The Ept, The Ane and the Fantile

About a week after I went blind, my friend Dorman dropped me off on a bench in Roosevelt Park, just exactly as he’d done the day before, so I could sun myself for three hours until the end of his shift. It was Thursday. Dorman said, “Now don’t you go anywhere until I get back, you impetuous kid,” and patted me on the head. He crushed the sharp grass with his boots as he climbed the slope to the sidewalk that ringed the park.

“What am I looking at?” I called over my shoulder.  I could just feel him standing there with his hands in his pockets, peering at the back of a blind head. The cigarette batting up and down in the corner of his mouth as he spoke. “Some gay guys playing volleyball.  Asian yuppie trying to teach a bulldog to sit.” 

I was partial to Roosevelt Park in part because of the courthouse bell tower looming over the park’s western corner and just as Dorman opened his mouth and said, “Well, adios,” the bell began bonging. It was two o’clock. By the time the bells were silent Dorman was gone, scrunched back down into his crappy little diesel-burning car with a plan to return at shift’s end.

I’d never truly appreciated the totality of the experience of sitting in sunlight on a late-spring day before the blindness. Less and less did I think of light as light and more and more as heat; I thought of it also as pressure and I knew that if the blindness kept up long enough the time would come when I could smell it and taste it too. I’d sniff the gray of an overcast day and the last gasp of twilight would reek achy blue. I sat there in my sunglasses, arms folded over my chest, face tilted towards the hum of that perilously huge and proximate star, inhaling it. I repositioned my head in one way or another, pretending to be watching things.

The sun felt so good. I could feel the smack of red palms on dirty white volleyball flesh, the green grunt (in a bouquet of gasps) preceding the smack each time and the grass-ripping skirmish of earthfall,  then pell-mells of yelps in pursuit of the ball to the opposite side of the net. And I could hear, at a forty-five degree angle to my right, at a distance of maybe thirty yards, metered out in human barks: “Sit.”

“Sit.”

“Sit.”

And I’m sure I could tell from the timbre of his voice, with liberal horror, that the person speaking was Asian. Dorman had told me as much; “Asian yuppie trying to teach a bulldog to sit.” So it’s possible that I’d colored the sound of his voice with the taint of prior knowledge. But he did. He sounded Asian. In the same way that every Public Service Announcement that I have ever heard on the radio in which a solemn majestic voice with a hint of high rasp in it has asked me not to litter or has asked me to give or has reminded me to remember Earth Day was a Native American voice and I didn’t have to be told that. Do I have to be told when an operator at the other end of a 411 call is black? So can’t I likewise detect the special quality of an Asian voice? Is it more racist to say that most Asians have a certain quality of voice than it is to say that most Asians have straight black hair?

Once every twenty minutes or so there came the cavernous flush of the public toilet behind and to the left, up the slope, beside the sidewalk. I could taste it, too, that deli tang of piss. There’s the brownorange of saturated vintage and the greeny-yellow of the day’s fresh pressed. Men like to piss outside the toilet bunker too, of course, much like those who helpfully toss their trash near a litter basket and the odor from such deposits has the sharpness of thumbtacks.

Holding my arm, Dorman had shepherded me to the toilet for one last drain of the bladder before he could take me down to the bench and park me here for three serenely helpless hours. Some lug was planted like a marksman at a stall already as Dorman and I had entered, arms linked, and I could feel the lug’s neck bones crack at us as his shoeleather flexed in the twist of his weightshift and his subsequent homophobe’s sniff and exit. Dorman tensed defensively but being blind I was far beyond embarrassment. Safe in my pod.

I had gone blind on a Friday. During the early hours. I wonder if a certain dream caused it. I sprawled there in bed for the longest time with a menacing sense of un-rightness. It was as dark in that room as I had ever seen on Earth but the noise that blew in on a temperate breeze through the window above the bed was the bright hustle and quarrel and stutter and screech of a wide-awake beast called a city.

“Sit.”

That bulldog was having a hard time paying attention to his master’s command to sit. Was it just not sitting at all, the bulldog, or sitting and standing again too quickly to constitute a proper sit? Was the guy pushing the dog’s flatulent rump down with every command? Was it a comically disobedient dog, with floppy jowls, peering up cutely from under a droopy brow? Or was it a bad seed, this dog? Destined to disappoint?

A funny effect of the blindness, which became evident after the initial panic subsided, after the first screaming-into-a-pillow day was out of my sytem, was the sexiness of it. I’d noticed a similar syndrome while travelling. I’d come into a new city, unpack a suitcase in a hotel room and develop a boner, an erection of adolescent persistence. Probably the possibilities implied by a maid-fingered bed in a virgin space, the thrill of knowing that anything can happen in a strange room simply because nothing had not happened there yet. And so it was in the Black Hotel Room of my blindness, my Pod; a state of constant arousal. I would crawl to the bathroom and finger the walls and fixtures until I oriented myself to face the blank mirror and milk the stiff udder of my imagination into the facebowl two or three times a day. Afterwards, I’d pull the silver knob that stoppers the sink, run the warm water and sluice them towards the pipe-encased sea of the city, my wiggling little atoms of need.

“How old is he?” I called out, boldly, wondering exactly how long I might fool somebody into thinking I could see. I tried to call out at a directed volume that might sound like I was aiming at him. Too loud would be a dead giveaway.

“It’s a she not a he. Five months. Stella.”

“Beautiful dog,” I said, nodding. I knew he was probably petting her, scratching behind her ears with pride. And the dog’s tongue was hanging out the corner of its messy mouth, ladling slobber on the grass. 

“Bulldog, right?”

He didn’t answer; had I offended him? but then it dawned on me that the owner was grinning and nodding. Then the silence stretched out until the bell tower bonged three and I realized that the Yuppie and his bulldog had gone, of course. Yuppies become uncomfortable after three or four minute exchanges. They’re ideally suited for elevator quipping in buildings of ten stories or less, or in line at a very fast bagel or coffee shop. Then it occurred to me that he’d probably seen Dorman lead me to the bench and sit me there, an ambulatory invalid, and it was clear to him that I was blind and I had looked to him as either pathetic or insane for pretending that I could see. He had crept off, embarrassed for me.

The volleyball game raged on. I could hear, in the out-of-breathness of some of the game’s participants as they shouted out scores, or good-natured taunts against the other side, that some of the players were a bit older than others, or at least in worse shape and were playing the game on a different level altogether. The young ones were just batting a ball around in the sunshine; the old ones were involved in a life-and-death struggle. The exuberant selfishness of beautiful youth, never looking at anything other than itself in any real detail, helped the old ones camouflage the terror in their efforts.  I got caught up in it, hearing it that way, and noticed that the weak, the sick, the old, were the ones making all the noise.  Gasping jokes. Desperate screams with the winning points. Then I smelled coffee.

My bench jolted and creaked with slender company.

“Hi.” 

