‘DON’T DIS YOUR SIS’
Dr. Mortimer Slocum reassured me that although the operation was new and difficult, it was a quick procedure, and he’d have me out of there in twenty minutes tops.
“There are no side effects or anything?”
“Why, are you a lawyer?”
“No.”
“Just stay home for a couple days and for god’s sake, don’t take off the cotton patches until tomorrow afternoon.”
“What patches?”
“You’ll have to keep your eyes patched until tomorrow.” He then called in a nurse. Together we went into a small room where I was laid back. He looked into my eyes, placed the soft plastic lenses, and inserted what felt like a tiny, red-hot poker into each eyeball. I felt a blinding light.
As a strobe of light zapped my cones and rods, I remembered Byzantine Emperor Basil II. Upon capturing fifteen thousand Bulgarian troops, he had them blinded, leaving every hundredth man with one eyeball in order to lead the rest of them back to their homeland.
Why was I doing this? I wondered. Then I remembered. My reagan pup-tented in my pants as I fantasized having sex with Amy while the procedure was done to the other eye. Then he applied bandages.
He excused himself, departed, and in a moment, Amy was there before me.
“Did it hurt, my little bat?” she hissed and rattled. The laryngitis had pulverized her voice.
“Excruciating, my little snake,” I replied, placing the guilt-ridden foundations upon her to support the sexual colossus I was hoping to build. As she led me outside and into a cab, I started slipping my hand down her buttoned blouse.
“Don’t you want to wait,” she whispered, “until you can see?”
“I’ll see feelingly.” I borrowed Shakespeare for the occasion. An eternity passed as she paid the cabby and we fumbled up the stairs. I rubbed up against her with every step. As she grappled for her key, I groped at her. By the time I heard the door slam, my reagan was ready for its own performance of Bedtime For Bonzo.
“Hold it!” she whispered, fighting her sore larynx. “I’m not nearly as experienced at this as you are, Bundles. I’ve only had sex three times, and I don’t want this to be any cheaper than it is.”
“Too late,” I replied, and rushed her.
“Hold it!” she said. “If we really have to do it like this, at least let me get a drink.”
“All right, get me one, too!”
I heard her go off to the kitchen and in a moment she returned with two glasses and a bottle. We drank our swill quickly. Then I battled her, bathed in her, drank her, nipped and nibbled her, all mere foreplay. Her clothes restrained and disguised her true resources. Before long, she appealed for a second bottle of vodka.
Over the next hour or so, a lot of alcohol was ingested in small, slippery quantities, and in the bathroom I felt my way through the medicine chest for some lewd quaaludes that I had from long ago. Soon she was as smooth as silk, soft as a pat of butter, and loose as a goose. But in another moment she started sinking into sleep. She couldn’t say a word, just a bunch of gurgling sounds. I finally placed her on the bed and wormed my way up that list of psycho-sexual fantasies like a rectal suppository. A couple times she would moan in pain, and her consciousness would peek out from the shroud of intoxication as she appealed for the traditional positions that were a part of her family values.
“Nonsense,” I retorted. “Moral sex is banal sex.”
On and on we went, the hunter and hunted, like a nation buying joy it never earned, spending money it never had. At one point, feeling like a teenager, I gave a sensuous hickey just above her breast. Eventually she passed out, and after a couple more hours of unilateral adversarial pole-arising (a/k/a lovemaking), so did I.
The next day, late in the afternoon, I awoke to the sound of the shower. I carefully peeled off my eye patches, and my eyes slowly adjusted. Checking my blue eyes in the mirror, I discovered that I finally had something in common with Paul Newman and Frank Sinatra. I fuzzily remembered almost everything from last night. I went to my half of the house and did some pore inspection. Then she came out of the bathroom, entered my part of the house, and looked at me strangely.
“What’s the matter, my turtle dove?”
“What did you do to me last night?”
“Whatever do you mean? We made love.”
“YOU DISGUSTING PIG!!” she suddenly shrieked. “Oh god, how could I delude myself so miserably? You’re even more disgusting than you were before!”
“What do you mean, my love?”
She stormed out, back to her apartment. I trailed after her, but she’d locked the door. When I returned to my apartment, I wondered what the problem was and how much money it would cost to rectify. My devotion to Amy was the most sobering path I had ever walked, and I didn’t want to lose it. Suddenly my phone, which few had the number to, rang.
“He doesn’t live here or want any,” I answered, hoping to fend off tele-sellers and wrong numbers.
“I got photos of you with a piece of tape on your chin feeling up some thirteen-year-old girl at the Nuyorican Poet’s Cafe.” It was Whitlock.
“What?”
