PUT YOUR HAND IN SHIT AND
YOU’LL GET SHIT ON YOUR
HAND
“Amy,” I whispered into the fuzziness of the night, “where art thou?” Nothing answered articulately. I turned on all the TVs, all to MTV, but it did no good. The libido was not libiding while Amy was out there. Love was great and pure, and I could never love or even think of another woman.
Locating a small envelope of coke, I did a line and sleazebang! Ma’ams, madames, ms’, and misses. Lips thin or ample, barrels of kisses. Oodles and noodles of Chinese Chix! Gals, ladies, getting kicks. A sultan’s harem of sultry lasses. Girls with soft contacts, girls in glasses. Kittens and nymphs, hot sensations. Aproned matrons in tight formations. Parades, parodies, endless cavalcades. Brat packs in slacks, mistresses, maids. Anorectics, bulimics, and round pound rolleys. Thinking mamas like Cher or Jane Trudeau Pauley. Babes flowing, strutting, a wide-open faucet. Quiet gals, brainy, with skeletons in closet. Babs: Walters, Streisand; and Sue: Sommers, Saint James. Tall, small mall chicks, those with no names. Downtown-scene chicks, dirty and clean chicks, teens-injeans chicks, shallow and deep chicks, fiscal and leap…
But when the drug passed: Amy, amy, amyamyamy yam my amy may may am ama ma mama ay…. I fell asleep.
I woke up early the next day. I missed the breakfast special by six hours, so I got a jelly donut and coffee at the counter of a local diner. While walking toward my door, I became book-ended between two massive men.
“Thought I’d find you here,” said one. Looking up, I reconized that guy Wylie, who had served me the macaroni and cheese at Whitlock’s house. I tried to leap backward, but he already had his hand on my back. So did the other guy, some thug-for-hire.
“Do you remember me?” he inquired politely.
“Yeah, you’re the guy that talks to himself. If you’re going to beat me or kill me for the money, forget it. I spent it. But if you want, you can kill me anyway. Just let me see my old apartment one last time.” I was hoping to get hold of the cheap handgun and kill them.
“What? Hell no. I’m just sorry if I behaved strangely the first time we met.”
“Oh no, I’m amused by stream-of-consciousness types.”
“Well, this time I’m prepared to speak in the traditional, dialogical fashion. Whitlock would kill me if he knew I was here talking to you.”
“So do us both a favor and…”
“You’re having an important birthday soon, so you have to know!” Wylie shot back.
“What do you want? I have money!”
“Shut up, just listen a minute.” He paused for a moment and then launched, “Suppose…Suppose…Suppose…Help me, Herman!”
“How?” Herman asked.
“Suppose you heard about this poor guy…” Wylie began.
“Yeah, a guy…” Herman echoed.
“And he was the son of an old cow.”
“An old cow? You’re calling Mister…an old cow?” exclaimed Herman.
“I mean…a lion…” Wylie revised.
“A lion?” I asked.
“Yeah, he was a lion cub…but he was told he was a messy, skinny chicken.” When we arrived at my apartment, they indicated that I could take out my key and enter the front door.
“Yeah, a lion cub that’s a chicken,” uttered Herman as if it all made perfect sense.
“A guy is a lion cub, but he thinks he’s a chicken?” I asked.
“YES!” Wylie yelled impatiently.
“Fine.”
“Bear with us, Joey.” Wylie fell silent for a moment, searching for more components of this bizarre, bestial tale.
“Well?” Herman finally asked Wylie.
“Well,” Wylie said, “how would that little lion cub feel if he realized that all his life he was treated like a creepy little chicken?”
“Crappy?” I guessed, sensing that somehow I was going to be equated to that chicken lion cub. But by the time we got to my inner door, I still couldn’t figure out how.
“What I’m trying to say is…”
“No!” Herman stopped him. “You can’t tell him nothing more!”