“Hi,” I said, smiling in the direction that the “Hi” had come from. A female “Hi”.  A throaty, sexy, televisiony “Hi”. The kind of “Hi” that sounds like it knows full well it’s welcome, barging benevolently into your livingroom at primetime to sell you some kind of frozen gourmet dinner, or to warn you about the dangers of pre-natal smoking. Hi, I’m Lauren Hutton.

I cocked my head. “Actress?”

She hesitated before responding and I knew she was examining me with a skeptical squint.

“But you’re blind aren’t you?” she said. I reached out for her and we both laughed. She apologized. “I’ll bet that’s the bluntest anybody’s been all day.” She touched my shoulder while chuckling and I felt like a tuning fork being pinged.  “Isn’t it?”

“Surely.” I pulled off my sunglasses and gave her a quick un-look and winked and slipped them back on with both hands. “Not just blind, I’ll have you know. Nouveau blind. Blind for six days, thus far, but who’s counting? Sitting here trying to pass myself off as a guy with eyes.” I saluted her. “I’m still in the closet. How’d you ‘out’ me?”

“I live in those apartments…” she caught herself, “I live in a high-rise overlooking the park. I sit on my balcony doing crossword puzzles and drinking coffee in the afternoon. This is the second day I’ve seen your friend walk you over to this bench. I like the way you dress…you look kinda displaced. Your friend isn’t bad looking himself. He drives a Skoda, by the way. Vanity plates. ‘2 BAD 4 U’. Oh dear.”

I enjoyed a very clear image of her on her balcony, peering through the eyepiece of one of those expensive little telescopes that were so popular among the hip last year. Lauren Hutton with a telescope. Then I had a disappointing intuition. “You’re not about to ask me if my friend is married, are you?”

“Me? Heavens no. I don’t date smokers, or Skoda drivers, or guys with vanity plates, for that matter. Your friend looks too much like a writer. I have to admit I like the sideburns, though.”

“Sideburns?” Mock outrage. “He’s grown sideburns in the week of my tragic blindness?” Dorman had been talking about doing that for years, growing sideburns, but I always gave him shit about the notion.  “I must say he’s made the most of my handicap.” I shook my head.  “The Skoda he bought in East Berlin and the shipping it cost more than the car is even worth, but his theory is that the kind of girl he likes likes funky little cars like that, so….”

“Whatever works. Beats swimming upstream for a little salmon, wouldn’t you agree?”

“How do you feel about painters?”

“Painters.” I could feel her frowning. “You were a painter?”

“Were? Am.“  One smart nod.  “You have admit it’s one helluva gimmick. Arrange the tubes a certain way, work with a limited pallet, I could even do you.” I leaned towards her. “By touch.” I reached but she pulled her face out of range.

“Sorry,” she said.

“No, no…” Hot faced. “You…”

“But you honestly don’t understand.”

A very long minute elapsed. I could feel traffic and the dramatic slaps and yelps of the volley-ball seige and her ladylike coffee-sipping. I could feel inland-wandering gulls pleading for life in a chain of circles across the sky. I heard a tree-shadow encroach on my left as the sun rolled right. I shrugged and smiled that ever-upwards smile of the blind and said,  “Spring.”

She made the muffled interogatory mmmm? of someone busy with coffee. I cleared my throat. “This is the first Spring I’ve ever felt a part of. I can no longer see it, but I smell it and hear it…I am it. Like eyes are these holes in your head you’re always escaping out of. Now that I can’t get out anymore, I’m here…I’m present. Responsible for my atoms. ” I think I was smirking. It’s hard to feel, from the inside out, the difference between a smirk and some rue. In any case, I was thinking that she was obviously an old hand at diverting attention.  Ask her a question about herself and the next thing you knew, you were talking about you. 

“So, uh, you still haven’t answered my question.”

“Which question was that, sweetie?”

“Your voice. It sounds so…I don’t know…so polished. Well-modulated.”

“Am I an actress?” Meaningful chuckle. Irony there. “You’re hearing the Finishing School, probably. You’re hearing some debutante shellack. I’m no actress. If I were an actress, I could only get certain parts, anyway. Well, not even then. Along those lines, there’s something I should probably tell you….”

I had another disappointing intuition. The voice was so deep. Deeper than Lauren Hutton’s.

“I love this coffee. Persian Mocha Royale. Wanna sip?” She carefully steadied the heavy mug in my hands and as I lowered my upper lip to the hot edge of the coffee she said, like there was poison in the drink, “Wait.”

“You’re a man,” I blurted.

“That’s right,” she said, with what sounded like real pleasure, “you wouldn’t even be able to tell, would you? Well, happy to say, no. But,” she took a deep breath, “when I was younger, very much younger than I am today, ten years ago or so, there was an accident, yes? and I’d really rather not go into in any detail now, but I had to have some pretty extensive skin-grafts…my face, my chest, my right arm….the doctors were very expensive and very very good…but, uh, what can I say? I’m no longer what you’d call a pretty sight. I have a good body, knock on wood (she knocked on the bench) and I haven’t been a shut-in or anything and I’ve had more than my share of drug-induced one-night stands, because, as you may know, men will sleep with just about anything…but, uh, you know, nobody’s ever walked proudly down the street holding hands with me on a Sunday afternoon in Soho, if you know what I mean? People stare; the very old are as bad as children. Yuppies try so hard not to stare that it’s the same difference. Oh, plus: I get these resentful looks on the rare occasions when I decide that I’m human and want to dine in a nice restaurant…I guess it puts some people off their food. You know, it’s like: doesn’t she have the common decency to stay home?” 

She shifted on the bench, getting a leg up on it, hugging a knee to her chest. I think. She said:

“God…”  

“You can’t believe you just told me that,” we overlapped, in near-unison, laughing. She touched my shoulder again. Again I pinged.

“I just wanted to get that out of the way.” From the inclination of her voice I could tell she was staring out across the park, away from me, remembering things. I wanted her very badly. “I mean, I suppose I could have kept it a secret and you never would have known. Until you touched my face.”

I was so glad I couldn’t see her. I found myself almost desperate that she’d stay. I experienced the astounding luxury of not giving a damn how she looked.

“Well, since you’ve already mentioned the unmentionable, how old are you? If I may be so rude.”

“Prefer not to say,” she said as pleasantly as possible.

“Ah. Mysterious older woman?”

“Not really. And there’s nothing mysterious about any woman over thirty,” she huffed. “That’s just a phony consolation prize men give you for your wrinkles…‘worldly’ ‘mysterious’…only teenage girls have any mystery about them and that’s only because they’re mysterious to themselves.” She sniffed. Sipped some coffee. Crossed a leg. I’d touched a nerve.

“What’s your favorite period of Picasso?”

She took long enough to answer that I realized (and I realized that she realized as well) that it wasn’t really just an innocent question on my part. It was a test. Anyone who answered “The Blue Period” failed. I could be friends with someone who answered “Cubism”, but never sleep with them. I was hoping she’d answer correctly, because I really, and not simply out of base biological need, wanted to sleep with her. In a very noisy way.

