CHAPTER NINE

VENGEANCE IS MINE
(KARMA IS FOR PUSSIES)

As the bandages were peeled off, the results were quite embarrassing. It all eluded me at first, but in the mirror of popular opinion, I beheld it. As the gauzy veils unspooled, a sigh went up, like a puff of smoke. I watched with the same goggle-eyed disbelief as the middle-aged nurses who filled the spectator pews in the surgical theater.

“You know, you’re lucky,” one R.N. remarked, in a nasal, outer-borough honk. “Some folks wait years before their bodies can deteriorate enough for the operations you’ve had.”

How fortunate I was. After all the bandages were off, and I started realizing what I was going to look like and what the future would hold, I felt lightheaded. Good looks were a wild card I had not been dealt. Only in the most incidental way had I even thought of my appearance.

Yet, as the nights progressed, I began to love sleeping with myself. During the days, intensive therapy was the regimen: hydrotherapy, parallel bars, Nautilus machines—all awakening stringy gristle that never knew it was muscle, spaghettied around newly fused bones. On a daily basis for months, the hours were filled with intensive aerobic and weightlifting sessions. My feelings for me were intensifying. Initially I had just a crush, a puppy love, but eventually I developed an Adele H. obsession with myself.

One day I was awakened by an ominous numb sensation. I opened my eyes to see the ghastly Whitlock standing before me, pinching an I.V. tube that had been dripping Lord-knows-what into my gorgeous arm.

“Hi, handsome, remember me?” he dropped the tube and began. “We’ve got a problem to work out.”

“Leave me very much alone,” I pleaded.

“Very much like to. Very much like to. But you seem to constantly be stuck in my craw.”

“What do you want?”

“Amy seems to think you’re a god in rags.”

“I’ll sue the bitch if I ever see her again, I swear. Look what she did to me.” I was still hypocritically irate over her five-hour body makeover.

“You don’t look any different to me. But I’m glad to see you feel this way.”

“I’ll sue you, too, I swear.”

“Suppose we settle this right now.”

“How?”

“Suppose I give you a solid figure, and we put an end to all this squabbling.”

“What kind of figure?”

“Suppose I give you, say, ten thousand bucks, and in exchange, you just stay away from us.”

“You mean give up my apartment?”

“Yeah.”

“No way.”

“How about fifty thousand, cold hard cash up front. That’s a lot of money.”

“You think I’m some hick?”

“You stay away from me and Amy, and I’ll deposit a hundred thousand bucks into your personal account.”

“I don’t have an account.”

“All right, I’ll give it to you, but I want a year.”

“Just keep her away from me,” I countered.

“Fuck you,” he said as if it were a salutation.

“Fuck you, too,” I saluted him back, and he left.

During that entire duration, while the hospital kept getting Amy’s checks, subsidizing my journey into ever-unfolding beauty, she didn’t reappear once. They soon moved me to a place outside the city that was more of a sanctuary. Weeks turned to months, and months gave way to seasons. I reasoned that she saw this as payment for stealing my apartment, and I assumed that under Whitless’s ocean of wealth she was able to extinguish any alleged love for me.

When most of the physical therapy was complete, I was informed that I’d be allowed to live at home and come in to the hospital for daily workouts and checkups.

Inasmuch as each of us is the center of our own universe, it takes no effort to believe that we are gods and should be treated accordingly. During the time in the hospital, when all the money and attention was being spent on me, I wasn’t compelled in the slightest to wonder why. I was me and there-fore worth all the money in the world. To me, bad as they were, my farts always came out smelling like roses.

Good fortune has a way of making even the most bitter mind magnanimous. This jihad with Amy had gone on long enough. I was soon well enough to check out. Hopefully she and asshole would have moved off somewhere and killed each other with their selfish and surgical forms of love.