“But…”
“If you do, we’re both dead! You know that,” Herman said.
“You’re right,” Wylie responded, and added, “Kid, you’ve got to figure it out from there.” Without further explanation of their fable, they turned and left. Aesop they weren’t.
The Amy craving was still there. I tried calling her at work, but I hung up. I called information and then the American Psychiatric Association to inform them that to be honest to their reclining public, love had to be officially listed as a psychosis. They hung up on me.
The next day, I pursued puerile pastimes. I took the Circle Line. That evening I saw a play at Circle in the Square. Afterwards, I ate at La Cirque, which somehow reminded me of a circus.
I went home, and while thinking of how to spend my new life, I watched music videos. In the same way that the ’60s brought us the space program, music videos were the ’80s’ contribution to mankind. The phone rang. Not my phone, her phone. I answered.
“Oh, I’m sorry. I must have the wrong number,” the female said, and hung up.
The phone rang again. This time I raised my voice a couple of octaves, put my hand over the speaker, and said in a raspy voice, “Hello.”
“Amy?”
“I’ve got laryngitis. Identify yourself, quickly.”
“This is Sophie. I’m just calling to find out when the big event is going to be.”
“Oh, I’m sorry. You have the wrong Amy,” I said and hung up. The conversation made everything tumble forth for me. What big event could she be referring to? My whole life was built around loving or hating her; I couldn’t withdraw. Another paradox of love is that the lover (dispeller of love) wants to use the lovee (the victim of love) as a physical and emotional toilet, wherein one can flush a variety of messy longings, freaky fantasies, and pathetic needs. If someone really loved someone else, they’d stay the hell away from them. Unfortunately for Amy, I didn’t love her enough to stay away from her. If she ever really did find her way to loving someone like me then something deep inside of her still loved me. (I don’t know why I knew this, I just did.)
The only way to get the love bug out of your system is by rendering it commonplace, through overexposure. Reconciliation would be the best thing for both of us. This would require: a) seeing her apart from the monster Whitlock, b) somehow showing her that my illogical state was due to the operations (my ego attack had given me an acute case of selfishness, but I had managed to regain my senses), c) proving my undying love for her (I might be able to pull that all off, but by far the hardest thing to do would be d)), and d) convincing her that her love for me, although fugitive from her consciousness, was still very alive, and not delusional.
I didn’t know where she was staying but I knew where she worked. I dialed her number, “I’d like to speak to Miss Rapapport.”
“I’m sorry, Miss Rapapport is unavailable.”
“Why?”
“She’s simply unavailable.”
I hung up. It was quite clear what had happened. The lady who called, Sophie, said it. The “big event” was going to happen. Amy had finally consented to marrying the Whitlock monster. This must have killed her drive to make stacks of money because no matter how brilliant or lucky she was, she would never be able to compete with the money she would marry into. But this would also kill all her purpose in life! Didn’t she know that? It would be just a Mme. Bovary revisited, couldn’t she see that? I had to prevent the marriage. Over the past week or so I had discovered that money was not the means to ultimate happiness; I knew that only Amy could bring me that. Since he had Amy, since he had everything, my mission was clear: I had to kill him. I picked up the phone and called him.
“Whitlock Incorporated,” said the horse-eyed receptionist.
“Yes, my name is Wilbur Whitlock, and I…”
“Oh no, I was warned about you. You stop calling here. Shoo!” She hung up. I dialed back.
“Hello,” I said in a brogue. “This is Father Dorris, and I’m supposed to conduct…”
“We know who you are, and we’ll notify the police if you don’t stop calling this instant.” She hung up again.
It was still daytime. I raced over to the rhombus-shaped building and waited in the cavernous lobby. The layout of the place, with the overhead mezzanine filled with security guards and the docile inmate-employees, reminded me of a minimum security prison—a day prison. And these were the day people. They were dormant in their homes at night and activated here by day. When the elevator opened, some suits got out. One suit in particular had the word “day” written all over him—he was pure rank and file. I followed him out into the street.
