New York, 1992. “Sir?” I open my eyes and see the Pakistani cabbie looking at me in the rearview mirror.
“Where we going this evening?” he asks in English so heavily accented I can just barely understand him.
Shit. I hadn’t really thought about it.
“You pick,” I say. His brow knits into a perfect V.
“Sir?”
“Central Park South. The Sherry-Netherland.” It’s what I always said when I got into a cab at JFK.
The drive from the airport along the Van Wyck and the BQE is one continuous stretch of drab—Woodhaven, Kew Gardens, Rego Park. I stare out the window straining to catch a glimpse of a garden or a park. Anything that could even in the broadest sense be construed as haven-like. But there is nothing. I’ve seen third-world countries make more hospitable first impressions. I close my eyes.
“Wake me up as soon as you can see the skyline.”
“Oh, yes sir,” he says enthusiastically. “You don’t want to be missing that. Very beautiful, very dramatic. Just like it looks in the movies.” His accent has a singsong quality to it which, after a while, I find oddly soothing.
I wonder what it means that I have just had the same thought as my Pakistani cabbie. Perhaps nothing more than that we are both cinephiles. He could in fact be the next Satyajit Ray. Or Quentin Tarantino. I lean forward and take a good look at his taxi operator’s license. Savijii Sengupta. Eventually Savijii’s going to have to lose the turban. Eventually he’ll have to water down everything that drew Hollywood to him in the first place. And he’ll do it. Give in. Sell out. What choice does he have? Like he’s going to spend the rest of his life driving this fucking cab. Not when all he has to do is lose the turban.
But I digress. I was thinking about the Manhattan skyline. About the fact that there is something deeply, fundamentally satisfying—inspiring, exciting, and at the same time comforting—about reencountering that view. Because it doesn’t matter what season it is or whether I’m sneaking in at dawn after taking the red-eye or how many years I’ve stayed away; everything is where I left it.
The Chrysler Building, the Empire State Building, the Twin Towers—always there waiting for me. Faithfully. Watching for me. Standing tall. Like the proud, lonely, loyal wives of sea captains.
L.A. has no skyline—no elegant bridges or buildings that soar toward the clouds. Shopping centers, nondescript office buildings, and citywide, event-themed decor (The Olympics! The King Tut Exhibit!) go up and down like sets on a soundstage. Nothing lasts. From one trip to the next. One day to the next, L.A.’s slapdash, easily impressionable landscape changes as hastily as the events on its civic social calendar.
Most of the time, you drive by without even noticing there’s nothing to look at. Unless you’re in one of the canyons or out at the beach. But L.A. can’t really take credit for that. The Pacific Ocean, Topanga Canyon—that kind of thing is just dumb luck. A gift. It’s only a matter of time before the well-intentioned people of Los Angeles fuck it up.
“Sir?”
“Mmmm.”
“Sir.”
I open my eyes and the drab is gone. We are crossing the Triborough Bridge and the sun is glinting off the swells in the East River. And suddenly I am seeing my little yellow taxicab from above. I am seeing the opening credits roll. I am orchestrating the establishing shot. Not as gritty as The Asphalt Jungle, not as gauzy as Manhattan. I am still deciding. But it is the same landscape, the same city.
When we get to the hotel, I realize I have only Kenyan money in my wallet. Now my cabbie is not so cheerful.
“Keep the meter running,” I say. “I’ll go to the currency exchange inside.”
I turn toward the hotel.
“Wait,” he calls out his window. “Leave your bags in the trunk.”
The bellhop—a man of about sixty, wearing a maroon tux and tails with brass buttons down the front, white gloves, and a little hat held on with elastic that cuts into the pillow of fat under his neck—has just finished loading my luggage onto a cart. Three heavy suitcases, a guitar I had custom-made for me in Brazil for $30,000 (I don’t play), a rug stitched from the skins of African water buffalo, a set of two-dozen hand-carved ivory chopsticks, and a giant brass Tibetan gong.
“You, bellboy! Put those bags in my trunk.”
“You don’t order me around. I don’t work for you.” The bellhop turns to me. “Savages, every one of ’em. Hardly speak the language.”
My cabbie throws open the car door and stands next to the taxi, one hand resting on his trusty yellow steed.
“You bastard! You think you can insult me. You think you better than me?”
The bellhop holds on to the cart with one hand and gestures dramatically with the other. “See what I mean?” he says to me. “Savages.”
My cabbie walks toward us menacingly.
“Why don’t you go back where you came from,” the bellhop says, shoving the cart toward the cabbie, “before you have an accident.”
“You shouldn’t start a fight, old man. You might get hurt,” my cabbie says, stabbing his index finger in the bellhop’s direction.
That kind of behavior could get you kicked out of Africa, I think, and deciding it’s really not my problem, I go inside the hotel to change my money.
As soon as the revolving doors spit me out into the lobby, I know I’ve made a big mistake. Luxury hotels in foreign countries are one thing. They provide a kind of privileged anonymity. But this is just the opposite. The circular velvet couches, the white marble staircase, even the clinking of glasses I hear from the mahogany-paneled lobby bar. The smells, the sounds—it is all nauseatingly familiar. Only this time I am not a VIP. This time I do not even have a reservation. My heart begins to race.
I should have known. How could I not? And when I see the couple ahead of me hand their passports to the woman checking them in, I realize how truly stupid I have been.