On my first day home, I walked across the hallway and knocked on her door. I wanted to set the matter straight. Getting no response, I went to my adjacent door. At the base of it, I found a sealed envelope. Tearing it open, I found a VISA card made out in the name Joseph Aeiou. Inside was a letter:

Aeiou,

Here’s a company credit card with the first installment, five thousand dollars of credit. In return, all I ask is that you leave me and the mother of my future children alone, and you will receive more money with time. This is my last effort at being nice. If this continues I’ll have to be…not so nice.

Andrew Whitlock,
M.B.A. Harvard, 1958

I slipped the note into my pocket and entered my home. Aggg! My apartment was a wreck. A typhoon had passed through it. The furniture was destroyed. My clothing and belongings were piled around the place. Filth, debris, profanity everywhere.

In short, it was exactly as I had left it. After two months of living like a king in a hospital, I had cultivated both a need and an admiration for purpose and structure.

I stepped into the waking nightmare, dreading the primordial things growing chaotically around the refrigerator and sink. I feared the hostile communities of insects and rodents with which I had clumsily coexisted in the past. They had bloomed and multiplied. Two sabre-toothed mice with thick, woolly coats held their ground and stared indignantly when I entered their living room. ‘You dash and dive into some filthy crack,’ they seemed to say.

Flying waterbugs and other bespeckled lotus-like insects swarmed on the neglected Fritos, uneaten Hostess products, melted ice cream, and funky onion dip which I had eaten for dinner and left on the counter just before the heart attack.

Upon inspecting the burlap texture and urine odor of my old clothing, which I had once so thoughtlessly pressed against my now silky skin, I was retroactively sickened. If I needed an added reason for a new wardrobe, all my prior garments were of irregular dimensions for a squat fatty.

After a couple hours of shopping at Macy’s way above my plastic power, I handed the cashier girl my card and chewed my bottom lip to see whether its magic would take. She asked for ID, I pulled out my old college ID, and she made doubtful expressions, while trying to compare me with the fiend in the photo.

Desperately, I stuck my fingers in my nose making it more bulbous. I pulled back my hairline to give her a taste of my former baldness. I squashed my cheeks together to indicate my poor skin, loose jowls, and multiple chins.

Finally, nervously, she returned the plastic wand with a receipt. I went off to the Herald Center. With bags and boxes containing all the styles and fashions that I had once mocked in glossy magazines, I was ready to leave. But first, exhausted by my little shopping safari, and hoping to delay returning to the hellhole apartment, I dropped into a midtown trap for a watery, tourist-bilking beer.

Usually, I would order a pitcher and work my way to the dregs. But here I was with this nice, new body and I had already ground one carcass into hamburger meat. So I just ordered a single headless, lite beer and sipped it very slowly.

Three cute girls who looked 90210-esque were laughing it up at the other end of the bar. Looking them over, I realized that they were all staring at me and giggling. Since the ’70s, I couldn’t help comparing tripletted babes to Charlie’s Angels, but they didn’t look anything like Charlie’s Angels. I kind of shuffled over, approaching the one that looked least like Farrah (Majors (O’Neal)) Fawcett. I said, “Hi.”

“Hi,” returned the one who looked nothing like Jaclyn Smith.

“What do you kids do?” I asked the one without any resemblance to Kate Jackson.

“We’re actresses,” replied the non-Farrah-esque.

“Really? I’m kind of a director of intelligent, low-budget, poorly distributed films.”

“What kind of films do you do?” asked one or all of them.

“Mainly adaptations of wordy, anglophile novels of the latter part of the last century.”

“Why?” they or she asked.

“Because there’s a bunch of people who don’t read books anymore, but feel real guilty about it, so they figure that by punishing themselves through these tedious films, they’re filling their reading quota for the year.”

One at a time they responded:

“Don’t the actors not get too much money…”

“…Or exposure…”

“…For it?”

“That’s true,” I said suavely, “but I make them appear far more intelligent than they’ll ever really be. And no one has to take off their clothes.”