“Excuse me,” I said to the suit.
“Yes?”
“Do you work at Whitlock Incorporated?”
“Yes.”
“Do you know Mr. Andrew Whitlock?”
“Yes.”
“Was he out today?”
“Yes.”
“Would you know if he’s getting married?”
“Yes.”
“Is he getting married?”
“No.”
“Does the name Amy Rapapport ring a bell?”
“No.”
“Do you know if he’s romantically attached to anyone?”
“No,” the day-suit concluded. Then he began asking a few questions: “What is it you want?”
“A girl named Amy Rapapport.”
“Have you tried the phone book?”
“No.”
“You thought she had married Whitlock?”
“Yes.”
“Are you a friend of Whitlock’s?”
“No.”
“Are you rivals for this girl?”
“Yes.”
“Well, good luck,” he said, and departed before the long, dark, false lashes of evening could batt. I went home and, deciding to take the day-worker’s advice, called information and got a phone number for Amy that I vaguely recognized. I dialed it; it rang and rang. I faintly heard a distant ringing and realized that I had dialed the front half of my apartment.
The next morning, I found a letter in the mailbox addressed to Ms. Amy Rapapport. It was from the Bundles O’ Joy Adoption Agency. I tore it open and read it:
Dear Ms. Rapapport,
In response to your donation, I have located the requested information on an infant named Joseph, adopted by the family of Ngm. This file is marked “CONFIDENTIAL, refer to Whitlock Incorporated.” Please contact the Whitlock Corporation for information on this matter.
Counselor R. LaCosta
Adoption Officer
They had their hands in everything. Stopping at a corner store, I purchased a big bottle of Colt 45 and a “holiday-size” bag of M&Ms (with almonds). When I brought my goods up to the register, I saw a blurry, old jar sitting on the counter. I opened it and took out a long, stringy thing that looked like a very large beef jerky.
“What is that?” asked the cashier.
“Isn’t it beef jerky?” I asked nervously.
“Yeah, that’s right. It’s been so long since anyone opened that thing, I forgot it was even there.” Looking at the label, he noticed the price was twenty cents.
“Twenty cents? Wow!” I replied. “I never bought anything that cheap.” I took a bite out of it. It tasted like an old belt, but it made a challenging chew so I kept masticating, ingesting, and digesting as I walked home. About halfway through, I decided the jerky both tasted like and was as difficult to eat as an old purse. I returned, depressed, to my apartment, only to find it had been broken into. Whitlock or some ding-a-ling working for him had entered and rustled through my half of the apartment. Nothing appeared to be missing. Still depressed, I watched more MTV videi. I started feeling an intense bellyache, but fortunately I also started feeling irresistibly sleepy.
My dream started out simply enough. I was walking in the woods, but there was a bright light in the sky. A tractor beam lifted me, and I seemed to be a UFO abductee: I was entering into a clean, white room with an eye chart on the wall and a check-up table covered with wax paper. I was wearing a backless patient’s robe and was preoccupied with hiding my tushy. A doctor entered. He had Whitlock’s face, though he was fat, short, and oily.
“You’re a doctor?” I asked.
“I dabble.” He looked at my chart, and asked, “When was the last time you had a work-up?”
“What kind of work-up?”
“What’s your coverage?” He started surveying my body surface.
“What coverage?”
“What’s this?” He was looking at something behind my neck. I put my hand there and quickly located the suspected growth. “That’s a pimple. I’ve been waiting for it to get pointier before picking it. I’m okay,” I said. And for some strange reason, I added, “I just need a clean bill of health.”
He pushed the cold, flat, circular end of a stethoscope to my chest. “Cough.”
I coughed and asked him where he went to medical school.