“I won’t be staying,” I tell the bellhop, who’s patiently waiting to follow me to my room after I’ve checked in.
“Sir?”
“Put my bags back in the trunk and tell the driver I’ll be right out. Please.”
Crimson-colored anger appears at the top of the bellhop’s collar, travels upward, seeps into his neck fat, and spreads across his broad face.
“Certainly, sir.” He smiles with tight lips and a clenched jaw. When I get back in the taxi, the cabbie is wearing a shit-eating grin.
“I gave him a hundred dollars,” I say, and then wonder if that was enough to compensate him for his trouble and the inevitable shit he took from my cabbie.
Savijii’s smile fades quickly. “Where you want to go?” he asks.
“I don’t know.”
Savijii bangs his fist on the steering wheel. He’s muttering to himself in some third-world language. I don’t need to speak it to understand he’s pissed.
“I need a place to stay. Nothing fancy.”
Without another word, Savijii burns rubber out of the Sherry-Netherland’s cobblestone driveway and heads downtown, quickly leaving Central Park South in our dust.
“No hot plates, no music, no guests. You pay a week in advance.”
The ancient black man behind the desk at the McBurney YMCA has been rifling around the same drawer of loose keys for ten minutes. He is thin and bent and wears an orange Teamsters baseball cap, though knowing the details of the Teamsters retirement package as I do, I doubt that if he were an actual card-carrying member he’d have to work at all.
“That’s fine,” I say. He looks up at me and then past my shoulder to my belongings.
“Can’t leave anything out in the hallways. Violation of the fire code.”
“Room ain’t big,” he says. Like it’s a threat.
“That’s fine,” I say. He goes back to rifling. “Laundromat’s around the corner on Seventh.”
“Fine. You do have a room, right?”
“Yeah, I got a room. Just opened up this morning.”
“Could that be the one you’re looking for?” I ask, taking a step forward and pointing to the lone key hanging on the bulletin board behind him.”
“You gotta stay back a’ the yella’!” he says, pointing to the broken line painted on the floor. I do what I’m told. He turns and pulls the key off the wall. “Two hundred twenty-two dollars. You pay again Friday before five if you want to stay.”
“Thanks, but I don’t think—”
“That’s your business. I’m jus’ informing you of the policy. Policy is you pay Friday before five if you plan to stay.”
“Okay. That’s fine.” I peel off the bills and he hands me the key.
“You damn lucky,” he says as he watches me fill out the dog-eared registration card. “Mr. Meyer just passed this morning. Well, we found him this morning anyway.”
I glance up at him. “Lived in that room for thirty-four years.”
“He lived at the YMCA for thirty-four years?”
“You got good timing. Before today I ain’t had a vacancy since 1978. I left you a fresh set of sheets.”
“Thanks, I appreciate that.” I am in the right place at the right time. I can’t remember the last time that happened, I think, as I drag my shit up three flights of stairs. And I have to admit, I feel only slightly guilty that Mr. Meyer had to die to make it happen.
The following Friday, I am standing at the desk handing over another two hundred and twenty-two dollars. I see now how this could easily turn into thirty-four years. The majority of the all-male residents here are either gay or over seventy. And so far everyone I’ve met has been quiet, clean, and discreet. Tony—I think that’s his name—scrubs our open communal shower stall with Ajax at least daily.
Staying at the Y is much like living at a monastery. Without the sex.
Chelsea is loud and bustling and there is very little green. I don’t know what to do with myself, so I look for bookstores. In the six years since I left the States, the smaller independent bookstores have been mostly replaced by big chains. I don’t mind. It just means I can be even more anonymous. I find myself gravitating to the Parenting section at Barnes & Noble, flipping through books with titles like Helping Your Child Through Divorce and The Divorced Dad. As if I am a responsible parent. As if I am a father who is going to have weekend visits and pay doctor bills and attend Christmas pageants. Every day, in every branch, pregnant women holding stacks of baby books look at me with contempt. The impending split must be my fault. How could it be otherwise? That poor woman, that poor child, they think, as they lay a protective hand over their ballooning stomachs.
Sometimes I take Willa’s picture out and look at it in front of these women. I keep it with me. It came off the cardboard key chain long ago. I have re-glued it over and over but it keeps falling off, so I carry the whole thing around in a Ziploc bag. The tacky, mottled blue background of her first-grade school picture makes her look ordinary. Her hair is combed back and kept neatly in place with a red floral headband that matches the dress she is wearing. This is my picture-day daughter, not my real girl.
I drift from Parenting over to Psychology/Self-Help. The titles run together like raindrops on a windshield. Glossy pictures of confident, self-satisfied experts stare out at me. For $16.95 they promise to change my life, solve my problems, increase my concentration, improve my memory, manage my time, fulfill my potential, discover my sexual self. They all have the answer.
My eyes fall on a small pink book—no author’s picture on this cover. I pull it from its snug place between Beating the Blues and Be Your Own Therapist. The pages of the pink book are made of cream-colored parchment paper, the edges uneven, like the ones in those leather-bound volumes of Dickens and Chaucer people keep on their bookcases but never read. I let the thick, soft pages stroke my thumb as I flip through the book. The pages stop turning and fall open. The words fly at me: “I have felt the wind of the wing of madness.” I slam the book shut and shove it back onto the shelf.