When I could see, I cared so much more about how I looked and the woman in your life is definitely an extension of your own appearance.  Would she, my deformed beauty with the luxurious voice, be the first in a long line of exquisite monsters?

“My favorite period of Picasso.” She sucked a lip. “Well, the last one. Just before he died. When he was painting like a death-obsessed child.”  She tapped my knee. “When he was painting those monsters.”

I got chills. 

“Do you wanna know the weirdest thing about my current condition?” I could smell her dry saliva on the lip of the coffee mug. She wasn’t wearing lipstick. She scooted closer. This poor ugly lonely girl. How ugly? She smelled like Persian Mocha Royale and herbal shampoo and something else, something nearly-forgotten and I really wanted to eat her. Lick and chew that ugly face. Oysters are ugly too and don’t I love them?

“The weirdest thing about being blind,” I said, as I tapped my nose, “Is that I feel indestructible. I feel immortal. Back before, when I could see, I felt as flimsy as a fruitfly. Now I feel, I don’t know, like I’m in this very safe place, this kryptonite vault in space. I call it The Pod. I feel like my ties to this tiny world have been severed. I’m only still participating in the banality of everyday life because why not?  But in reality, see, I’m flying through space in The Pod. Immortal and unbound. Cozy in the black-box recorder of the jet plane of existence or something.”

I was selling her on blindness, you see. I was offering it to her, to share it somehow, in order to keep her with me. She touched me through my light jacket and her touch left sweet burns of sex on my arm. She kissed me twice, first on the side of my face and then, giving into the impulse, she suddenly took my blindness in her hands and kissed me hard on the mouth.

“I’ll keep in touch,” she said, and she was gone.

I was so stunned that I couldn’t even say goodbye. I had a sad premonition of coming back to this park, this bench, at the same time every day, for years of hoping. Tilting my face towards her balcony. Wherever it was.

“Hey,” someone called. I cocked my head.

“Are you alright?” The panting of the dog at his feet. “She sure can spin a tale, can’t she? That sister can talk,” he chuckled. He patted Stella the mildly disobedient Bulldog. Or maybe he was scratching her belly. “But you’re fine, I see.”

He settled on the bench.

“Gary Chew,” he said. “She smells good for a homeless, too. I’ll give her that. See, I used to give her money when I first moved here. I look like an easy mark, I admit it! She’d cook up these real elaborate sob stories and it was kinda funny because she never seemed to remember me and came up with a different story every time. But I always gave her a buck anyway. Then one day I saw her approach a brother, you know, a black guy, in a business suit, a successful brother with a real air about him and he just shook his head and kinda straight-armed right past her and I thought, damn! If her own people won’t help her, why should I?”

The Asian slapped his leg and Stella jumped with great effort upon the bench between us and her master rubbed her vigorously as he spoke.

“You a dog lover?”

I felt sick.

 

1.

Why are people so awful? After all this time I still don’t know. There must be evolutionary advantages in being an utter shit. There must be. Do I look like a stalker? Was I born to pee into coffee pots?

Everyone in the world, at some time or other, lived in that flat on St. Alban’s. When I say everyone, I mean the dozen or so that I was hanging out with from Moorebury. They weren’t all students but they were all connected to the college.

St. Alban’s is a sidestreet in the Summit Avenue neighborhood of Saint Paul where, if the mind’s spark survives the body’s extinction, F. Scott Fitzgerald feels most at home. There are a dozen addresses along Summit where Fitzgerald lived, as a boy or as an adult, but the only one the clique ever paid any attention to was a Romanesque brownstone in front of which we’d linger invariably in the misty dead of night in an attempt to give the girls the fantods on the way home from some little concert or movie or party on campus. We continued to haunt Moorebury long after we’d quit or graduated. “Fantods” was Tucker van Tassel’s word…being poor I filched it from him.

I was the only scholarship in the circle and the only one who had a ‘work -study’ job during my year and a half at school and most definitely the only one who had to wake up at the crack of dawn every Thursday, slip into painter whites and meet a grey-eyed half-Ojibwe alcoholic named Chuck in front of the student union, where he’d already be setting up the dropcloths and the extension ladders, reeking of drinkable paint thinner. I was supposed to be grateful for the opportunity to attend this gilded bunker of privelege. Watching my weightlessly rich acquaintances sail through every chatty day towards every night’s bacchanalia filled me with resentment.

I suppose it was my subconscious revenge maneuver to aspire to make love with one of ‘their’ women; to defile her with my dirty paws, my working class seed. The moment I first saw Mary Duncan Ford, though, looming in silhouette against a laughing thirty-foot Jeanne Moreau on a bicycle, I interpreted my panic as a simple case of love at first sight.

She was pushing her way down the row of cinema seats and she squeezed right in front of me, hunched under the grayscale of beams from the projector, giggling with her friends and saying pardon moi to bursts of hilarity. She put a hand on my knee and stepped on my foot and ended up sitting to my left. The smell of her shampoo made it impossible to follow the movie and when all five of us got ushered out for making clever little jokes at the screen and disturbing the rest of the moviegoers I followed my new friends to an off-campus pizzeria. You didn’t have to be poor to want to fuck Mary: she was hurtfully beautiful.

The four I met that night were part of a much larger clique. Mary, Sophia, Eric and Katie referred so often, in the course of the conversation, to those not present…to the three Johns and Tucker and Andrew and Lorelei and Annette and Victoria…that it was like sitting at a long table in a banquet hall instead of at a booth near the jukebox in a place called The Leaning Tower. Sophia, Katie and I sat on one side of the table and Eric and Mary on the other. I wrote Eric off as a potential rival early on after he demonstrated his ability to talk and belch simultaneously.

The Clique, as I came to know it, divided into two churches: the Self-Pitying Cynics and the Sweetly Doomed Romantics. The two groups were divided by taste…not high versus low but a Kubrick vs Truffaut kind of thing. The conversations in general could be superficially worldly and clever in a show-offy way but they hinted at travels and experiences beyond me. They were my first exposure to people who enjoyed mass-pleasures like pizza and pop music without guilt or disdain but under the contractual loophole of irony. I grasped immediately that curling my lip at disco music, for example, wouldn’t put me any higher on the carefully-calibrated ladder than being caught with a poster of John Travolta in his white suit on the wall of my dorm room.

I wisely kept my provincially boyish enthusiasms for F. Scott Fitzgerald to myself that first night in the pizza parlour. The main thing was they were all from cultured, well-off East Coast families and I knew if I gave them anything to pick on in those first few formative days and weeks the flaw or error would become my description. I would become the crippled mascot, rubbed on its head for good luck. So I was very quiet; I listened more than I talked; I mastered the off-hand quip and improvised a working persona.

It’s obvious to me in retrospect that Mary was intrigued by my blue-collar good looks from the very beginning. I wasn’t the only dark-haired boy in the bunch (Tucker’s hair was blue-black as any comic book hero’s) or the only one with a calloused handshake (sailing will do that for you) but there was something solid, or self-willed, about me that the over-bred males of her species lacked. I know now that if I’d looked her in the eye and casually said something about fucking she would have. At the time, of course, I was privvy to no such useful knowledge.

