-time bottom.”
“It’s still too costly,” she replied, “even for me.”
He sighed the sigh of troubled love and mumbled something in the intercom to his horse-eyed secretary stabled outside. The door opened, and a lackey wheeled in a document; it was thick and written in fine print. In size it resembled the Treaty of Versailles. After she signed it, she handed me the document. Eager to just get out of there, I took out the Montblanc pen I had stolen from Whitlock earlier.
“My pen!” he exclaimed, snatching it from me. “That was given to me by the Prime Minister of Carraway, you thief.” He handed me a Bic Ballpoint.
“So what am I signing here?” I thumbed through the document.
“A basic sublease agreement,” said the well-pruned tyrant.
“A sublease agreement doesn’t have to be the size of a phone book.”
“Actually, that’s a standard corporate real estate agreement there. Admittedly, my people made some modifications for this situation. If you like, take it home and look it over.” I flipped through it quickly, a lot of party-of-the-first-part crap. It read like a Cartesian equation, an endless series of pointless statements and reasons.
“This looks like something from the foreign ministry. I’ll get a standard Blumberg sublease that you can sign,” I said to her.
“As a woman, I’m asking you to sign it.” I’m not sure what sacred power being a woman carried, but I wasn’t moved. It looked like a confession to the Lindbergh baby kidnapping.
“Come on, sign the damn thing, and let’s get you the hell out of here,” Whitlock yelled.
“I’m reluctant.”
“Sign it, or I’ll have you blacklisted from the proofreading circuit.”
“Andrew, you won’t do anything of the sort!”
“He already did something of the sort,” I explained. “He had me expelled from college before I could drop out!”
“Well, he won’t do it again,” she said.
“He can’t do it again. This is unfair. I didn’t know he was your boyfriend.”
“He’s not,” Amy exclaimed.
“Well, I still don’t want to have anything to do with anyone who’s a friend of his. You two deserve each other.”
“What exactly happened between you two?” she asked Whitlock.
“Nothing at all. Joseph and I are best buddies,” Whitlock said.
“This guy ruined me!” I countered. “He humiliated me, slept with Veronica…”
“Excuse us, Amy,” Whitlock said, as he walked her to the door, “Me and Mr. Aeiou have some unfinished business to work out.”
“No, we don’t.” I rose and headed out with her. I was afraid to be alone with him. He closed the door on her, and we were alone.
“Now, Aeiou, take it easy,” he said, cracking his knuckles.
Whitlock went to a small refrigerator in a corner of his office and handed me a bottle of Heineken with a pubic hair on it.
“Fuck beer. You people come in here and think you can just take over. She makes more money in a day than I’ll make in a lifetime. Why does she want my apartment?” The snake with a suit for skin took out a hundred dollar bill and extended it to me.
“A hundred dollars?! Who do I look like—Harpo Marx?”
While I protested, he took out a small vial of coke and the next month’s issue of Penthouse, which hadn’t yet hit the newsstands. Opening the pages, he put the magazine on the desk. Then on the edge of his desk he laid a long, thin line of coke. It looked like a fine strand of white hair.
“You cheapskate, that’s the most paltry line of coke I’ve ever seen.”
“It’s pure,” he said, handing me a gold-plated tube. I hadn’t gotten my share in the ’80s, so I snorted it and…”Ewwwwwweeeee!”
“There’s more,” he said. I remember popping things, pills and herbs and glasses of fine liquor with exotic larvae submerged at the bottom. He put something in my hand, and I signed a treaty to give Panama Canal back to the Lilliputians. And then I remember looking at 3-D nudes of women who screwed presidential candidates or ministers or chancellors or something. Porn from Cleopatra right on up. Pink dishwashing gloves turned inside out. And then Amy walked back in the room and thanked Whitlock and asked for my keys, which she returned a second later, saying that she had had them copied; another fine white line, and she was asking when to send two carpenters named Mason and Dixon to build an Iron Curtain down the middle of my apartment, with her on the Serbian side and me on the Croatian. I couldn’t stop smiling, into the street, accelerating right into the middle of a million lives that I’d never know, launched through subway throngs for the rush hour, weaving like a wave runner, leaving all in my wake bobbing up and down. I wasn’t going anywhere. It was just a pleasure cruise on the current of life, a scuba dive in the great ocean of mankind, feeling strange flesh—young and old, poor and middle class, hot and cold—pressed against mine. As the packed train stopped at Times Square, I developed a bizarre fear. Physicists have observed that when a big-ass star exhausts its nuclear fuel, it crushes together with such force that its gravity becomes inescapable. I kept finding myself at the center of this massive collapse, the black hole of this rush hour.
I had to prevent it or I’d be crushed into spaghetti. When the subway doors opened, people outside, free of manners, crushed inward. Those behind me, equally eager, pushed outward. The masses—I love ‘em—they rush for red lights, risking everything to capture a few seconds, only to get home and waste their lives.
I threw my arms across the frames of the sliding subway doors and held on like Samson, not allowing any of the crushing commuters behind me, or any of the commuters in front of me, to pass—a Spartan at Thermopylae. Finally, when the big boom occurred, I popped out like a champagne cork, flying right into one of those big metal pillars. I had an ear bleed. When I got home, I sat down, fell asleep, woke up, and sat down again. I dreamt that I’d just signed away my apartment, my life, and lord knows what else.