“Wow!” They raced with the bait. Then one of them asked, “Are you from Europe? You seem to have kind of an accent.”

“Well,” I replied Daniel Day-Lewisly, “I am in something of a self-exile. New York is a natural Elba. Don’t you agree?” They all giggled, so I continued, “Few realize that among New York’s many former expatriates one must count both Trotsky and Talleyrand.”

“How fascinating,” they chirped.

Out the bullshit kept rushing. I couldn’t believe that all this was happening, and I kept wondering, why are they buying this? But then I remembered I was good-looking, a homonym for right, a synonym for everything profitable. Usually I just didn’t get a response. (If lucky, I earned an insult.) But my looks now were a catapult from which I could sling forth endless crap. Eventually, we all went to one of their apartments in Kip’s Bay. I unloaded my bags near the door, and we examined the flat. It had a lot of rooms, and we spent the evening giggling, drinking wine coolers, playing Nintendo, and watching MTV. Subtly, I’d sneak off with them one at a time to a different room and slip one hand up the blouse, the other down the pants, past the elastic guards and straps, and feel them up, one at a time, twice as fast. Aside from the dewy warmth and pointy tips, all I could think was—Wow! Even I felt like tipping them off: Can’t you see it!? He’s a slinky!

It wasn’t like I was even horny. I just felt like I had to get away with it. Soon, when two-thirds of them faced the hard fact that I probably wouldn’t marry them—which is the only reason most chicks ever let you space out on them—they departed.

I was left alone with non-Farrah. I entered her bedroom, where she was spread out against a vast collection of stiletto-high heels, an Imelda ready for her Ferdinand. After some preliminary handiwork, I realized that I could usurp her, a rebel uprising. All my life I had been starving, with only morsels of memories to sustain me. This chick was undoubtedly the best looking thing I had ever conned into the sack. But suddenly I understood that even though Joseph Aeiou could do no better, I, Bane, could only do better. I was a diamond cutter with a cheap mood ring.

I remember reading how Hugh Hefner, during his middle-aged, pre-AIDS heyday, kept a blue book filled with notes on all the chicks he’d made it on. It was complete with notes on where he put his dapper reagan and everything. If possible, he would even videotape the spectacle. He had boxes full of economy-size Johnson’s Baby Oil carried in, sometimes on a weekly basis, by workmen who had to keep from snickering as they marched through the mansion. Presumably, they had to leave the boxes in the bathroom. The non-Farrah’s bathroom was adjacent to the front door. Claiming I had to squeeze a dump, I grabbed my Herald Square shopping bags and snuck out.

On the way home, I saw the all-night pharmacy on Fiftieth Street and Lexington Avenue. I quickly picked up some Blistex, Vaseline Intensive Care, and a few other protective medications. I had to take care of my new-and-improved self.

When I got to my building, it was about 3:00 a.m., and I had to return to the same contemptible apartment that that slime Joseph had lived in. Sticking the key in, opening the lock and door, I entered loudly, flicking the lights off and on in hope of scaring away the wildlife. I was greeted by disbelief. It was beautiful, as if my world had been beautified along with me. In the space of twelve hectic hours, most of the garbage, including boxes and clothes, had disappeared, and a connecting door had been quickly constructed into the adjoining Berlin wall between Amy and me. I threw my boxes of new clothes on a couch and called for Amy. She wasn’t there. Nervously, I tried her door. It was unlocked. I went into her new bathroom. Whole walls were covered with magnification mirrors and bright bulbs. I opened some of the dermatological products I had purchased.

I started putting on applicants and creams, I don’t know why. I had never done it before. I spent hours doing the inexplicable. Time that I would normally invest in either intellectual acquisition or piggish habits was, instead, devoted to skin care. Soon there was a knock at her door. I had no idea who it was.

“Go away.” I didn’t want to do anything but work on myself. But the door opened anyway. It was Amy. From out in the hallway, I heard Whitlock appealing, “But look at the xeroxed letter and this credit card printout. He’s sold you out for the price of a wardrobe.”