2.

Hyacinth is on her death trip again. Shuffling from room to room and staring at stuff with that spooky I am a camera blankness. Like she’s memorizing it, filing it away. Storing it for the day, soon coming, when none of this…the ashtrays, the doorstops, the all-in-one entertainment center with a busted cassette player and a scratched-at unremovable Take That sticker over the radio dial… will exist. Only Hyacinth will exist, only Hyacinth will survive as a witness. Hyacinth the Chosen One. The rest of us are doomed. When the landlord of landlords comes tromping up the back stairs of the universe jingling his zillion keys, the rest of His tenants are toast.

What I like is how Hyacinth strips down naked before trancing out. Wants to meet her maker in her innocence is how she puts it. In her birthday suit. Hyacinth has a very nice birthday suit. You’re having a dinner party and virginal Hyacinth comes shuffling into the dining room with The Gypsy Kings on at low volume, and she makes her entrance in the middle of some toff’s anecdote about Heidigger, in her birthday suit, polaroiding everyone with those big brown memorializing eyes: that makes an impression. I usually say she’s sleepwalking, poor thing. No sudden moves. Remain seated. She’ll nip off to bed on her own in a minute or two. People call and ask me when’s the next dinner party?

Well, problem is, I can’t guarantee that Hyacinth will make an appearance and nothing kills conversation like half a dozen people glancing expectantly at the dining room door for two hours. Thing is, she has to be on a death trip to do it, and she only goes on a death trip when the signs and omens augur the imminence of joyful dominion. Hyacinth is our American. You’ve probably gathered as much.

It isn’t given to many English to be raised on a compound, is it? It’s practically a rite of passage for Americans. Most of them over there could probably write a pretty good tell-all exposé about some Spiritual Leader or other. Most of them have been dandled on some Messiah’s knee as a matter of course, and staged deprogramming interventions have become, in the 21st century, what bat mizvah’s and coming-out parties once were in a bygone era. I used to think they were preposterous for forming these little cults of a few thousand and proclaiming themselves The Chosen, as distinguished from the other 6.8 billion on earth. That’s a pretty strict door policy. Studio 54 at its peak was all-embracing in comparison. But Americans, and always very rapidly, take things to the illogical extreme.

It’s a nation of escalation, the spiritual home of escalators, and as if to prove that an apocalyptic sex cult of six heavily-armed Puerto Ricans speaking in tongues in a one-room flat in Brooklyn (for example) isn’t as far as one can go in the direction of exclusivity in the matter of holiness, now you’ve got these cults of one popping up…these all-American solo-cults or uni-cliques like Hyacinth. In fact, Hyacinth tells me she had a falling out with her best friend Phoenix, back in Nebraska, for that very reason. Phoenix was under the impression that she was the Chosen One (hereafter to be referred to as the C.O.). Reasoning that Nebraska isn’t big enough for two C.O.s, Hyacinth headed back East. Her father, a relatively down-to-earth Baptist, was from New Jersey.

On the long bus trip east she noticed, strategically placed in seats on the right and left of the aisle, three or four waifs of approximately the same age, body mass index (in a country of the fat, the thin stick out) and facial expression. More C. O.s, of course. Hyacinth’s only hope (if she planned to set up shop as a C.O. in unclaimed territory) was to get out of the country.

“It’s because you’re secure in yourself that you can admit that I am The Chosen One,” says Hyacinth, during one of her more talkative moments. But really it’s because I desperately want to nail her.

More about that compound. That photo album she brings everywhere with her is a wealth of coded information. Ignoring the sunsets and geese-on-the-lake pictures, and all those blurry snapshots she took of her own left hand, starting when she was nine, the other photos comprise a vivid document of a place where clean-air America and Millennial dogma met. One snapshot that stays with me is of a man in a dark cloak, kneeling in the snow in a semi-circle of dark-cloaked onlookers. The man’s gloved hands cover his face. Yet the onlookers (with unisex, too-long, center-parted hair) don’t seem particularly galvanized. They seem bored; unimpressed. I always wanted to ask about that.

3.

My maternal grandfather shot his adopted son over a property deal. The deal would have made my grandfather a millionaire, finally, after so many years. My uncle, half-Ojibwe by birth, rescued by my grandfather from a Red Lake orphanage in Northern Minnesota, grew into a hippie. A hippie named Graham who refused to agree to the deal. He answered the door in nakedness one brilliant green morning and was found right there in the vestibule of the hand-built house he loved by a groggy member of his harem with holes in his chest and face, scribbling on the baseboard with a bloody finger. 1968.

I start calling myself Graham and dressing a certain way, twenty years too late and quite awhile before it’s fashionable again. Reagan is giving a speech on a thriftshop television on which the speaker doesn’t work and he sounds like a fly. I have a band called The Law of Averages and would you like to know what the law of averages means? It means that the average person is just average in the eyes of the law. A fat girl is paying my rent and licking my washboard stomach. Her head is in the way.

4.

There have been times in human history when ugly was fashionable, when being ugly was a kind of good luck so powerful it conferred itself also on those who clamored to be near it…when ugliness had the power to bless. But this isn’t such an era. It’s said that the Emperor Hadrian refused to attend state banquets unless accompanied by his favorite page, known to be the ugliest man in Rome, valued for his ability to weaken the concentration of uninitiated foreign dignitaries. And Spencer Tracy, no Adonis, was not only a movie star, but the man who shared Katherine Hepburn’s bed. The Golden Age.

I was born somewhere between 2,000 and 30 years too late. In these times, my times, the era I inhabit, this Pyrite Age, this awful epoch, it’s considered better to be born stupid than ugly; the beautifully stupid flourish like flames in a mattress factory. Page through the magazines and blink through thousands of television channels and bend your head back on your neck as far as you dare to in the dark and goggle at the barn-sized images of blank perfection.

Ugly these days is seen at best as an embarrassment, and at worst as a kind of disease, and it resists the social leveling that has done so much since The Civil Rights Act to eradicate the barriers that once kept blacks, Asians, Catholics, gays, women, etc., filtered out of the Good Life. If you are a myopic black ex-con of a Buddhist lesbian overweight Democrat confined to a wheel chair and fond of spouting Marx, you have a better chance of getting a job as a traffic cop in Texas than an ugly man like me has at being the romantic lead in a Hollywood movie.

So you can imagine my surprise when the most beautiful woman I’d ever seen made an effort to speak to me at the wrap party that SmikSmak Films was throwing for the cast and crew of Model Citizen. Model Citizen was our postmodern slasher flick. Plot: a super-model becomes a serial killer. Running time: 98 minutes.