“Did Hippocrates go to medical school? Did Galileo study physics in high school? Where did Plato study Plato? Experience and soul-searching! I’ve developed techniques that in a hundred years will become standard practice.” He removed a sample-size tube of KY gel from his top drawer. “When were you last inspected for rectal cancer?”
“No way! I don’t need a cancer test,” I said.
“But I broke the seal on this tube,” he replied.
“Tough titty.”
“Are there any cancerous predispositions in the family?”
“What do you care?”
“Look, if you’re sick, I’m sick.”
“Huh?”
Before he could answer me, I morphed into an olive-skinned, turbaned man. I was entering into another room—an office. The phone was ringing. The wall of the office was covered with diplomas commemorating everything: membership in obscure societies, completion of intensive and pedantic courses, cryptic licenses, honors bestowed for unspecified philanthropic services, and titles, including an honorary citizenship in some strange Balkan municipality. Then I noticed that some of the laminated diplomas repeated themselves. Another shelf-laden wall was filled with stone and wooden artifacts from around the world. A network of wooden shelves were covered with fertility symbols, carvings, and hand sculptures—bric-a-brac of all shapes and sizes. A big tom-tom made of a hollowed log was sitting in the corner; behind that, a large, ivory statue of Buddha; and next to that, a brass statuette of the dancing Shiva. On the shelf behind the statuette was a plastic bust of Pope John Paul II. Suddenly, a man in a tacky, plaid suit entered, reading a legal file; again the Whitlock face.
“Scooza mea,” I found myself garbling in a strange, indistinguishable dialect. It was apparent that I had only a nominal grasp of English.
“You want a green card, Raj?”
“Yeza, please.”
With great difficulty, he tried to navigate the language barrier over the better part of an hour, piloting around strange questions about my life: Whom had I married? How long was I married? What were the sex of my many children? What was my level of education? and so forth.
Finally the sleazy lawyer, Whitlock, asked the unsuspecting illegal alien—me—how much money I had. I smiled elusively and nodded. Again he painstakingly tried to unravel the mystery through primal communication, employing symbols, mime, and dance. Gradually, as it became clear that I was evading an answer, he drew closer and closer, and slowly, in a very nondeliberate way, he started frisking me.
“MONEY!” he said, burning off the last residue of patience. “I NEED MONEY!”
“But vhy?”
“Don’t you understand?” he replied. “You are the citizen! I’m the alien! Therefore payment must be made.”
The Whitlocker then shoved his hand in my threadbare pants pocket. Dreamy voices awoke me, and I drowned. This time I was intensely young: relentlessly stunning, luminously blonde, awesome blue eyes, a bone structure to end all bone structures. Handsome without compromise. Six-feet-two, one hundred and sixty pounds of rock-hard muscle.
I was in a studio or on a small stage; I was facing rows of empty seats. Through the darkness, in the furthest distance, I saw a poster with intense Svengali eyes penetrating outward. Below it read, THE LÖECHí TECHNIQUE. A slightly stooped Whitlock-mask appeared, voilà—he was an acting teacher. A white knit sweater was tied around his shoulders. A tight pair of slacks hugged his heavy midsection and sadly collapsed buttocks. Mascara meticulously struggled to hide his age, a male menopausal make-over. A tastefully colored toupee was carefully anchored into the sideburn hair, which in turn seemed to be woven to his copious ear hairs.
“To learn the coveted secrets of the Löechí will cost you eight hundred American dollars,” he said in a slight, untraceable accent.
“What’s the Löechí Technique?”
“White light rises from the core of this earth through the kaleidoscope of your feet. It electrifies your spine. We teach harmony, provide you a special water diet, teach you ‘exalted movements’…”
“What’s so special about this technique?”
“It’s movement-based.”
“So?”
“It works.”
“How do I know it’ll work?”
“We ask you to measure your bowel movements. They get longer as your motion gains in majesty.” I expected something simple, like sworn testimonials. He showed me sworn scatologicals in a photo album.
