TRUTH IS WHAT WORKS
As I went out that night the G-man followed me. I walked around, went to various discount stores, and spent all the money Amy had given me on petty indulgences, entirely forgetting about the rubber gloves and funnel. I decided to forgo the Downtown scene that night in order to be with my pretty woman. When I got home, though, around midnight, I was broke and starving. My little woman was fast asleep. I awoke my woman.
“Come to bed,” she grogged. “You’ve got your first class tomorrow.” She then rolled over and went back to sleep. I shook her again.
“What?” she bolted up when I touched her.
“Can you spare any change?” I said delicately. “I’m genuinely starving.”
“My god, is there no escaping beggars in this city? I worked a ten-hour day, and sacrificed my lunch hour to get you a livelihood. Can’t I sleep in peace?”
“You’re my girlfriend. You owe me.”
“Pardon me?”
“If it wasn’t for you, I’d still have a job proofreading.”
“How much do you want?” She reached over to her purse.
“I’d like three hundred a week.”
“What?”
“That’s how much I used to gross proofreading.”
“I’ll loan you the money until you are employed as a refrigeration technician. Then I expect to get it all back.” I agreed.
“Do you want me to sign some kind of agreement?” I asked.
“You’re my boyfriend, I trust you,” she said in a strange tone. She took fifty out of her purse and laid back down.
“While you’re awake and it’s still night, let’s have sex,” I said, hoping to seize an opportunity. She didn’t reply, she just lay there.
I inspected her more closely. She had gone to sleep. Sex was always the first thing to go in a relationship; fighting was the last thing to go. I took the fifty and went out. The G-man’s car was across the street. I tried hailing a cab, but there were none. I went to the G-man, opened the rear door of his car, and got in.
“Can you take me to the Nuyorican Poet’s Cafe? They’re having a poetry slam.”
“Get the hell out of my Buick,” he said without turning around.
“You’re following me. Why don’t we just do it this way?”
“Get out of my car. I’m waiting for my wife.”
I got out and successfully hailed a cab to the Nuyorican Poet’s Cafe to hear some poetry of our age. The G-Man followed. I paid my five bucks at the door and went up to the bar. The slam apparently was already over, people were drinking and mingling. I saw the G-Man peeking inside, looking for me. My new body really made a difference. Finding a roll of black masking tape, I taped a little on my chin so it looked like a plastic goatee.
Moving around, I bought a beer at a usurious price, then came on to as many girls as I could. Finally, I approached one cute chick and introduced myself as last week’s poetry slam champ. I showed her ten bucks, the prize money, as proof. She couldn’t have been much older than sixteen. We talked about TV shows. I finally won her over with my crisp recollections of the early ’80s, and she let me buy her a beer.
“So you write poetry?” I asked as if I cared.
“I’m working on a long poem about sleazy guys who’ll say anything to get laid, how ‘bout you?”
“What are the roots that clutch?” I said in a fierce and demonic tone. “What branches grow, out of this stony rubbish? Son of man, you cannot say or guess, for you know, only a heap of broken images where the sun beats, the dead tree gives no shelter, the cockroach no relief, but there is shadow under this red rock. Come in under the red rock of my apartment and I’ll show you your shadow at morning striding behind you or your shadow at evening striding to meet you. I’ll show you fear in a handful of dust…”
“Your red rock needs a little work,” she replied.
“What kind of work?” It was part of Eliot’s The Wasteland.
“It needs, like, a victim, or someone we can feel bad for. Like an oppressed group or something.”
I steered the conversation away from modern poetry and careened her to the balcony where our lips collided in kisses. I touched her here and there and then nodded off. When I was awakened a couple hours later, I was alone. It was morning. I went out and tried to hail a cab, but there were none on B and Third. I saw the G-man and got in the back seat of his car.
“Home, Jeeves.”
“My name’s not Jeeves. Get the hell out of my car. I’m waiting for my wife.”
I got out of his car and slowly walked along Second, from Avenue B to Avenue A. He followed twenty feet behind me the entire time, until I finally got a cab on First Avenue, and we went home.