That night I take two sleeping pills. I wake up a little after 3:00 A.M. My heart is racing. My mouth is dry. The sheets are cold and damp. There is sweat in the creases behind my knees and on the insides of my elbows. I go into the bathroom, run the cold water in the sink, and put my mouth under the faucet. I walk back to my room and stare out the window at the streetlights and the traffic on Twenty-third Street. The grimy, ugly street has grown on me. Like mold.
I open the window and stick my head out to make sure it is all still there, that I am still here. Bodega, Chelsea Hotel, stained mattress left sagging at the curb four days ago. My world is as I left it. But when I close my eyes, all I see are images from my dream.
My daughter is three, maybe four. She stands over me with a giddy look on her pink-cheeked face. She is wearing a party dress—one of those frilly things that stand out at the bottom—and patent-leather Mary Janes. I reach out to hug her, to tell her I am sorry, that I’ve missed her. Her lips part, revealing little cat-like white teeth. She raises her arm and in her tiny, dimpled hand she holds a gun. She raises the other hand and waves at me. “Bye-bye, Daddy,” she says in a tiny voice. And she pulls the trigger.
A breeze blows across my face.
The wind. The wing. I can feel it coming.
I do not go back to sleep.
I do not go back to Barnes & Noble.
Lately no one and nothing can keep up with me. Not traffic or store clerks or elevators or the old lady with the walker in front of me on the sidewalk. Especially not her. Her I want to kill. I try to pass her on the right but her walker is too fucking wide. I try to pass on the left but a woman with a double stroller the size of a goddamn Winnebago beats me to it. She flashes me an insincere “I won this round” smile. The kind of victorious New York expression reserved for total strangers.
That I have been forced into a holding pattern causes rage to rise in me. My tsunami. My chest constricts and I am painfully aware that suddenly, inexplicably, there are tacks and shards of glass circulating through my veins.
I slip between two parked cars and walk briskly down the street. In the street. No pedestrians to worry about, to slow me down. Except now and then when I encounter another fast walker like myself—someone who has abandoned the sidewalk for the fast lane. And then I am relieved. Because everyone in New York is impatient and irritable and agitated. So there is nothing wrong with me.
The Piccadilly is the answer to my prayers. I discover the enormous used bookstore accidentally. Apparently I am the only person in New York not already familiar with “the Pick,” as it is known.
It is easy to get lost in the Pick—not just in its famously daunting miles of labyrinthine aisles, but to lose track of time, of proportion, of perspective, of oneself. It is a drug. And within a week I am a junkie.
At first I need help navigating the Byzantine shelving system and outdated store maps. When I first begin coming here, spending long, languid hours during which time finally slows down for me—the only time during which I can finally take long, slow, albeit musty breaths—I am as lost as anyone else who first wanders into the Pick. And so it annoys me when, seeking help, service, or aid of some kind from the sales staff, I find a young man wearing a bright red Piccadilly shirt, his “Pick My Brain” badge pinned over his heart, hiding in a secluded corner of the Military History section. He is wearing a Walkman and shamelessly filling up multicolored note cards with information from books he obviously can’t afford to buy or isn’t allowed to xerox.
“Excuse me,” I say loudly. But since he doesn’t hear me, I walk up, grab a hold of the ladder on which he is perched, and give it a good shake.
“What the hell, man?”
“What’s your name?”
“Cecil, why?”
“You work here, Cecil?” I ask, as if the answer isn’t completely obvious.
“Yeah?”
“I thought maybe you were a customer impersonating a salesperson.”
He pulls his headphones down around his neck. “Can I help you with something?”
“Yes, actually. John Berryman. Dream Songs.”
He points in a general direction. “Poetry. Aisle 18b.” Then he puts his headphones back on.
Not that the aisles actually have numbers on them.
“Thanks for your help, Cecil.”
But I am only annoyed with Cecil until I don’t need him anymore. Which isn’t long. Very quickly I find a much more dedicated salesperson who, as luck would have it, also has breasts, which she has done a wonderful job of showcasing. She has customized her child-sized Piccadilly T-shirt by taking scissors to the neckline, Flashdance-style, so that it now hangs provocatively off one olive-skinned shoulder.
Now, after months of trying to navigate its topography on my own, Nicki—that’s her name—has become my own personal Beatrice of the Piccadilly, taking me by the hand and guiding me through every nook and mouse-friendly cranny, explaining the nuanced maps, even teaching me the secrets of the aisle numbering system.
She too has a tag pinned above her heart. And though by now I no longer need her assistance locating books, I often ask if I can “pick her brain.” But Nicki, who is studying Library Science at the New School, takes her job very seriously. So she only helps me on her lunch hour. Usually downstairs among the ergonomics textbooks or in the Typography section. Rare Typography. Nicki once confessed that she finds the old letters and typefaces to be quite a turn-on. She likes to put on the special cotton gloves used for handling rare books and, bending over so that her nose is almost but not quite touching the pages, she inhales their smell while slowly turning the pages.
I have not yet confessed to Nicki that I find her turn-on quite a turn-on. As do I the Technicolor bras she wears underneath her Pick T-shirt, their straps always visible on one shoulder or the other—fuchsia, lavender, aqua, fire-engine red. Never beige. Always something cheerful and impractical. One day maybe, one day. For now, admiring her ass as I watch her inhale antique ink is enough to get me through the day.
Cecil’s lack of work ethic no longer bothers me. Now I find him endearing. Technically, Cecil works at the Pick inventorying and shelving. But what he really does for at least ninety percent of his shift is research for the dissertation he’s writing as an NYU graduate student in American History.