“Then I respect him that much more.”

“I love you,” Whitlock invoked.

“I’m only interested in you professionally!” she replied. “Now leave me alone, old man!”

I had a magnifying glass and was carefully searching for irregularity in skin texture, only noticing her peripherally. She was dressed in some “sexy” Frederick’s of Hollywood lace. Suddenly I had a rush of excitement: A just-visible dot, which I suspect was a speck from a cigarette ash, was lodged deep in one of my forehead pores. Carefully, I extracted the speck, a pimple aborted. For the first time I had an idea of the thrill that pulsates through a pimple-popper.

“I’m glad to see you’ve finally taken an interest in yourself,” I heard her say. She was leaning against the bathroom door. I looked over at her. For the first time, she seemed extraordinarily plain. She kept talking about how much she had cared for me and how all spats that we had in the past were just an indication of this care. She slowly approached me. I think it was an attempt at being romantic. When she came between me and my mirror, I stepped even closer to her, attempting to see my reflection in her eyes.

“Bottom line,” she said, “I love you.”

“I love you, too,” I said to myself reflected in her eyes.

“Oh, Bane!”

“I worship you, I…I…” I couldn’t believe how strikingly handsome I was. I was hypnotized by my own eyes. Yet, I had to admit it, the brilliant, blue pupils that glowed in the dark were my one sin of omission. Still, I had to see more of me in different lights. I picked up a hand mirror and danced around with it. I was energized by seeing myself. I was something that transcended sexes. Hermaphroditically handsome. I was my own lock-and-key, I felt sure I could self-produce, I could cleave like a hydra upon orgasm.

I was above standard morality. I could do more, understand more, jump higher than an ugly or plain person could. I couldn’t understand how come I wasn’t followed, pursued, exalted, lionized, and worshipped. Adulation and prostrations were lavished on things of far less beauty. I went over to the window and looked down at the moving gray mass, like squirming brain tissue—meaningless commuters.

In some great overwhelming and predestined surge, I raced out the door, down the flutter of steps, and onto the streets filled with the morning rush hour. In my right hand I still clenched my scepter of power, the hand mirror.

Jumping onto the hood of a parked car, I stared into the mirror and screamed to multi-legged men-o-pede: “Run to your false prophets, inspect the photos and trinkets on your altars, and compare. Notice the sentimental Bambi-eyes of Christ! See the ragged turban on Mohammed! The large, oily forehead of Lenin and booger-like mole on Madonna’s upper lip! Observe disproportions, imperfections, and flaws of both a structural and aesthetic nature. If you saw them on the street, would they be living embodiments of their truths? Would you instantly recognize and be faithful? Behold me! My beauty has been laid bare. My deep and undeniable philosophy exudes through me—an onomatopoeia of truth. Hidden and intensive meaning has been exhumed from me. I give this era and place definition high above other periods and places. You live in the age of Bane!”

I hugged myself. I kissed myself passionately on the lips. I tried sticking my tongue down my throat. An erection knifed upward and still more blood filled; my reagan was in extreme pain. I groped at me in lewd, yet sincere ways. I dropped down to my knees. My head was spinning, arrhythmic pulses; suddenly I vomited… Quickly, Amy, still in lingerie, hustled through the maddening crowd, pulled the mirror out of my hand, and shoved a paper bag over my head. In a moment I passed out.

Sometime later I awoke back in the apartment, the bag still on my head. I could hear a male voice whispering, “We had a deal, Aeiou!”

“Shut up or leave!” Amy shrieked. It was the Shadow—Whitlock.

“Look,” I heard, “here’s the company credit card I gave him to leave you. And look at these receipts! His use of the card is proof of his willingness to dump you!”

“SHUT UP!” Amy yelled, “Are you okay, Bane?”