The tag line on the poster (If Looks Can Kill…We’re All In A Lot of Trouble!) was not as good as the one for the original Alien (In Space, No One Can Hear You Scream), or as kitschy fun as the one for Jaws (Don’t Go Near the Water!), but it was turning out to be a good topic for a wrap party conversation. With the most beautiful woman I’d ever seen. The poster was taped to Terry’s screen door; the image in the poster was a pouty-lipped model-type headshot of the lead actress…with skulls for irises…and the tag-line was printed over her head, appearing to drip blood.

The most beautiful woman I’d ever seen read the tag line out loud to herself. ‘If Looks Can Kill…’

‘That one sentence,’ I interrupted, tapping the poster, ‘took nearly as long to come up with as the whole screenplay. And five times as many writers!’ Which was true. I’d written the screenplay alone in six weeks, while the tag-line was finally the effort of everyone in the SmikSmak office: Jay and Terry (creative), Tomiiko (financing), Guin (the secretary), and Guin’s boyfriend (something like Joe…or Jack. Or Jason. Jeff?). It wasn’t finally agreed upon until the night before the morning we faxed the PR layouts to the printer, a week after the Model Citizen work print had shipped out from the developing lab.

‘I’ve got one,’ said the most beautiful woman I’d ever seen. She stared at me, expressionless for a moment to create a dramatic pause, and then she announced, with her hands framing the sentence, ‘Beauty is in the Eye of the Beholder…and it’s the last thing he’ll ever see!’

We both laughed. ‘That’s good! That’s pretty damn good!’ I nodded.

We were standing together outside, near the screen door at one corner of Terry Hilliard’s enormous redwood deck, under the grape-black night of the San Jacinto mountains, balancing pale gold coins of reflected moon in our champagne glasses. L.A. was two hours away, north by northwest, and the most beautiful woman I’d ever seen pointed at the moon and said, softly, with the confidence of a first language, ‘Qamar.’

Before she could explain that Qamar is the Arabic word for moon, I added, “And the Czech word is Komar. They both sound like…like sickles; they sound like sickle-shaped words, don’t they? The quarter moon of Islam. Isn’t that interesting? But the Greek version sounds all wrong: Fengari. The Swahili, too…it sounds too tiny, like a speck of something, or a cat’s name.’ I made my lips small. ‘Mwezi.’

She mimicked me, squinting. ‘Mwezi.’

“You’ve been terribly betrayed by a handsome man recently, haven’t you?” I asked.

She smiled.

5.

It is Chicago, Illinois, and the year is 1972. There are three of us together, good friends, old friends, in Jimmy’s, near the corner of Jackson and State Street, under the ‘EL.’ Jimmy’s is half-way between what we’d call greasy spoon and down home and Jimmy does all the cooking. One has a choice of three tables near the window or the counter itself to eat on and the tables are always occupied. The tables are green Formica and chrome and they were new when Jimmy opened the place with a VA loan after surviving the Korean War with two good arms and a leg.

Jimmy is good at producing a certain kind of very heavy meal with sweet iced tea or very strong coffee for a beverage and pie for dessert and he charges a fair price. The one thing you do not do in Jimmy’s is tip.Jimmy’s is lit like a pool hall: coolie hats of light hung from a dirty ceiling. There is no juke box. Jimmy thinks it’s impolite to listen to popular music while one is eating his food. The sooty windows gazing on State Street are a triptych of iron-webbed sky (the structure of the ‘EL’) and one little Xmas tree of a traffic light. The upper right corner of the triptych blinks red, yellow, green all night, even when there’s no one in Jimmy’s to see it.

Here we are: Gorman, Perez and I. We are lucky and have a window table near the door. It’s summer and being seated near the door is a relief, even with the stain of blue exhaust fluttering in on the breeze. Gorman, with his big head and too-small haircut like a child’s cap barely reaching his neckline or red ears, and his feminine eyelashes, has, in preparation to eating, cut his meat into a grid of what looks like thirty two small squares and is now leisurely forking one after another into his mouth while Perez and I hack away like slobs at our porkchops.

‘The Germans are metaphysicians,’ says Gorman, between forkfulls, putting the meat away. ‘Nietzsche. Jung. Kant.’ He glares at the ceiling. ‘Horbigger.’ He forks a square of meat and writes an ‘eight’ with it through a tablet of gravy and puts it away. ‘They might as well have been witch doctors.’

The squares of meat he removes from the plate follow a pattern: one bottom left, one top right. Next bottom left, next top right. Perez winks at me and tips his chin at Gorman’s plate: the puddle of gravy with a vertical ‘infinity’ inscribed in it. The tesselated Salisbury steak and cuneiformed mashed potatoes.

‘Gorman,’ says Perez, ‘We’re curious. Really. Do you take a crap as methodically as you eat?’

Perez is pretty: he has flared nostrils and a precise black haircut and an Elvis-like permanent sneer. But one eye is always bloodshot and a little dead because a big kid clubbed him on the playground for being too pretty. I heard a rumor more than once that Perez and Gorman did a little something as Vaselined choir boys in one or the other’s bunk one night when we were all three of us attending a week-long ‘retreat’ at a seminary in East Troy, Wisconsin. The retreat was sponsored by the Catholic School (Our Lady of The Loop) in which we were incarcerated the year we all three became friends.

Gorman was there at Our Lady of the Loop because his parents didn’t want him attending the run-down educational institution of the neighborhood: Joseph J.Pulaski Junior High School. Perez was there because his whiskery grandmother, the sole gaurdian of Perez and his six sisters, supported a Catholic universe so fervently that she experienced ecstatic visions of the Virgin Mary on demand, the holy mother illuminated in swirling clouds of Lucky Strike. You could smell Perez’s house from a block away. I was there at Our Lady of the Loop because it was the farthest my mother could get me from the house every day: we didn’t even live, technically, in Chicago.

The rumor about Perez and Gorman never bothered me, and I treated it with the same open-minded neutrality I applied to the miracles that the Sisters used so much of every school day advertizing: I neither believed nor doubted. But that rumor went a long way towards explaining the teasing. Gorman and Perez would bicker and tease like a couple embarrassed by the memory of an unrecoverable closeness.

‘Sure’n if you tink oi eats metodically,’ retorts Gorman, with a fakey brogue, after a swig of tea with a sandstorm of sugar in it, ‘you ought t’ see how oi barney yer muther.’

Then he catches my eye and drops his gaze and he apologizes profusely in a deep soft voice: he’d forgotten, and now he feels like a shit, a real shit, and I feel sorry for him. Being a good guy, and famously easy to get along with, I change the subject immediately, of course. Or, that is, I change it back, faking a casual sing-song.

‘Henry Miller.’

‘Henry Miller,’ echoes Perez, tapping the table. But Gorman is still pouting over his faux-pas, his mouth in the palm of his hands; all work has ceased on the construction site of his dinner plate and his words have escaped him. We have to prod.

I repeat, ‘Henry Miller…’ but Gorman won’t bite. Christ, Jerry, I want to say: she was my mother. What are you so upset about?