He’s passionate about his dissertation topic on the three thousand Jews who fought for the Confederate Army, and I admire that. Now when I see Cecil’s pale, skinny arm peek out of the Military History aisle, his ink-stained index finger pointing unhelpfully in some vague direction of the cavernous store, I wait for the disgruntled customer to emerge, usually muttering obscenities. Then I help them find what they’re looking for. Because I really don’t want Cecil getting in trouble with Tina and Terri.
I’ve seen the owner’s identical twin daughters (porcine women whose behavior seems to indicate they have their periods all the time) yank a salesperson into one of the store’s dusty, less-traveled corners—Art: Printed Ephemera or History of Aviation, for example—and ream him or her out for not providing an adequate level of service.
“It doesn’t do much good to tell them we have what they’re looking for if they can’t fucking find it, does it?” one of them—I can never tell which—asks in a tone reminiscent of the Wicked Witch of the West. Usually the beleaguered, uninterested, occasionally intimidated sales associate nods and vows to lead the customer by the hand until the actual sale is made. Often, when the lecture is over, an eye roll or a barely audible “suck my dick, bitch” lingers in the air as Terri/Tina makes her way to the front of the store.
And so I feel terrible when it happens because I absolutely, positively do not mean to get Cecil fired. I have only been trying to help—showing his exasperated customers exactly where to find the book, edition, or translation they are looking for; helping them back to the register when they get lost. Which is where my plan backfires. Because the now-satisfied customer asks Terri/Tina who the useless kid in Military History is and why the excellent middle-aged salesman isn’t wearing a red shirt so he can be more easily identified.
And that’s it. Because of course it isn’t the first time Cecil has been called useless. Among other things. But training people to work at the Pick is a bitch. So Tina/Terri has let him stay. Until now. And now he is done.
Cecil and Nicki and a few other Pick staff are in Cecil’s apartment in Hell’s Kitchen, getting stoned and eating pizza.
“It’s not your fault, man,” Cecil says generously.
“What are you gonna do?” I ask, looking around at all the half-packed boxes.
“I’m moving in with two other guys. In Brooklyn. Fuckin’ sucks.”
I look around the place. It has a kind of turn-of-the-century, poverty-stricken Jacob Riis charm to it. “Nice place. Do you know if it’s been rented?”
Cecil glares at me. “You get me fired and now you’re going to steal my apartment.”
One week and a new coat of paint later, I move out of the Y and into my new apartment.
I hoped having my own home, a more permanent living situation, would make me feel more grounded, less weightless and insubstantial. Like a hot-air balloon without the sandbags. But I am wrong. Again. Nothing can hold me down.
I hardly sleep anymore. Not much, I mean. People who say they don’t sleep at all are lying. But I sleep less and less. I move purposefully around my apartment with the energy of midmorning while the hands on my cheap wall clock glide stealthily through 1:00 and 2:00 A.M. They are dipping deep into the three o’clock hour before I notice it is getting late. I know it will be an hour or more until I can unwind enough to fall asleep.
I watch the twenty-four-hour news networks. I don’t keep track of which hours. The tiny store of sleeping pills I was able to get at the neighborhood clinic is long gone. Apparently the emergency rooms don’t consider insomnia to be an emergency. I could go to a real doctor, but then there would be real questions, and just the thought of those make it harder to sleep. I need a drug dealer. I splash water on my face from the tap in the bathroom and stare into the medicine cabinet mirror. I look like shit. “You talkin’ to me?” I look over my shoulder and back to the mirror. “I said, you talkin’ to me? Well, fuck you.” I aim with my hand and shoot the man in the mirror.
I wander through my railroad apartment, its narrow hallways piled high with stacks of books I’ve bought at the Pick. I buy novels, poetry, philosophy, history, medical texts, scientific journals, and erotica. I am indiscriminate. I have several spinning towers of CDs planted like saplings in my living room. I spend my days in book and record stores, browsing, collecting, trading, discarding—hoarding words and sounds—so I can consume them later. Gorge on them in private.
Once a week, a Polish girl comes in to clean. I pay her extra to sleep with me. We fuck and then she changes the sheets. She doesn’t seem to mind that I can’t remember her name from one week to the next. Every Wednesday at nine, she introduces herself all over again. Sort of like a perpetual first date.
At twenty after nine, the buzzer downstairs rings and I push the Enter button without asking who it is because the intercom doesn’t work for shit and no one but the housekeeper and the delivery guy from Szechwan Dragon Garden ever comes over. A few minutes later, she is standing in my doorway panting from the hike up the stairs.
“Good morning.” She waves girlishly. “Here is Marsienka.”
She is pale and petite and has short burgundy hair. I look up from where I am—where I have been since Letterman ended—lying on the couch reading Patton’s diaries. I smile at her and wave back. Girlishly.
Regardless of the season, Marsienka always comes to work in some version of the same outfit: miniskirt, tight shirt made of some stretchy, shiny material with a plunging neckline, brightly colored tights—usually fishnet or lace—and a pair of ankle-high stiletto boots. I wonder whether the outfit is just for me, but since I don’t really care that much, I’d rather not know.
After we fuck, she puts on sweatpants, an oversized T-shirt, and rubber sandals.
I will pay her twice what she normally gets for cleaning toilets. And she will be able to take her asthmatic kid to a real doctor instead of some filthy clinic. I enjoy doing charity work. Marina? Mareska? Marinka?