“And I just want you to know, sleazebag, that it wasn’t your looks and charms that did it. We paid her to let you.” So that G-man did some work the other night.
“Hah.” I feigned a one-note chuckle.
“They’re in the mail to Amy. Let’s see how you talk yourself out of this one.”
“She knows all about it, asshole. You think you can extort our relationship to death? Forget it! We have an open, honest relationship. A simple relationship that takes into account the dynamic excursions of the male libido.” I hung up the phone. That fucking thirteen-year-old hadn’t looked a day younger than fifteen.
The phone rang a moment later. Him: “Look, I give up. Just say it. Dictate your terms. What do you want to stay out of my life and leave me and Amy alone forever?”
“Nothing.” I hung up the phone, he called back. I had no intention of parting with Amy, but I remembered the determination that Whitlock used when he called me after the stand-up comedy episode at YUK!, so I decided to make him an offer that he would refuse.
“I want cash, cold and hard and green. And a lot of it.”
“How much?”
“Three hundred and fifty-seven thousand dollars, and thirty-eight cents.”
“WHAT!”
“That’s my price, and I’ll never see her again.”
“You’re crazy!”
“That has nothing to do with it.”
“I ain’t giving you a cent. I can hire some college kid to kill you for a thousand bucks, pal.”
“Sure you can. But even dead she’ll be mine. Morrison, Elvis, and Jim Croce all reached greater heights of popularity in death than in their lives. She’ll be my number one Elvis impersonator, pal.”
“I’ll give you half of that.”
“Fuck that. You’re rich. In fact, get me back into the masters program, reinstate me in the proofreading agency, and come up with four hundred and eighty-two thousand dollars and twenty-eight cents.”
“Hey, I’m willing to compromise in the middle.”
“The meter’s running, pal. Now, I’m looking at my watch; you got ten seconds to make up your mind.” I silently counted to five and then hung the phone up. Just as quickly, it rang again.
“Okay, I’ll do it!” He wasn’t supposed to accept the offer. I hung up the phone in a panic.
I ran into the bathroom and locked the door. I had no idea what to do. I was terrible at confrontation, even with my big, new body. I still reverted to a seven-year-old when in fear. I jumped in the bathtub and covered my eyes so he couldn’t see me. Through the wall, though, I could hear Amy wildly weeping in her apartment. Last night’s intimacy had been too much for her, poor kid.
I went to the green door and tried knocking softly. I really did love her. I wasn’t aware that I had done anything wrong. But even I am capable of some guilt. I kept reminding myself that whatever kind of violation I might have unintentionally performed, she, with her unauthorized series of zip-lock operations, had made me look like an amateur, even if they were an improvement. But I felt incredibly guilty. It must have been a sacrifice for her to miss one of those power lunches to find me a blue-collar vocational skill. I gently knocked on Amy’s door.
“I’ll kill you, you pig. Stay away from that door.”
“Let’s put this behind us.”
Like a promising act at CBGBs, I could hear her violent shrieks to the accompaniment of explosive glassware. Suddenly there was a knock at my front door. Through the peephole, I saw him, the unshelled nut. I turned up the TV to blanket all sounds from her room and opened my door. He was holding his extra-thin briefcase. He meant business.
“Christ, can you lower that?” My Favorite Martian was blaring.
“Afraid not, pal. It drowns out the voices in my head.”
Using his knee as a desk, he set down his briefcase and unclicked it open. WOW! I seized a tightly ribboned stack of hundred dollar bills. It looked genuine with a capital G. He handed it to me—mine! For a moment I lost myself. I asked him to wait in the hall and transferred all the cash into the compartment under the toilet. I had to have it. I wouldn’t even spend it, I could just look at it and masturbate. I opened the door again. He was still there expectantly.
“All right, you want her?” I asked, preoccupied with how I was going to sell Amy, who I loved, who hated me, to this man (who hated me), whom she disliked.
“No, I just wanted to see what you’d do with a half-a-million bucks.” He wasn’t even good at sarcasm.
“All right, look, I’m going to stage a scene. Just play along. Do what comes natural.”
“Huh?”
I lowered the TV and went back to the adjoining green door, the Glinika Bridge where the former East Berlin met the former West Berlin of our former relationship. I started banging. “Open this fucking door!” I screamed. “My reagan’s at attention and you’re my first lady.”
“Uruuuugh!” she screamed.
“You arch slime-bag!” he said. Rushing over, he punched me in the back.
“Get off me, you preppie boy!” I shoved him into a pile of boxes that collapsed to one side. The common door opened. She had heard the commotion and bit the bait. She watched for a minute as I struggled to contain the Terminator-Whitlock. I kept whispering to him things like, “enough,” and “quit,” and “uncle.” But he kept punching, and it really hurt.