I say, ‘Come on, Jerry. You’re the writer. It’s your job to educate us Phillistines. If you don’t finish, Perez and I are going to go out into that heartless night without the gift of knowledge to light our paths. You were saying… ‘ But Gorman just sits there, slumped, so Perez stars talking about popular film.

Poor Gorman. If only I could admit that I’m glad she’s gone! But that would put me under suspicion.

6.

LD: A particular guy wants a particular woman: this is not a story, it’s a situation. Make it two particular guys and make the two guys friends (and the woman beautiful) and at least you have a story. Make one of the two friends in competition for the affections of the beautiful woman not a guy but another woman and make the two not friends but married and you have a modern story on your hands, possibly. The jury is still out on the relative modernity of sad or happy or unresolved endings. Is there a fourth alternative? Maybe the fourth alternative is there is no ending. It just goes on and on that way. Everyone in the story just gets older and older until you can’t even stand to look at them any more. Does that sound like a bestseller to you? Anyway, you asked so I told you. How’s the Mrs?

MD: You’re so bitter, Larry. So sarcastic.

 

Setting:
a chat room

Dramatis Personae:
Ann Ominous-a recently divorced Academic (34)
O’Sirus-a bisexual serial killer with an interest in Celtic murder ballads and Egyptology (43)

OS: I like you’re profile pic

AO: To the extent that you’re willing to ‘believe’ (i.e. suspend disbelief) that the picture is A) ‘me’, B) recent and C) un-photoshopped, I thank you. What is it that you ‘like’ about the image, specifically? (And please don’t respond with, ‘your eyes,’ since we’re all aware that references to the ‘eyes’ are always coded symbols of everything *but* the eyes in the context of online transactions of desire and power). It would be refreshing, I confess, if a man, just once, were to answer the above-stated question bluntly, with, for example, ‘the size, shape, and elevation of your breasts’ or ‘your truculent, fellatio-evocative pout’, though, I’d qualify this confession by saying that a man gets ‘points’ (a currency calibrated in what units?) for somehow reconciling the ability to be ‘refreshing’ (transgressive) with some degree of elegance or suavity. That is to say, a contextually ‘hermaphroditic’ presentation interrogating the vitality of ‘male’ aggression with ‘female’ strategies of mimesis-in-play (‘play’ as equal parts ‘agon’ and performance) might prove to be a delightful synthesis. Not that I’m advocating a totalitarian approach to the aesthetics of persuasion, though Henri-Levy did, of course, once quip, “The only successful revolution of this century is totalitarianism.” However, lest your eyebrows remain raised (*emoticon of mirth*) at my referencing such a camera-ready poppinjay as BHL, I will “raise my stock” (as traded on what FTSE of sexual metaphor?) by appropriating the gravitas of Levi-Strauss instead: “If the composer withholds more than we anticipate, we experience a delicious falling sensation; we feel we have been torn from a stable point on the musical ladder and thrust into the void.” Substituting, of course, the terms “cockmaster” for “composer” and “pleasure arc of masturbatory chatting” for “musical ladder”. Not that I expect (hope?) that this last ‘revelation’ (obfuscation?) will ‘up the ante’ (referencing as this colloq. does the ‘game’ of ‘poker’ and the demotic pun it redeems) in our ‘chat’.

OS: ?

AO: 551 275 1585

The Sea John Banville, 264 pp Picador

Everyman Philip Roth, 182 pp Jonathan Cape

Philip Roth’s Everyman and John Banville’s The Sea are both essentially death-preoccupied works which manage to tread the same narrow territory via paths that never touch. They reach conclusions that, while clearly foregone and ending in the obvious place (the end of life), seem worlds apart. Still, they are strangely twinned works the connection between which wouldn’t have been apparent, ironically, if not for Banville’s harsh review of Everyman from April of this year. It was in October of the previous year, of course, that Banville won the Booker for The Sea.

Banville’s assault on Roth begins in a register not difficult to interpret as outrage: “It takes a Philip Roth to have the nerve to give the resonant title Everyman to a small novel about a retired advertising executive turned amateur artist who dies prematurely while undergoing a heart operation. Of course, the book is about more than that - though not much more - and, of course, anything from Roth in this late stage of his writing life deserves and, indeed, compels our attention.” Later in the review, attacking Roth’s choice of a pared-back language for Everyman, Banville pleads, “…nobody, surely, could write this flatly and not think to compensate us with a few fireworks?”

Everyman begins with the following line, in a monastic version of Roth’s identifiable rhythm and melody, commencing at once with the patient accretion of quotidian detail that will work the magic of persuading the reader not only to believe but to empathize:

“Around The Grave in the rundown cemetery were a few of his former advertizing colleagues from New York, who recalled his energy and originality and told his daughter, Nancy, what a pleasure it had been to work with him.”

The Sea, with terse distance, opens with: “They departed, the gods, on the day of the strange tide.”

The opening paragraph of The Sea goes on to describe in painterly (or filmic) detail a bay and its rising waters, as it was fifty years earlier, from the perspective of a first person narrator, Max Morden (with death itself hidden in his name), who some reviewers have referred to as a kind of everyman. If Banville indeed conceived of his Morden as an everyman recollecting two tragedies and musing on Death and the particularities of Life’s trivial miracles, one could see how Roth coming along with a book on the same general theme, with parallel motifs, titled Everyman (branding his work as the definitive product), would put Banville in a tetchy state.

The Sea has been so lauded that Banville has a kind of mandate to chastise writers who do not write as he writes. His critical dismissal of Everyman is a case in point, in that the gist of Banville’s complaint against this book is that Banville himself didn’t write it; that Everyman isn’t, essentially, The Sea. But is The Sea as good as Banville believes and its praise suggests?

“When art historian Max Morden returns to the seaside village where he once spent a childhood holiday, he is both escaping from a recent loss and confronting a distant trauma.” That’s part of the teaser appearing on the back cover of the paperback edition of the book. The “recent loss” that Morden is escaping is his wife’s cancer death, and the “distant trauma” he’s confronting is centered on an upper-class family his semi-unrequited crush connected him to for the tragic pubescent summer the book recalls. The greater part of the book is a fiendishly passive construction: the narrator’s discurssive reflections on fading memories of minute boyhood observations…as if, from the outset, Banville had dared himself to sap us of the will to read.

From the aspect of literary mechanics, Banville’s use of a first person narration is a questionable choice in a book that spans, along with Everyman, most of a man’s generally uneventful life from the end point of the beginning of his seventh decade. As we rely on the protagonist’s thoughts for our information, we are trapped behind his eyes and stuck with his judgements: Max Morden’s sour view of existence is all we have to go on. Even worse, there is key information witheld during the course of The Sea which Morden can only be witholding from himself as he muses along, an awkward device indeed. Roth’s choice of a broader angle from which to narrate bespeaks his greater technical competence as a novelist.