I am not so pathetic that I don’t know just how pathetic I am. I am pathetic but self-aware. And Wednesdays with what’s-her-name are all I can count on to punctuate the passage of time. The time. My time. They are no longer the same. Because my time has become unreliable. The days have become a blur. I am exhausted but on edge, revved up, impatient. Nothing is fast enough. No one walks fast enough. Gets out of my way fast enough. Objects have begun to shimmer and shine.
I need to move faster to break out of the shiny, shimmery fog. So I buy an expensive bike. So I can get around the city. Faster. The guy at the store tries to sell me a helmet. But I pass. It will only slow me down.
I ride everywhere—in bike lanes and bus lanes, darting in and out of traffic, steering with one hand because the other is always busy flipping off the cabbies and truck drivers and pedestrians I’ve cut off, sideswiped, nearly hit. I am impatient and can’t be bothered with stop signs and red lights. And now I am in the park riding fast, passing anyone and everyone. I am lightning. Except there is one guy who is riding faster. Faster than me. And that is not okay. So I give chase. I try to close the gap between us, pedaling hard—on and off the bike path, dodging nannies pushing strollers and dogs on retractable leashes and girls with triple-wide asses who take up the whole sidewalk.
He is heading east, cutting across the park toward the Met. Maybe. I don’t know. I am losing him. I am having trouble keeping up. So much trouble it hurts. But I push. And pump. And pedal harder. My heart pounds. And I manage to keep him in sight. Just. I don’t know why, but it feels important. I lose sight of him for a moment and get a sick feeling in my stomach. I catch a glimpse of him and ride harder, faster to catch up. I can’t tell if he knows I am following him. He cuts easily across all four lanes of the park drive and hops the curb, but by the time I get there, a riding club is making its loop around. I weave in and out, nearly killing myself and several other riders.
“Fuckin’ tool.”
“Get your ass outta the park, dickhead.”
“Fuck off,” I call breathlessly over my shoulder as I desperately try to make up lost time and space.
And then I see him, mounting a hill on a no-bikes-allowed path. He is wearing a red biking jersey. Just like mine.
I can’t tell if he is trying to get away from me or just doing his own thing. But he sure as shit is oblivious to my near-death experience. To me and my need to catch up. Suddenly he stands and jerks his bike off the bike path onto a lawn and then rides headfirst down some stairs and back onto a pedestrian path leading to Fifth Avenue.
I follow, nearly falling off my own bike with each awkward switchback, barely making it onto Fifth, where I see him heading north. Finally he looks at me over his shoulder.
When I see his face, the sweat coming out of my pores turns to ice. I assumed, when he finally looked back at me, he’d be laughing. All along, I assumed this had been a game for him. But he’s not smiling. What I see when he looks at me is the same thing I see every time I look in the mirror lately.
My face. Terrified. Terrorized. Persecuted. Pursued. Paranoid. Apocalyptic.
Me.
“Excuse me, sir, can I see some ID please?”
“Huh?’
I whip around to see a Central Park police officer wearing his aerodynamic NYPD helmet and sitting astride his NYPD bike. He is holding a summons book in one hand and biting the cap off the pen he’s holding in the other.
“Sir, you broke like four really serious laws and six or seven moderately serious ones. Did you not hear the whistle?” The officer picks up the silver whistle hanging around his neck and blows it in my ear.
“I was trying to …” I point to the space in front of me. It is empty. There is no one anywhere near us. I collapse on the stone bench and let my bike fall to the ground. I still haven’t caught my breath. Chest heaving, gulping mouthfuls of air, I look up at the cop.
“You ever have those days where things are moving so fast you can’t keep up with yourself? Literally. Like you are a just blur passing through yourself until you can’t keep up and your outside slips off? Almost like a snake shedding its skin. It’s just hanging by a fuckin’ thread and if you don’t haul ass and catch up, that part of you is going to split off and just blow away for good? And then it’s gone. You’ll never get it back. And maybe it’s just one piece to begin with. One day. But if you have enough of those days … how many pieces can you lose? Before you’re just fuckin’ gone? And they’re fast. So fast. Like a blur. You ever feel that way?”
The cop has taken a few steps back. He says nothing for a while, then puts away his summons book and pulls out his radio.
“So, you were following your blur?”
“Yes, officer, I believe I was.”
More nodding and this time head-scratching as well.
“You sit tight, buddy, okay? Can you do that for me?”
I nod.
“I’m gonna be right here. Just need to make a quick call.”
His radio makes some beeping noises and he turns away from me while he talks into it. Then he turns back to me.
“Sir, is there somebody I can call for you? Your wife maybe, or a family member?”
“I don’t have any family.”
“A friend then?”
“Look, just give me the damn ticket, okay,” I say, getting up from the bench and reaching for my bike.
“Actually, sir, my, uh, CO thinks it would really be best if you were checked out. You know, at the hospital.”
“That won’t be necessary. I’m fine. And besides,” I say, picking my bike up and getting back on. “I can’t. I’m in a hurry.”
It’s 2:00 A.M. when I reach into the drawer in the little table next to my bed and take out the small teak box I bought at a street fair to benefit the Little Red School House. It’s just the right size and shape to hold my pipe, my lighter, and my film canister with a half-ounce of weed.