“Why do I want my waste any longer? I want to become a successful Hollywood actor.” Who doesn’t?
“We can’t control anyone’s destiny. All we can do is give you the tools. Take it or leave it.”
“All right, I’ll take it.” He then moved behind me. Grabbing me around the waist, he started bouncing up and down while yelling, “Jump, Löechí! Jump, Löechí!” I broke away.
“What did you call me?”
“Löechí. You are the Löechí!”
The implements of acting! Green cards of citizenship! A clinical work-up! I struggled up from between the diametric tension of two psycho dream-unweavers: Carl Jung and Joseph Campbell. It all made perfect sense!
One glyph of recollection pulled from the accursed temple of sleep was something Whitlock had muttered about being in Tokyo during the early ’60s (probably eluding the Vietnam draft). I quickly upturned all my boxes until I located it, the birth certificate that Amy had located when she first arrived in my apartment. Sure enough, I was made in Japan, right in Tokyo. I was a Tokian while Whitlock was there. I was then adopted by the Ngms. It seemed odd that Amy, who knew everything about Whitlock, wouldn’t mention that our paths had crossed in Japan so many years ago. I sniffed a confederate.
Opening a suitcase filled with Amy’s stuff, I searched through papers, notebooks, work-related crapola. Flipping through utility bills, unclear warranties, tax-deductible restaurant tabs, a terrifying quantity of metered cab receipts, a copy of my Wittenberg Bible-sized sublease, and so forth, a tiny and much-abused appointment book finally relented, and dropped out.
Thumbing through the book, I saw a listing of appointments. Aerobics were tri-weekly, gynecological appointments were bi-monthly. “Stooges,” a client, loomed early in the month, reappeared daily for two weeks like a nervous tic, and then fell off the face of her schedule book—a deal closed. The one cryptic and recurrent staple in her schedule book was a notation that read in capital letters: TOB. It occupied the Tuesday, 7:00 p.m. time slot as if the time were a parcel of real estate. The obvious deduction was that TOB was short for someone named Toby? Tobias? Tabatha? Tobolopolous? A lover she kept? A masseuse she required? A sex club she frequented? Who knew? I flipped through the little pages of her book looking for elaboration of a Toby. None was evident.
Fanning back through the days, weeks, and months, past notions that came and went, I kept encountering that same one: TOB. At last, something yielded. At one time slot, instead of TOB, it read: O. Building. What was the O. Building? I decided to try calling Amy at work and ask her point blank.
I called her office; her secretary picked up.
“Amy, please.”
“Yes, who shall I say is calling?”
“I’m calling for the O. Building.”
“Yes, who shall I say is calling? Is this you? Is this that sleazy guy I was warned about?”
“Yes. Do you know what the O. Building is?” Very often secretaries are informational run-offs for their basin bosses.
“I was warned about you.”
“What is the O. Building?”
“Is this a prank? Are you masturbating?”
“Not yet, I’m trying to find the O. Building.”
“Where is the Old Building?” she misunderstood me.
“No, the O. Building.”
“It’s probably the old Whitlock offices over on Wall Street.” She gave me an exact address.
I thanked her, told her I was masturbating, and hung up.
FACT: I WAS MYSTERIOUSLY BORN IN TOKYO WHILE WHITLOCK WAS THERE. AND THEN MYSTERIOUSLY PUT UP FOR ADOPTION.
FACT: I WAS MYSTERIOUSLY GIVEN A WHITLOCK SCHOLARSHIP EVEN THOUGH I NEVER APPLIED FOR IT.
FACT: THE GRANT WAS SUDDENLY CUT AT MY TWENTY-THIRD BIRTHDAY.
FACT: MY ADOPTIVE FATHER WAS NEVER VERY PATERNAL.
QUESTION: WHY WOULD AMY, A JUNIOR PARTNER AT ONE OF THE COUNTRY’S BIGGEST LAW FIRMS, NEED TO MOVE IN WITH A NUTCASE LIKE ME?