As soon as I opened the door to my apartment, I saw a big sign waiting for me. It read, “WHERE ARE YOU? FIRST CLASS IS TODAY AT NOON, DON’T FUCK UP!!”
It was 7:00 in the morning. I could comfortably catch four hours of sleep and get there by noon. I rummaged around a bit and looked through the remains of my collections that had been stocked into boxes—all my old copies of underground magazines and journals such as the SoHo Weekly News, the East Village Eye, and the Berkeley Barb were gone. Also gone were my anthologies of Celebrity Skin, featuring Hollywood Starlets when they were just high-priced call girls, and my rare “Warts and Farts” issues of Hustler. I lay down in a slight daze and dozed off. I woke to the ring of the telephone.
“How was it?”
“How was what?” I said drowsily. “Who is this? Where am I?”
“Your girlfriend, asshole.”
“My girlfriend’s what?”
“This is your girlfriend, asshole.” It was Amy: I loved her. “How was your first class?” I looked at the clock, it was 5:00 p.m.
“It was first class!”
“What did you learn?”
“We got a breakdown of conventional refrigeration appliances,” I lied unimaginatively. “Today’s focus, though, was on conventional home-style stand-ups.”
“Like what?”
“Like G.E., Westinghouse, Maytag…”
“What exactly did you learn?”
“Well…” I was out of material. Refrigerators didn’t inspire me.
“Yes?” She wouldn’t relent.
“You know those little magnets with the little fruits on one side.”
“What about them?”
“They’re…ummm.”
“They’re what?”
“They’re poison to your standard home machine rheometers, especially the large-fruit magnets.”
“Large fruit magnets?”
“Yeah, like cantaloupe and watermelon magnets. They usually have two magnet strips behind them.”
“Where did you end up purchasing your specially treated funnel?”
“Small place near the river called Mesticles,” I quickly invented. “It sounds like you’re cross-examining me!”
“You’re lying!” She switched gears into a holler, “I received a call five minutes ago from your guidance counselor who informed me that you missed your first class!”
“Did you throw out my archives of underground journals?!” My first day and I was already assigned a guidance counselor.
“I certainly did and I don’t want to even talk about them.”
“But…”
“But don’t worry,” she added. “We will have a talk. Don’t go anywhere, I’m coming home right now.” She then hung up.
Oy, what was I going to say? She caught me red-handed. A moment later, she entered. “Now what the hell is going on? Either you provide me with a reasonable explanation, or this relationship is finis.”
“You want an explanation!” I began confidently, seeming to launch into a strong retort, but actually blank-minded. I began giving a brief history of the nature of consciousness, talking about the Great Earth Mother and the heroic evolution of the ego, and how the great egoless ego was symbolized by a snake swallowing its own tail.
“What!” she screamed like a swooping bird. The scream snatched a marooned thought in its talons, and I was suddenly on to something else.
“I feel a complete lack of faith in you,” I said, “and it’s paralyzed me.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Sex! This is supposed to be a sexual relationship, but we haven’t even seen each other nude! Explain that to me!” Amy started coughing. She coughed for such a length of time, I dashed to the kitchen and fetched some water in a bowl. After drinking it, she asked, “What do I look like, a cat?” The bowl was the only thing that was clean.
“You okay?”
“I’m coming down with laryngitis,” she rasped. “You’re giving it to me!”
“Before you lose your voice, explain to me how you’re always so carefully out of the house when I’m excited, and vice versa?” If there was a vice versa.
“I…”
“Tell me what man would tolerate this behavior!”
“What are you talking about?”
“Sex! Why don’t we have sex?!”
“Fine, have sex if you must.”
“I mean with each other.”
“How does this relate to you not having gone to class?”
“I’m drawing on your strength is how! And that strength isn’t coming because I don’t believe you care for me!”
“Well…well…” she sputtered.