When I light up and inhale a lungful of ashes, I kick myself for not refilling the bowl when I finished smoking last night. I dump the film canister upside down into my hand and find that it too is empty. I zip into the kitchen and pull open the freezer. I feel around, roll the vodka bottle out of the way, and feel nothing but the indentations it’s made in the accumulated frost, which I have no idea how to get rid of. I’m looking for a Ziploc bag of pot I’m hoping I may not have smoked yet. The bag is not squished between the cans of Bacardi frozen margarita mix, which are standing in a neat line on the shelf in the freezer drawer.
I’m not hopeful. The truth is, I think I finished off the last hit of the pot I bought from Cecil before he vacated the apartment last night and now I have nothing. And now I am more anxious, more wired, more racy. All the things you don’t want to be at four o’clock in the morning. Sleep is definitely out of range now. At this point I’ll settle for anything that will take the edge off. I fly around my apartment, looking for my address book and the phone. I punch the numbers so fast I misdial twice. Then, finally, he picks up and I’m talking so fast the words come out almost as one:
“Cecil, buddy, how you doing? Great. Listen. I was wondering if you could help me out, I’m kind of in a jam here … what? Oh, were you sleeping? Sorry buddy. It’s just if you could spare a little weed I’d be willing to come to Brooklyn to … Hello? Cecil?
SHIT! The phone makes a visible indentation in the wall when I throw it across the room.
Shimmer, glimmer, higher, faster, shatter, break.
Fall.
Every day rainy, cold, grey. Regardless of the weather. I don’t read. I don’t taste. I don’t fuck. Who has the energy? Or the interest? But I get through the day. So gold star for me. Sometimes I even leave the house. Today I sat on the floor in one of the aisles at the Pick. Staring at book spines. It was exhausting.
Now, back at home, all I want is to go to bed. But when do I ever get what I want? “Hey, mister,” I say, this time loud enough for people walking by to hear. “I’ve had three birthdays standing here waiting for you to get your mail.”
Old guy is bent over his mailbox, blocking access to my building’s narrow entry. I know my neighbors only by the labels I’ve given them—depressed single mother, great tits/no ass chick, Christie Brinkley wannabe, kid who smells like curry … At the moment, old guy is jabbing haphazardly at the lock with his key—like a fifteen-year-old virgin who can’t figure out where to put his pecker.
If I thought this inconvenient twitching were a Parkinson’s thing, I’d probably be more sympathetic. Maybe. Hard to say. Phil, the guy who owned Phil’s Fish Store on Beverly Drive where Ellen bought the most incredible Dungeness crab, came down with it. Phil was a good, solid working guy. I always admired him. So I have good associations with people who have Parkinson’s.
But old guy does not. A few months ago, not long after I moved in, I came down the stairs and found homo couple and compulsive recycler talking about how they couldn’t believe he was eighty-one and how he looked like an older Jimmy Stewart. When they started speculating on what kind of fitness routine he must follow to stay in such good shape, I got nauseated and left the building.
Soggy copies of the Times, the Post, and the Daily News stick out of the faded canvas Planned Parenthood bag that hangs from his arm. He’s either oblivious or indifferent to the slippery-when-wet spot spreading out in all directions from his New York Public Library umbrella that lies on the tile floor, shedding enough water to irrigate the Sudan.
Pro-choice/anti-neighbor seems to be old guy’s platform, because he’s bent at a right angle in the narrow vestibule, completely blocking my entry into our building. Either he moves or I knock him down and step over him.
“Look, I’m cold and wet and I live on the fifth floor, so I’ve got miles to go before I sleep,” I say in my last attempt at quasi-friendly banter.
“Frost. I’m impressed,” old guy says, not looking up. “But I figured you more for the ‘Good fences make good neighbors type.”
“And you’d be right.”
“Ahhh,” he says, straightening up and looking at me with a kind of wild-eyed fervor almost never evoked by Robert Frost. “Something there is that doesn’t love a wall,” he booms. “That wants it down.”
When he leans in and whispers conspiratorially, I can see little flecks of foam in the corners of his mouth. He smells strongly of the same mentholated cough drops my grandfather used to suck on. I always hated those.
“I could say ‘Elves’ to him,” the old guy says in a stage whisper and goes back to jabbing at the lock. “But it’s not elves exactly, and I’d rather …”
I grab the little key out of the old guy’s hand. “You ever think maybe it’s time for reading glasses?”
I open mailbox 3c, pull out the underwhelming contents, and lock it up again. I slap the key into his palm and try to get around him, but he’s not budging.
“I can read fine, Mr. 5c.” He grabs his mail and pokes me in the chest with his key. “I’m just a little too stoned to get the teeny-tiny key into the teeny-tiny lock.”
He turns and unsteadily starts toward the narrow staircase.
“Excellent shit, too,” he says without turning around.
This unexpected revelation knocks me off my game and now I am stuck behind him. I feel like a Porsche following a tractor on a one-lane highway.
Somewhere between the first and second floor, he stops to admire the tacky Sears light fixture on the ceiling.
“Now that is beautiful workmanship. I’m guessing belle epoque. But probably a reproduction,” he says, bending his head back so far he almost tumbles backward down the stairs. He doesn’t say anything when I put my hand on his back to prop him back up. A few steps later he stops to pet the polished wood banister. “No seam. All one piece. You don’t see carpentry like that anymore.” And a few steps later, to appreciate the dark red paint on all the second-floor apartment doors. “Have those always been that color? What would you call it?”
“Red.”