All roads pointed to one answer: ?
Early Tuesday evening, I dressed in office formals, an old tweed suit. As I was about to leave, I decided not to take the cheap handgun. I carefully slipped it under my pillow as any good member of the NRA would.
I took a city bus through the constipated bowels of lower Manhattan. I arrived at a filthy, old, limestone office building on Wall Street. Under the tarnished plaque it read, WHITLOCK INC. Long before the sudden and erratic growth of the American economy, rising like the bow of a great ship, reaching its greatest heights just before it majestically slips under, before the freakish erection of rhombus-shaped buildings and the picket fences of adjacent skyscrapers that rendered this neighborhood into a slow-motion parking lot of traffic at the base of a human-filled air shaft, before all that, this modest monstrosity must have been one of the first office buildings in the area.
Six o’clock on Tuesday, an hour before Amy’s fateful TOB meeting, I purchased a weekly leftist newspaper and stationed myself across the street from the old building. I ate a tuna fish on challah while waiting for Amy to show up. I stooped behind and around structures, compelling the too-tight belt of my too-loose pants to dig painfully. I unbuckled it and waited. Slowly, strange sights appeared. Unusual men emerged. And they didn’t arrive in any of those tacky rec-room-on-wheels limos either. These guys came in chauffeur-driven Rolls or classy, old, English sports cars, which they illegally parked out front, fuck the parking ticket.
In some cases, they got out of private cars. Who were they? There were about a dozen in all, usually with at least one bodyguard as an escort. They were all white, older men, well-dressed with strange clothes, costumes of aristocracy, gold-capped walking sticks, monocles on small vest chains. In one overdone case, a Prussian-looking riding crop tucked under an armpit; in another case, right out of central casting, an antique wicker wheelchair: Old money smelled of geriatric urine. My belt slipped off my pants.
From out of nowhere, a bouncy rottweiler walked up the street and looked at me angrily as it passed, then squatted and took a steaming dump before proceeding on. Along with pit bulls and dobermans, rottweilers are the turnstile jumpers of the pooper-scooper laws. Before the commanding canine could bounce away, a cop car paused.
“Hey,” a rottweiler in a cop uniform called to me. “Clean that up.” He pointed to the poop.
“He ain’t mine,” I said plainly.
“Clean it up or I’ll give you a ticket.”
“He ain’t mine. Give the dog a ticket.” The cop got out of the car, halting traffic all the way back to Brooklyn.
“What, do you just carry a leash on you for kicks?” he said, spotting the leather belt in my hand.
“This is my belt.” I held it up.
“What are you doing here? Let’s see some ID.” Letting out a sigh of protest, I unfolded the copy of the Village Voice I was planning to get disgusted by, and shoveled up the expelled remains of the rottweiler’s last victim. Deputy Dog passed, and I resumed my wait.
As I grew hypothermic in my hot-and-cold guessing-game of hunches, Amy’s cab screeched to a halt before me. As she appeared, and the driver tore off her deductible metered receipt, I felt the tender scab of healing love rip open. “Amy, I love you,” I muttered to a mailbox that doubled as a conduit for my heart’s thwarting.
Not knowing what else to do, I figured that I should try to break into this odd little gathering and confirm once and for all that paranoia was not the central governing force in my life. Something was up. I had to go upstairs and find out what role these senior citizens played in my life. The old building had a main entrance and a large, metal set of janitor’s doors. I tried the janitor’s doors, yanking and pulling, struggling and wheezing. Then I went around to the main entrance. A near-dead security guard dozed before a dozen closed-circuit TVs and switches. I passed him and his seismographic snoring, and snuck into the only elevator in the bank that was still functioning. The button panel required key-access to each floor. Fortunately, the tumblers to one floor were switched to open. I pushed the button for that floor. Loud mechanical sounds from above must have heralded my coming.