I had found a breach and wasn’t about to acquiesce. I was on the offensive. In point of fact, I was sick of her You-can’t-make-an-omelet-without-breaking-eggs attitude, and I saw quite realistically that there was little chance this relationship was going to float very long. Too quickly, she was spotting cracks in my hull. It was time to find the best life boat and abandon ship.
“Well?!” I asked with a false indignation.
“All right?” she interrupted. “You’re right, I do love you, but I have something painful to tell you first.”
“What?”
“I can’t make love to you until…until you get the pupil-fusion operation. I can’t bear looking into your eyes.”
“Why? What’s the big deal about the color of my eyes?”
“I can still see the old monster staring at me through those eyes.”
“I’ll wear sunglasses.”
“No, we can have the operation done tomorrow. It only takes twenty minutes. The optometrist assured me there’s no risk.”
“What is this operation exactly?”
“Did you ever see David Bowie in The Man Who Fell to Earth? Where they fuse the pupils to his eyes? It’s like that.”
“I didn’t see it, but I’ll do it.”
“When it’s done, we’ll consummate our love.”
That night we slept nervously. She kept coughing, and I kept thinking how this was the last night that my eyes would be their natural hazel.
By the next day, the laryngitis had completely consumed her. With a cup of Hazelnut coffee and a warmed croissant, she quietly informed me that it was time to get up. She had awakened hours earlier and managed to secure a morning appointment with the noted eye-butcher, Dr. Mort Slocum. I dressed. Amy accompanied me, probably to be certain I wouldn’t run off. While in the waiting room of his attractive, ground-floor office on Fifth Avenue, I gained faith from his selection of quality, updated magazines that he was a good doctor.
We sat in the waiting area across from each other. There was only one other patient, a middle-aged woman who looked like the mother I never had, voluptuous under a business outfit, buried behind a copy of Mademoiselle.
If safe sex required any kind of patience and conviction, it was nothing compared to what I was about to undergo. Soon, the doctor came out and shook my hand, saying he was delighted to see me. He told me it was just a quick piece of cosmetic surgery, and gave me photos of before-and-after cases who underwent the operation. The “befores” were frowning, the “afters” were smiling. Other than that, I saw no difference. Then he excused himself to go to the bathroom.
“Don’t forget to scrub your hands,” I called out to him. Rushing over to Amy, I appealed, “Can’t I just get a cheap feel to keep me motivated while I’m in there under the doctor’s knife?”
“It’s not a knife. It’s a laser beam.”
“That’s even worse!”
Looking at me, she tightened her face like a fist, and through gritting teeth she hissed, “Okay, go ahead, feel it! Grope it!”
I told her that I’d wait till after the operation. The doctor returned and told me to follow him.
“There’s something I want to say before I go,” I said to Amy.
“What?”
“Remember how, before Gorbachev, the U.S. and Russia had enough weapons to destroy the world, and each of the other’s weapons were pointed into the heart of the other, how that created great distrust, but kept the other on each other’s minds to the point of constant, day-to-day anxiety?”
“Yeah.”
“It wasn’t like a big country dominating a little country, and it wasn’t like two big, dumb countries at constant peace, was it?”
“No, the doctor’s waiting for you.”
“It was two big countries with huge and sophisticated weaponry pointed directly at each other, and both countries were stuck on the same globe.”
“So?”
“A generation of drills, school children under the table, backyard bomb shelters, the birth of bottled water…”
“So?”
“It was adversarial polarity.”
“So?”
“I, too, have developed an adversarial polarity for you.”
“Huh?”
“Mr. Aeiou,” Sawbones Slocum called, “I get paid by the hour. Let’s paint those pupils, shall we?”
“What I’m trying to say is I’m animus possessed!” I explained.
“Huh?”
“I love you,” I replied, employing the colloquial term. Then the strangest thing occurred: I distinctly saw the swell of a tear in Amy’s cold, functional eyes.
“I’m sorry about everything,” she replied and kissed me. Despite the laryngitis, she assured me that she would be there waiting for me when I got out. I followed the doctor into the examination room.