He turns around and, without actually focusing his eyes, gives me a dirty look.
“Philistine.” He stares at one of the doors, tilting his head from side to side as if he were looking at one of those blinking Jesus holograms. Fuck, I am never getting home tonight.
“Okay, fine,” I say. “What would you call it?”
“Burgundy maybe? No, more of a Chianti or—I know, claret.”
“So really any shade of red with an alcohol content of fourteen percent.”
“Claret, definitely.”
“I don’t know about you, but I was fuckin’ terrified we weren’t gonna solve that one. Can we move on, please?”
Lucky for me, the numbered floors start at street level. One more and we’d be camping out on the landing overnight. When we reach three—approximately twenty minutes after completing the thirty-minute mail retrieval mission—he stops in front of the apartment at the top of the stairs. He keeps his back to me while he fumbles with his keys.
“I don’t put out on the first date,” he says over his shoulder.
“Don’t flatter yourself. I like ’em a little higher up the actuarial table. I just wanted to make sure you could get in.”
“Bullshit. You want to smoke.”
“What? No!”
The plan is to protest, but not so much that he can’t actually see right through me.
“I mean I might. You know, once in a while. But I’m not going to smoke yours. You probably need it for your … and don’t they ration you?
“My what?”
“Your—well, don’t you have …”
“Cancer? Do I look like I have cancer?”
Old guy, thinning hair, getting high regularly? Pardon me for jumping to conclusions. I shrug.
“No, I do not have cancer. Shit, I look a helluva lot better than you. I work out, you know. Weights.”
“So I’ve heard.”
“You don’t believe it.”
“Sure I do. I bet you can bench-press your own weight.”
“Asshole.”
The old guy picks up the stroller parked outside the apartment next door and hoists it over his head. A shower of Goldfish crumbs, petrified Cheerios, and animal cracker amputees rains down on him. He stumbles backward a few steps, loses his grip on the stroller, and it goes bouncing down the stairs. Most of it comes to a stop on the landing, but one wheel continues down to the first floor.
The old guy stares over the railing at it. I stare at the apartment that belonged to the stroller.
“Depressed single mother?” I ask.
“Uh-huh.”
“Leave her a note. I’ll take care of it.”
He’s still staring into the abyss when I notice that his Planned Parenthood bag, deflated and empty, is hanging limply from his wrist, one strap dragging on the floor. The contents—more than just a bunch of soggy tabloids—have spilled out and there must be a dozen little plastic containers of weed, all neatly labeled, scattered across the hallway floor.
I bend over to start picking them up and suddenly the old guy whips around, knocks me out of the way, and snatches up every one. He readjusts his bag onto his shoulder and looks at me bashfully.
“I just had lunch with my dealer.”
“You do lunch with your dealer.”
“We’re very tight.”
“You know,” I say, “I don’t think we’ve ever been formally introduced. I’m Greyson Todd.”
“Walt Fischer,” he says, shaking my hand. “Wanna get wasted?”
I know exactly what to expect when I enter Walt’s apartment. Cabbage boiling on the stove, plastic runners to protect the high-traffic areas of his beige wall-to-wall carpeting, econo-size tube of Preparation H on the bathroom counter.
But I am wrong. Very. True, the peeling paint and ceiling cracks are just where I thought they’d be, and the wood is stained on the floorboards around the radiators. But repairing those obvious signs of wear and tear would be a mistake. Apparently, our landlord agrees.
Wear and tear is the foundation upon which Walt has built his castle. Through the doorways of the railroad apartment, I can see that room after room is filled with what are either family heirlooms or, more likely, carefully sought-out treasures picked up for nothing over years of dedicated flea-marketing.
I do not expect to be invited into someone’s home. It has been a long time and I am unprepared. I am searching for feelings I cannot name. Like trying to identify the spices in a new version of an old recipe.
Walt peels my coat off without asking me and hangs it carefully on a brass coatrack. He tosses his keys and mail on an old silver tray monogrammed with someone else’s initials and then bends to squint at an invisible spot on the narrow oak table it sits on. I smile for the first time today when he licks his thumb, rubs the spot, and then polishes it with the hem of his sweater.
I wander around Walt’s living room: grandfather clock, well-worn kilim rugs, antique mirrors, rolltop desk, velvet armchair, faded leather sofa. The combined alchemy of these objects gives off the warmth and peace of mind Beverly Hills decorators have struggled for centuries to replicate.
Beyond the living room, a streetlight shines into Walt’s bedroom, illuminating a collection of little colored glass bottles on the window-sill. Those bottles. Something about them makes me want to put my arms around Walt and hold on very tight. Because old guys don’t have little glass bottle collections. Teenage girls do. Willa does. Probably.
I am in Walt’s house, looking into Willa’s room. I am in Walt’s house, standing in my house, looking into Willa’s room from my living room with the grandfather clock for which we overpaid because Ellen fell in love with it at the Santa Monica Antique Show. I fell in love with the deep reverberating sounds it filled the house with every fifteen minutes. The chiming that eventually made Ellen regret we’d ever bought it in the first place.
I taste home. And for that, I love Walt.
But I think I will save the hug for another time.
“Pretty swingin’ bachelor pad, huh?”
“You’ve got quite an eye, Walt.”
He walks over to an antique wooden icebox—the kind that used actual ice to keep the food cold. “Had one just like this when I was a kid.”