“I think I had some kind of…ego avalanche,” I explained through a mouth hole I poked out of the bag with my tongue.

“Vanity,” Whitlock decrepitly replied, “he’s become vain about his looks.”

“Are you okay?” she asked.

“I guess I have to find something new that’s ugly about me. New ruffles…”

“Shouldn’t be too hard,” I heard Whitlock mutter.

“All this is very difficult. My thoughts have been taking on a new and sensible turn. I’ve been thinking in short, declarative sentences. And worse, I…I…”

“Do you hear that, Whitlock?” Amy said to the monster.

“Elaborate,” replied Whitlock.

“I’ve secretly been considering a ca…ca…” The word was obscene, the phrase had turned men into machines. I dreaded saying it, but there it was, “Career!”

“What?”

“I’ve been making plans!”

“Plans!?”

“For the last couple of weeks, I’ve been thinking about making myself more efficient and goal-ridden within the common value-systems.”

“What value-systems?”

“Money-making, power consolidation, social acceptance. I mean, never before have I cared about what other people thought of me. Now I’m filled with doubts and wonder, like maybe all my learning is just gratuitous. If knowledge can’t be utilized or, more important, be instrumental in reaching a precise financial return, it’s unjustified.”

“Do you hear him, Whitlock? It’s over.” I could imagine her silly, syllogistic thinking process at work: Money was meaning, ergo I was meaningful.

“Give him time,” Whitlock rushed in, “He has no staying power. In no time at all he’ll backslide into the same slothful sybarite.”

“Test him!” Amy replied.

“Test me for what?”

“Exactly,” Whitlock replied. “Test him for what? He has the same desires as the rest of us.”

“What are your desires?” I asked Amy, wondering if we were truly of one mind.

“Amy wants to be a self-made millionaire,” Whitlock spoke up.

“And once you’re a millionaire?” I asked. “What then?”

“I want to travel,” she uttered modestly behind an embarrassed smile.

“To be a dekillionaire!” Whitlock corrected her in a sky-shaking boom. “Amy then strives to be a dekillionaire.”

“And then?” I asked Whitlock, who appeared to be acting as her truthful side.

“To be a hektillionaire,” Whitlock asserted.

“Wait a second,” I heard her mutter.

“How can you treat yourself so well?” the liberal jerk in me needed to know. “How can you want so much while others, just as human as you, are starving?”

“Maybe,” Whitlock joined in, “just maybe all people are not equal. And maybe, just because people like us do succeed, it doesn’t mean we rob you of success. Maybe people like you fail on your own.” It was like listening to Scrooge teach the Spirit of Christmas the error of his kindly ways.

“Get the hell out of here!!” Amy finally belted out. “Get out! You’re repulsive.”

As I saw her shove the most eligible bachelor since [the late] John John [before he married, and accidentally killed, Carolyn Bessette] right out the door and slam it, I felt that deep sense of gratitude that was frequently and falsely advertised as love.

I went over to her and held her tight, and sincerely explained, “I’d be honored to be your roommate, but I just don’t know if I can. I just don’t think it would be a realistic match.”

“I hardly think your criterion of reality is anything to judge anything by,” she replied curtly.

“What is that supposed to mean?”

“You’ve bungled one thing after another. Andrew told me how you met, how you initially scared the hell out of him. He didn’t just pick on you out of the blue.”

“Did he tell you how he cut my grant money?”

“He doesn’t owe you an education. He only started the endowment in honor of a relative who died in his arms.”

“Who was this?”

“I don’t know, he doesn’t talk about it. All I know is it happened in Tokyo in the early ’60s. He wouldn’t mention it. I suspect it might have been a son.”

“A son? Well, that doesn’t excuse other things he did.”

“What other things?” she asked.

“Did he tell you how he humiliated me on a stage at YUK! and screwed my girlfriend?”