“Enough!” she called, as she walked through my half of the house out the front door. She went downstairs carrying a small overnight bag.
“Give me my money back, asshole!”
“No way,” I replied calmly. He punched me hard in the nose.
“Punch me, kick me, chew me, kill me. I finally got you, and there’s no way I’m going to separate with that cash. My life is worth much less than it, so you’ll have to kill me to get it.”
“I don’t kill people, I hire others to kill them.”
He pushed me down and raced around my side of the apartment, searching for his unearned cash. It was already pretty emptied out, but he turned over the few boxes I had. I didn’t mind much until he started tossing around my newly purchased clothes. In my kitchen, everything was already near barren; I had no food, one pot, one pan, and one plate. Rushing into the bathroom, he tossed all my skin-care products into the garbage while emptying the medicine cabinet. He still couldn’t find it. Then, exhausted, frantic, truly undone and defeated, he raced out the door.
As I heard them storming down the stairs, I rose and went into her half of the house, where I flushed the blood out of my nose and held a compress up to my eyes. They were still recovering from yesterday’s operation, and my sight was blurry as I inspected her half of the apartment. It was designed in a classical Grecian manner, like a temple yet to be despoiled. There was a sunken waterway set in faux marble.
When I got to her bedroom I found the true riches of her place. She had an entire room devoted to television. It was loaded with different cable boxes and three thirty-inch sets, side by side, positioned before a non-impact treadmill. Flipping through the different channels I realized that besides MTV and VH1, she had the Comedy Channel, and to top it all off, the Playboy Channel. She had four different movie channels! FOUR!
I tallied the score. On the down side, I had lost my great love, my adversarial pole. On the plus side, though, I had a half-renovated palace. I had a half-renovated set of looks—my true “ugliness,” as Amy pointed out, was still intact, and I’d only be able to fool chicks until they got a full taste of my character. Most importantly, I had nearly half-a-million bucks. Not a bad jump on life.
Slowly, over the next couple of hours, as I regained the full power of sight, I realized my new purpose in life. I’d spend the rest of my days preparing, cultivating, and hopefully winning the other half of everything.
I sat down and started watching the multiple TV sets simultaneously. It was wonderful, all these scantily clothed, bouncy chicks. I went to her fridge and found a plate of tasty-looking hors d’oeuvres, which I brought over to the TV room. The Robert Palmer video was on, the one with all those leggy, look-a-like chicks in black miniskirts. I watched the legs and wolfed down the delicious little foods and fell asleep. But it wasn’t working. All the girls in Robert Palmer’s video were Amy. The food was Amy. The hi-tech comforts were all Amy. I fell asleep dreaming about Amy.
When I awoke, it was a couple hours later. One of my many viruses was with me, the dull fever. That fever was Amy. Hoping to displace my obsessive love for Amy with money, I took some cash and went out into the street. With money, it was a new and different street. I had to buy something. I was weak and hungry, so I went to the nearest restaurant.
I visited Graceland once, and in the same way that Elvis Presley had all the best of the worst objects, I went to a Mc-Donald’s and ordered everything on the menu. Everything, sparing nothing. I ordered it all to go, in every size—small, medium, and large—and in all varieties: salads, fries, burgers, cheese burgers, Big Macs, Quarter Pounders, hot fruit pies—everything in bags. One of the girls was wearing a belt with a neat “M” insignia on it. For some feverish reason, I knew Amy would like it.
“Can I buy that from you?” I asked the cashier, pointing to her waist.
“Screw you.”
“No, the belt.”
“My belt?”
“Yeah, I’ll give you ten bucks for it. It’s for Amy.”
“No thanks.”
I pulled out twenty bucks.
“All right.” She gave me her belt. As she turned around to pull the belt off discreetly, I noticed the golden arches insignia on the back of her pants. Amy would want this to go with her new belt.
“Do you want to sell me your pants?”
“For a hundred bucks I will.”
I didn’t want them that much, which meant Amy would probably want them, since her tastes were the opposite of mine. I gave the cashier a hundred dollar bill, took her belt and all the food I could carry, and got back some change.
At first I gorged myself, but I heard it. I whipped around, looking for her, and munched again. Again I heard it: Amy was saying, “Take mouth-size bites. Chew slowly. Let the food digest.”
Finally though, I realized Amy would not appreciate this purchase. I looked down at the tightly packaged food that hollered, EAT ME! I pushed the bundled food away, but became aware that people were looking at me, giving me that people-are-starving look. I spent awhile on a french fry. But I could taste the sugar laced throughout it; it was like eating poison. I started sweating profusely and getting itchy. EAT ME! commanded the food. Someone leaving held the door open a moment. Hopping to my feet, I dashed out and to the corner. Fearing I was being chased like at YUK!, I dashed down into a subway hole, over the turnstile, and into an awaiting subway train. As the doors closed I realized that although no one was behind me, Amy was the fever in my head. My eyes were seeing double Amy in baby blue.