The advent of Freon has freed up Walt’s icebox to accommodate his large and varied selection of booze. He pulls out an excellent bottle of Hennessy and two old-fashioned-looking snifters.
“Are you sure you’re not a gay man from West Hollywood?”
“This,” he says with a sweeping gesture, “was a hobby born of necessity.”
“Fire or divorce?”
“My ex-wife got every fucking stick of furniture,” he says, handing me my drink.
“If I didn’t hate her so much, I’d thank her. I didn’t realize how ugly that shit was. It was kind of a toss-up which one of ’em I was happier to get rid of.”
Walt unlatches the old pipe rack that’s sitting on the coffee table, and as soon as he cracks the lid, the thick aroma of fresh, sticky pot leaks out.
“Give yourself a tour while I roll us a joint.”
The kitchen is narrow with doorways at both ends and the appliances are ancient—the downside of living in a rent-controlled apartment. Walt’s refrigerator door is covered with photos: a boy around seven and a girl of nine or ten. In one, the children are younger. They sit together on Walt’s lap eating ice cream cones, dripping chocolate and strawberry all over Walt, whose head is thrown back midlaugh. I lift the corner to look at the photo underneath it. A much younger Walt—probably in his forties—stands with his arm around a young man in a cap and gown. A pretty, young woman stands on the other side of him smiling.
I am halfway out of the kitchen before Walt’s art collection catches my eye. Layer upon layer of crayon drawings, macaroni collages, and construction paper snowmen are taped to the side of the fridge facing the wall. Secreted away like treasure. These I remember. These I know. Our Sub-Zero was Willa’s private gallery. The exhibits changed, but Ellen kept them all. All of the fall leaves pressed in wax paper, all of the cotton-ball bunnies, all of the four-fingered, pickle-nosed self-portraits.
I feel tiny beads of sweat form on my forehead. My heart is racing.
Why didn’t I take one with me? How stupid. Just one to tape on the side of my refrigerator. I am convinced that everything would be different if I had slid a crayon landscape with a rainbow out from under the Pepsi bottle magnet. Or taken one of her early works from the giant plastic storage box Ellen kept them in under her bed.
I can’t stop it. I press both hands over my mouth to muffle the unplanned sob that escapes. Just one. I wipe the tears away with a dishtowel. I’m fine.
“I didn’t realize my kitchen was so interesting,” Walt yells from the living room.
My first impulse is to run. I’ve been caught standing in Walt’s kitchen staring at his grandchildren’s artwork like it’s porn.
I remind myself that it’s possible I’m being paranoid. That most likely Walt has no idea what I’ve been doing in here. I stick my head out the door so I can see Walt.
“Those your grandkids?”
“No, I just like to hang out near playgrounds with a telephoto lens.”
I can see the little glass bottles. Just over Walt’s shoulder. In Willa’s room. I’m sure there is a plastic storage box under the bed filled with her artwork. I look at the art on the fridge again. I’m sure it’s just like what’s in the box under her bed in her room.
So I take one. A macaroni-and-lentil collage in the shape of a heart.
“And your daughter and son?”
I roll it up very carefully and walk to the other side of the kitchen, which opens onto the entry hall.
“Uh-huh. She’s an astrophysicist at Cal Tech. He’s … a Republican.”
I gently slide my heart into the sleeve of my jacket.
“Makes me sick. But Richard, my son, lives in Westport, so the upside is I get to see my grandkids. I read to them from The Communist Manifesto when they come to visit.”
I sneak back into the kitchen and walk out through the other side into the living room, where Walt is carefully licking the edge of the paper on a perfectly rolled joint.
“Soup’s on,” Walt says, handing me the joint and a sterling silver cigarette lighter circa 1940.
I am still stoned when I leave Walt’s and walk down the street to the twenty-four-hour drugstore on the corner. I am cradling my jacket as gently as I can. When I get back upstairs to my apartment, I spread the jacket out on the kitchen counter and gently work the collage out of my sleeve.
Then I take out the Elmer’s I bought at the drugstore and carefully reglue the macaroni pieces that broke off.
New York, 1994. I wake up feeling lost, empty, as if I have given too much blood. Or all of it. But Glenda is there to cheer me up. To make me forget what I can’t remember.
The day after Glenda’s cinematic come-on, I more or less invited her to watch me jerk off—an invitation some girls might actually balk at. Dragging my blanket behind me, I came into the dayroom, lay down on one of the couches, and, making sure she could see, put my hand down my pants. While the other patients watched Jaws, Glenda pulled up a chair and watched me. We went on like that for days, eventually getting each other off under the table at breakfast, lunch, and dinner.
Still, we’re adults. We want to fuck. But the logistics of psych-ward fucking are tricky, to say the least. For one thing, it is difficult to find a loophole in our unit’s no-touching policy that allows for penile-vaginal penetration. So we, Glenda and I, have chosen to disregard this draconian rule entirely. True, there are no locks—anywhere, at anytime. But we have found that the unlocked showers of our unlocked rooms afford us the most privacy. For at least a few minutes at a time. Then again, it’s not as if Glenda worries about things like consequences or getting caught or even being watched while we’re going at it. Sometimes I think she hopes we’ll be seen. I never know from one minute to the next what her desires will run to. It is like fucking a different woman every day. A different paranoid, psychotic woman who mumbles under her breath about government conspiracies. But beggars can’t be choosers and my potential dating pool is limited.
Besides, Glenda would kill me if I cheated on her.