“There’s another example of your gripless reality. He claims that she was not your girlfriend, he didn’t screw her, and that you were a hit at the comedy club.” Everything I said was a barefaced lie; every opinion was fundamentally wrong. Another comfirmation that I had met my true match. Adversarial polarity was achieved.

I had no choice but to be with this woman. She was the only one I had ever met that would not allow me to lie to myself. The only person that could truly hurt me. Furthermore, she was the only person who would demand nothing short of excellence from me—not that she’d get it. And besides, I desperately wanted to screw her.

“All right, fine,” I said. “How shall we do this? We already live together so shall we make my room the living room and your house the bedroom, or vice versa?”

“What do you mean? Who said anything about a restructuring?”

“I thought we loved each other.” I didn’t dare launch into the adversarial polarity philosophy. Women can’t bear dark, stark realism. After a lifetime of being babied and wooed, they like soft lighting, sweet-smelling, sugary-tasting, laughter-inducing stuff, and who could blame them?

“Even if we did love each other,” she replied, “that doesn’t imply that we should become inseparably connected until we merge into a single bland person.”

“Did you want to have a relationship or what?”

“Bane, I care for you deeply. I find you intriguing, deeply intriguing, and we can try a limited partnership, but first, your eye color scares me. Secondly, I’m late for an appointment now, and, indeed, will probably be late for my next three appointments. But lastly, I can’t respect anyone, Bane, who doesn’t have a decent livelihood.”

“You’re absolutely right.” She was right.

“I’ll call you later,” she said, and off she went.

With that she dressed into her office uniform and dashed out the door. It was 10:00 a.m., time for bed.

I went to sleep with the faith that—in the words of the greatly misunderstood and unfairly neglected Captain & Toenail—Love (or adversarial polarity) would keep us together.

I was asleep. The phone started ringing, I awoke and answered it. A frantic voice said, “So what livelihood have you chosen?”

“Who is this?” I replied, still high on sleepitude.

“Me—Amy. What have you done in the space of five hours since I last saw you?”

“Oh, it’s you dear. I’m sorry, I was dozing.”

“Dozing?! These are the business hours! The wheels are turning! The doers are doing!”

“Yes, but I was up for twelve hours yesterday.”

“Twelve hours, ha! This is my thirtieth hour, and I’m fit as a fiddle. You’ve got to learn to lengthen your biological day.”

“My biological day?”

“You can’t be a slave to your metabolism. Got to run.” Click, she hung up. She probably was actually running. I did love her. She was living a life for the both of us. I felt sure that my life would now work out okay. She watched out for me in the waking world, while I looked out for her in the sleeping world. Slipping…sliding…sleeping…

Ri!i!i!i!i!ng!!! Phone again, I answered and put phone to ear.

“What have you done now?”

“I was looking for work.”

“Good. What are we having for dinner tonight?”

“I got some Lays potato chips and onion dip,” I said, still drunk on z-z-z’s.

“WHAT! Are you insane?”

“No ma’am.”

“You have a very serious heart condition. Didn’t the doctor give you a lecture on what foods to eat, and exercises???”

“Yes, I wasn’t thinking.”

“Clearly. I got to go.”

“I love…” She hung up.

I went back to sleep.

SLEEP; R!I!N!G! The heart doc was calling at the request of Miss Rapapport to remind me what nutrients I needed and sample dinners that I could ingest. I thanked him, unplugged the phone, and went back to sleep. When I finally awoke it was dark, early evening. But for me it was morning.

The first bad habit that day started with the breakfast of two oily eggs, greasy potatoes, and a beer. Afterwards, I went to the East Village and looked at photo art books with dirty pictures at the center table in the St. Mark’s Bookstore. There I bumped into another friend, Cecil, who was going to some vaudevillian transvestite show at a new place that was once the site of the old dance joint called The World, over on Avenue C. I went with him, lost him, got drunk, and fell asleep in one of the big ballroom’s bathrooms. When I awoke it was about 6:00. Some strange man in a car stared at me as I stumbled to Houston Street for transportation. When I walked toward him, he zoomed off.