I consulted silently with her for a moment. We were rich! It was like we were chosen to live! We could do anything we wanted. We could have people killed if they forced us to eat fast food. We could do serious crimes and get off easily in country clubs. We danced on the subway and felt lightheaded. Life felt heavenly, like a wonderful interpretation of death. Indeed, for the first time I didn’t hunger for death.
A bunch of people were sitting quietly in their seats behaving themselves. As far as a bunch of people went, they seemed docile. They appeared hardworking. They were a fair slice of New York. All races, sexes, and ages were well represented. They were what we loved about New York, and we felt sorry for their plight, having to take the subways every day. As New Yorkers, they had suffered so that the rest of the country could delude itself into believing it was healthier, happier, and safer. They deserved something for this punishment.
We got up in the center of the car and announced, “Excuse us, ladies and gentleman. We don’t mean to be a pain but we’re a well-educated white man and his well-educated white girlfriend. We didn’t go to Vietnam and we have all our limbs and we don’t have any ailments and we live together in a large, comfy Upper East Side apartment and have a lot to be thankful for. If anybody needs any spare change, please just tell us how much, and we’ll try to oblige you. Remember, any idiot can become rich. Thank you.”
One guy laughed insanely. The other commuters completely ignored us. But as we neared the end of the subway car, one fashionable young man with a hook in his face asked me if we could spare a five for a flick. We informed him that it cost more than that but gave it to him anyway. Then we gave him six bucks more for popcorn.
“Hey, you got a hundred bucks?” someone said next. Amy said to give him only twenty, so we gave a twenty.
“Do you have fifty?” a lady asked. Amy gave her a five.
“Hey! Give me a dollar,” some old lady screamed from across the train. She came over and I gave it to her.
“Amy and I hope you live a happy life,” I said for both of us.
“What are you, crazy?” she said as she seized the bill out of our hands. “You’re all alone.”
And so, in The Epic of Gilgamesh it is written, “What you seek you will never find.” Happiness was a mere delusion of having both Amy and money. The old lady’s comment twisted through my sternum like a rusty corkscrew and tugged out my greasy heart. I stood there alone, Amyless.
The entire car-full of people were moving toward me like an army of zombies, no longer the noble people of New York. They were pushy at rush hour, intervening when something was a bargain, neglectful when someone needed help. As the door opened at the next stop, I dashed out and up.
I had lost track of the subway track and was up in Harlem. I walked among the locals looking for alternate transportation. On one corner, I noticed a well-behaved line of people buying drugs. Police spotters were on each end of the street, and there was a dealer in the middle of the block. I got at the end of the jittery-yet-mannered cue. When my turn came, I asked for a nickel bag.
“A nickel what? Who are you? Fuck off!”
“Look, you have to sell it to me!”
“Fuck away! Get out of here whiteboy before I blow you away!”
As a visual aide, he took out a cheap handgun and pointed it in my face.
“Shoot, go ahead. Life is worth nothing without my her. I’m Aimless without Amy.” Her life was probably joyful without me—Joey.
“Get out of here.” He smacked my sore nose with the flat of the cheap handgun.
“Ow!” The pain gave me an idea. “Hey, how much would it cost for you to shoot someone? I’ll give you ten thousand dollars.”
“Bring the money and we’ll talk.”
“Here.” I flashed three hundred dollars in his ratty face.
“Shit!” He grabbed at my money. I pulled away, he chased, I raced.
“Grab that little shit!”
One of the spotters cut me off and held my arms behind my back. The dealer went through my pockets and took out all my money, three hundred and twelve dollars and twenty-eight cents. He took the three hundred and put the twelve and change back in my shirt pocket.
“Now beat it.”
“Keep the cash but give me the gun, and I won’t call the police.”
“Okay,” he said complacently. “Here, I guess it’s better than killing you and going to jail for six years. And if you do call the police, I’ll have you arrested for having a concealed weapon.” Clever, he must have been a lawyer before dealing drugs.
As I walked over to 125th Street, I inspected the gun. It looked convincing, but there was only one way to tell. I pointed the weapon in the air and pulled the trigger. A screw fell out of the handle, but nothing fast came out of the front. I clicked the gun into the air repeatedly, and not entirely without results. A cabby, thinking I was hailing, came to a halt. I took it home. The ride was rough and circuitous. But like everyone else in this city, even with the gun, I was too afraid to give the maniac a punitively small tip.