Whereas Roth’s third person omniscient allows him to speak with the plain confidence of God about precisely what happened and when, fifty years prior or yesterday, Banville blurs the picture and stresses credulity with minute descriptions of setting and action from the well of his narrator’s memory. A good part of The Sea, in fact, deals with events that are fifty years gone. Banville’s memory savant, unlike plausibly endowed humans, recalls not just jumbled, blurred and iffy snatches of all but the most momentous occasions, but replays hours-long scenes remarkable both in detail and banality.

The difference in P.O.V. underscores the difference in character between the two protagonists: Banville’s Morden (an art historian/critic) is as self-obsessed and hypochondriacal as a first person narrator with obsessive-compulsive endowments of recall can be, whereas Roth’s everyman (a retired ad man who takes up the brush), as we track him through the eyes of his god, suffers his many dates with the surgeon, and the setbacks (often self-inflicted) in his personal life with a stoical terror that earns our empathy and moves us in a way that Morden’s fussy scold fails to. The stylistic genetics of each book is its respective Fate, and one can’t help feeling that Banville couldn’t possibly have meant to fall so short in moving us, and the very ‘plain’ style, lacking ‘fireworks,’ that Banville chides Roth over, is the crafty choice that ensures that Roth’s Everyman works in many regards in which The Sea fails.

On a superficial level, Everyman is one man’s medical history (‘The Life and Death of a Male Body’ as the protagonist muses, mordantly, he’d name his autobiography), but a closer reading reveals that Everyman is full of acts and words of kindness, good manners, old world civility and grace. One reading of Roth’s novel is that it celebrates all that we humans ever had in a cold, vast universe of incomprehensible physical processes indifferent to our fate: each other. The book is full of people with words of praise for each other; comfort and reassurances given; love registered and deaths very deeply mourned. Everyman is warm with decency and the plain style is a clear lens through which the warmth is magnified. Another reading is that Everyman is an elegy to the courtliness and decency, and primacy of the family unit, of another era, fading into the lost paradise of Everyman’s idyllic seaside boyhood.

The boyhood which The Sea revisits is interior and isolated and finds its brief, fraught pleasures in puberty’s animal drama. It is ironic that Roth is considered the pornographer of the two writers but that Banville’s The Sea is the more selfishly sexual of the two books. The denseness of the style and enamelled quality of its metaphors don’t disguise the low level at which its passions lie: a pubertal boy conceives a lust for first a mother and then the mother’s daughter. The boy then ages into the narrator who ends up regretting his own daughter’s homeliness: “What age is she now, twenty-something, I am not sure. She is very bright…[but] Not beautiful, however, I admitted that to myself long ago. I cannot pretend this is not a disappointment…”

Contrast that with Roth’s Everyman’s feelings towards his own daughter Nancy: “Sometimes it seemed that everything was a mistake except Nancy. So he worried about her, and he still never passed a women’s clothing shop without thinking of her and going in to find something she’d like, and he thought, I’m very lucky, and he thought, Some good has to come out somewhere, and it has in her.”

It’s difficult to like a character who judges his daughter’s lack of beauty harshly, and likewise difficult not to be charmed by one grateful for his grown daughter’s existence; it may well be Banville’s intention to make Morden unsympathetic to the reader, but if so it’s a peculiar tactic, locking us in the mind of his character with so little by way of charm or creature comfort in that particularly Spartan room.

The Sea is a tough slog for such a slim vol. To invert the hack reviewer’s catch phrase: ‘I couldn’t pick it up’. Upon finishing it this reader was astonished to realize that he had spent two off-and-on weeks reading a Douglas Sirk film. A Douglas Sirk film gussied up with a dozen ten-dollar words of which ‘convolvulus’ (in place of ‘morning glory’) and ‘velutinous’ (instead of ‘velvety’) were the standard-bearers and ‘twelvemonth’ (rather than ‘year’) brought up the rear on its clowny tricycle. Not to mention ‘strangury’ and ‘flocculent’ (which you are free to look up for yourself).

Banville’s is a book that hopes to redeem in its finer details the sins of its fundamental construction, like rococo mirrors on the walls of a pebble-dashed semi-detached. In his review of Everyman, of a scene in which Roth has an estranged son eulogizing his waked father in a strange tone, Banville quotes and then lambasts this sentence: ” ‘…any note of tenderness, grief, love, or loss was terrifyingly absent from his voice’. That overblown and redundant ‘terrifyingly’ -who is it that is terrified? - is an early example of a recurring slackness in the writing,” he writes, as though he himself weren’t responsible for the following overblown sentences:

“….are there coincidences in Pluto’s realm, amidst the trackless wastes of which I wander lost, a lyreless Orpheus?” (pg. 24*)

“I must have seemed like a moth throbbing before a candle-flame, or like the flame itself, shivering in its own consuming heat.” (pg. 86)

“After the funeral, when people came back in the house…that was awful, almost unbearable…I gripped a wine glass so hard it shattered in my fist.” (pg. 125)

“The little waves before me at the water’s edge speak with an animate voice, whispering eagerly of some ancient catastrophe, the sack of Troy, perhaps, or the sinking of Atlantis.’ (pg. 132)

“You cunt, you fucking cunt, how could you go and leave me like this, floundering in my own foulness, with no one to save me from myself.” (pg. 196, with apologies to Brando and/or Bertolucci, perhaps?)

“She was the Sphinx and we her seated priests.’ (pg. 237)

Boil these sentences down to poetic essentials…Orpheus; moths and their candle-flames; Troy, Atlantis, a Sphinx and…(Xanadu! Why no Xanadu?)…and you’ve got the basis for a pretty good sophomore sonnet. Couldn’t really use ‘cunt’ though…but rest assured that when Banville writes ‘cunt’ he means ‘exudative, turgor-thickened rose.’

The Sea’s big treat is meant to be the revelation, a few pages shy of the ‘fini,’ that a main character in the narrator’s present was a key figure of the tragic boyhood romance he spends the book recalling. This twist is kept from us for as long as it is through the simple yet unbelievable convenience of the narrator not once thinking this key character’s first name during the two hundred fifty-plus pages he thinks the book for us…until making us ‘gasp’ not only by finally thinking it, but in the thinking of it loosening up all kinds of clogged exposition, igniting the damp firecracker of a second ‘twist.’ Just as Banville’s narrator keeps the first ‘secret’ from us with a shoddy gimmick of omission, Banville keeps the second ‘secret’ from his narrator with an even shoddier trick, or B-movie edit: a puff of smoke from a locomotive, thank you very much, obscures a specific kind of illicit kiss and thereby ensures that the tragedy proceed apace.

To the implausibility of the narrator’s pointillist recall of events fifty years gone, add Banville’s implausibly plausibles from the cast…the kimono-wearing spinster landlady; the harumphing, feebly macho old boarder called, of course, ‘The Colonel’; the sinister, blonde, upper-class twins…Banville doesn’t miss a trick. There’s even a gorilla-armed ‘Pecker Devereux,’ who ‘used to be a deep-sea sailor’ and is ‘said to have killed a man.’ What we’re getting here are bits and pieces of Banville’s adolescence…Thesaurus-masked appropriations from formative cinema-going experiences. I wasn’t so much seeing word-pictures at Banville’s behest as revisiting stock imagery despite his best efforts. Deeper meditations on grief, death, memory and the essential unknowability of other lives were conceived and lost before they could survive the copy-of-a-copy imprecision of their constituent cliches.