Before hailing a cab, I realized that someone must’ve gone through my pockets ‘cause I had no money. When I got home it was 7:30 a.m. The telephone was ringing. I picked it up. It was my new girlfriend, Amy.

“Where were you?”

“I went out,” I said. “Where are you?”

“I came home, got six hours of sleep, and came back to work.”

“But you were at work yesterday,” I said.

“I put in a seventeen-hour work day. I’m trying to bring it up to twenty.”

“But…”

“I don’t think we’re connecting,” she added.

“We’re not,” I assured her, and then asked, “How much money are you worth?”

“That changes day to day with Mr. Dow Jones. In the neighborhood of two hundred and fifty thousand in stocks and bonds. Why?”

“How could you afford all the operations done on me?”

“I have a great insurance plan. I have you down as a spouse.”

“With a quarter-million you can quit and we can live off that for ten to fifteen years.”

“Right, and then you’re in your forties, without a livelihood. What then?”

“Well, I don’t know if you saw that film narrated by Welles.”

“Orson Welles?”

“Yeah, he did a film about Nostradamus, who says that New York is going to be blown up soon. We’ll all be dead in a few years.”

“Let me get this straight,” she said, “I’m supposed to plan my life around the predictions of some mystic of the last century.”

“Sixteenth century. He mentioned Franco by name.”

“Who?”

“Franco, the former dictator of Spain. And he predicted Hitler’s rise to power, only he called him Hisler.”

“Suppose Nostradamus is wrong. We’ll be homeless soon.”

“We could always go on welfare.”

“Now you listen up,” she said. “If you want to remain in this relationship, you’re going to have to find a career.”

“Huh?”

“I am looking for a professional partner. Do you understand?” She elaborated, “I am looking for someone who I can lunch with in executive dining rooms. Someone to go on junkets and conventions with. You don’t have to be managerial, but I at least expect someone gainfully employed.”

“But life should be a vacation,” I replied. She hung up on me. I laid down and thought awhile. Could she be right? What if Nostradamus was wrong? What if peace in the world were sustained? What if I turned forty and drove another body into the ground? I did need a new course, a way of getting more mileage. To that foggy resolve, I fell asleep. But it didn’t last very long.

I awoke to a glass of cold water being thrown on me.

“Up and at’em!” she yelled as I bolted up. “Now! Before you do irreversible damage to your life! Are you or are you not ready to batten down and find an occupation so you won’t someday be a bag person?”

“Bu…” Moments earlier I had been in a deep, important sleep.

“What do you want to be?” she asked.

“I don’t know—a fireman?” Her stare became so sharp and intense I thought her eyes were going to cross. It was quickly apparent that she wouldn’t tolerate that answer.

“I…I…I’m good with my hands,” I replied, holding them up for examination.

“Good! Now that’s a start.” Leaning forward she looked fiercely into the unwashed windows of my bloodshot eyes, as if to read my thoughts more closely than I could.

“Since your operation, you look…rugged,” she remarked. “I don’t know why, but I see you in overalls.”

I released each syllable of the word slowly, “Pro-le-tar-i-an.” I remembered a postcard sent to me years ago. The subject of the card was the giant statue of the Futurist poet Mayakovsky in overalls on a pedestal in downtown Moscow. For me, this was the symbol of heroic modern man.

“I’ll do anything to wear overalls!” I said heartfully, picturing myself in dungarees with blue straps over my shoulders.

“Great, I have it all mapped out. Dress!” I dressed.

“Come on!” She grabbed and dragged me down the stairs and into a cab. It was then that I noticed the G-man. I remembered him from the other night parked in front of The World. This morning he was sitting across the street in a parked car. He was conspicuously inconspicuous under a fedora and sunglasses. He turned over the engine of his car and followed our cab.

We ended up at the Apex Technical School. The G-man parked across the street. As we went in I told Amy, “A G-man is across the street.”

“Whitlock hired a gumshoe,” she said with an eye-rolling expression. “If he wants to throw his money away, so be it.”

We entered, and she sat me down. A receptionist asked me to take a very basic test before meeting with any of the guidance counselors. I decided to test the test. I took it and deliberately flunked. They said they’d make an exception in my instance and sent me and Amy in to see the counselor.

“What exactly do you want out of Apex?”

“Well…” Amy cut me off before I could say, “A job in which I could wear overalls.”

“Training for a job that would provide a starting wage of something in the ballpark of twenty K—starting figure—but with entrepreneurial potential.” The virtues of being a welder, an auto mechanic, and a refrigerator repairman were discussed. Each had merits and demerits. Classes, tuition, placement services, and statistics of employability in different job markets were considered. For the next thirty minutes the interview became a dialogue between Amy and the counselor. I quietly sat as my life was mapped out for me. For the most part, I tried listening to the sounds of their words as a dog might attempt to comprehend a human conversation. Occasionally they would look at me for a response. When Amy shook, I shook no. When she nodded, I nodded yes. A strong relationship required the faith and loyalty of a trained seal. Amy furiously jotted down notes. I noticed that she wrote the counselor a personal check, and I assumed I was enrolled in something.

“Is there anything else you’d like to know?” the guidance counselor asked, before we were to take leave.

“I’d just like to ask two questions,” I said. It was the first time I spoke.

“Shoot.”

“Are tools included?”

“I’m afraid not.”

“They are in the commercial.”

“That’s just TV.”

“Are distressed-denim overalls standard issue?”

Amy sighed.

“Well, you certainly may wear them, but many of our students wear either orange or white overalls.”

“Fine.” We went outside. The G-man was still out there. Amy tried to hail a cab.

“Why don’t we get the G-man to drive us. He’s going to follow us anyway.” She ignored me and got a cab with bad shocks. As our cab pogoed from pothole to pothole and jockeyed wildly from lane to lane, Amy explained my schedule. I was to attend a class in freon management. I had to purchase a face mask, goggles, a pair of industrial rubber gloves, and a funnel through which the freon would be poured into the apparatus. The first class was tomorrow at noon.

“Wait a second!” I stopped her. “What part of a car requires freon?”

“You idiot! It was decided that you were going to study refrigeration and air-condition repair.” She explained that there was far more money and marketability in it. She told me where I could purchase the special funnel, and opening her purse, she loaned me the money to purchase it. Then changing the subject, she talked about my getting that last piece of corrective surgery: my pupil-fusion operation.

“Who devised it, Joseph Mengele?”

While she rambled on about how I could have such beautiful baby blues, I envisioned years from now, in the early part of the twenty-first century, standing in front of a one-floor, cinder-block garage with a pull-down gate. Inside the garage would be two half-ton pick-up trucks with “AEIOU REFRIGERATION REPAIR” stenciled on the front doors. I could see myself in front of the place with overalls. It was a good, solid, satisfying picture, something worth working toward. Amy let me off in front of a Gap.

“Remember,” she said as the cab was about to speed away, “classes commence at noon tomorrow. Don’t fuck it up.”

I purchased the best pair of overalls in the place. I looked really good in them, and inspected myself in the mirror awhile until the sales-chick said, “Will that be all?”

While walking around I found a pair of sunglasses and a rainbow-colored headband that complemented the overalls. Soon I meandered home. I located a large claw hammer and admired myself in the mirror. I was born to wear overalls and swing a hammer. It was early afternoon, and she was still at work, so I went to sleep in the overalls, still clenching the hammer.

My growling stomach woke me up: hunger. Amy still wasn’t home. In the kitchen cabinet, everything had been thrown out except bouillon cubes, tomato paste, and Saltines. I mixed these together in a small pot, added a little warm water, steamed it, and ate it down. It wasn’t so bad.