To paraphrase a torpedo from Banville’s denunciation of Roth’s ‘Everyman’: all of The Sea could be contained within a few pages of late Roth.

*page numbers refer to the paperback edition

.

Death had left its baby in
my mother’s breast; the doctors came to have it out and
save the rest. Accumulated knowledge
brought the fortress of The Heartless West
to bear against her
body on a table ringed by
internists. thirty years before 

on the fold-out couch on her boyfriend’s porch
she found herself like this laid out, smiling in
the center of a mildly-worried crowd of friends, but
disco fatigue and daiquiris were
fingered as
the culprits then.  

In truth it was a troubling child, both times, just
settling in.

  1. Ginger, Ollie, Inisha and Kim 

Ginger has a late lunch, early dinner meeting with Ollie, Ollie Daumen, an executive from Heart Cell Records. The task at hand is only obliquely related to music; all they are doing is looking at photographs. On the table in front of Ginger is a thick sheaf of prints.

They are having lunch in Chez Guevara, on Alte Schonehauser Allee, where the waitresses are twice as pretty as the food is good, and the food is ten times better than the service, except for the breakfasts: the breakfasts are pretty much equal to the service. The waitresses are all wearing berets. More than once, as Ginger sits there with Ollie, songs with which he has had something to do warble at them from the low-key speakers over the bar. I repudiate you, he thinks, each time. One, especially, sung by a kid from Munich with the most irritating voice since Alvin and the Chipmunks, makes him very nearly physically ill. 

Ollie is younger than Ginger, but looks older. He has a jowly face, rough with perpetual stubble, under a sexy boy haircut. Everyone at the record company envies Ollie’s hair: you can tell, because they all make fun of it. His nickname at the company is Duran Duran. His eyes have the secretive twinkle of a sherry-tippling grandmother’s. It was Ollie to whom Ginger once explained, during a punishingly long recording session with a talent-free German rap act that had to be rushed out to market a week before Christmas, the German national character versus the American national character as exemplified in Dusty Springfield’s two versions of the Bacharach/David song “Wishin’ and Hopin’,” her German cover of which was called “Warten und Hoffen.” 

Now, in the American version of this elegant Jane Austenesque pearl of ‘60s era romanticism, the chorus is: Wishin’, and hopin’, and thinkin’, and prayin’, plannin’ and dreamin’ each night of his charms… that won’t get you into his arms. In other words, it is a call to action…it advocates aggressive measures in a carpe diem sort of way. If you want some attention from the dreamed-of love object, girl, you best go get him…don’t sit around on your sumptuous ass in the rumpus room just sighing. Do something about it. Whereas the German version of the chorus states the exact opposite. It advises the listener: Nur warten und hoffen und hoffen und warten, Sehnen und träumen, Tag aus und tag ein, Dann bist du bald nicht mehr allein… Just waiting  and hoping and hoping and waiting, longing and dreaming, day out and day in, then soon you won’t be alone anymore… 

“You see, Ollie? Right there is the key…” 

“Oh, come on!” 

“…it’s the whole fucking problem with your country! You’re always Warten und Hoffen…” 

“Like there are no problems with America!” 

“…you’re a bunch of day-dreamers, baby. A bunch of talkers and planners…” 

“A bunch of thinkers, perhaps, yes. Yes, we Germans think before we do…whereas you Americans tend to shoot before you think…” Ollie had then mimed aiming, Oswald-like, a rifle at Ginger from the other end of the control room sofa and pulling the trigger. 

The material they have in front of them has been distilled from sixty rolls of film. There is a black girl (not really black, but half-German and half-African), an Asian girl (of Japanese descent, but with bleached-blonde hair, born in Berlin), and one very white girl, tall, striking, with enamel-blue eyes and blue-black waist-long hair. Together they are going to be known as “Q-Teez,” and Ginger is being asked to write the songs for their first record. The photos range from class-picture cute to insincerely Sapphic; it is Ginger’s general opinion that if you’re going to photograph girls kissing each other, they should be given a few days to practice first. 

“I like the way this one looks,” he says, “…even though she needs a new hair style,” sliding a photo of the tall one, dressed like a Geisha but leaning across a motorcycle, back across the table towards Ollie, “…but the other two look like truckstop chippies. How old is she?” Ginger taps a photo of the “black” one.

“We’re claiming…I don’t know. What do you think? Seventeen?” 

“She doesn’t look a day under twenty one. And I’d say very near to celebrating her twenty third.” 

Ollie salutes him. “Good guess.” 

“And the Japanese girl looks like a transvestite. Why is she wearing a scarf around her neck in every picture?” He strokes his Adam’s apple. “How big are her hands?” 

Ollie shrugs. “These three tested the best together.” 

“Which one can sing?” 

“Yumi. The Japanese.” 

Ginger taps a picture of the tall one again. “Too bad it’s not her.” 

“Couldn’t sing with a gun to her head and a canary in her mouth and… Tom Jones as her biological father.” 

“Don’t tell me the black girl is the dancer…” 

“Okay, I won’t tell you.” Another Ollie shrug. Ollie has honed his shrug, over the years, into a tapered, elegant tool of detachment. “There is a reason that stereotypes are stereotypes.”

The look that had been decided on is sporty casual, plus incongruous accessories of glamour (running suits and diamond necklaces, say)…Ollie and Ginger put the photos away and they decide to order. Before Chez Guevara, the in-place had been right up the street: The PsycheDeli. Ginger is sorry that The PsycheDeli is no longer “hip,” because the food there is still much better, and he eats there whenever it isn’t important, meaning, whenever he is alone, simply for the pleasure of the food and the atmosphere. A hundred years ago (or so it seemed), when Ginger had a wife, they would go to The PsycheDeli for pepper cheese cake, or bagel/ice cream sandwiches, and lounge on the terrace out back, finger-feeding each other and making an afternoon of it. 

It is the late lunch rush, and Chez Guevara is full of faux film producers, out of work actors, and the spoiled sons of Zehlendorf (Berlin suburb) with their tier-3 model girlfriends, along with a handful of very well dressed but solo gray-at-the-temples nobodies who are leering around the room and eating their hearts out. Ginger has four shots of Elke, the tallest Q-T, fanned out in front of him like Tarot cards: The Queen of Pentacles; The Tower: The Virgin; Death. 

“She’s definitely the sexiest.” 

“And the biggest bitch to work with.” 

“Viva la Resistance.” 

“You won’t think it’s so funny when you’re in the studio with her.” 

“I’m not afraid of a little controversy.” 

“You know Udo? The photographer?” 

They’ve been sitting there almost an hour already when their waitress shows up, asking if they require menus, or if they know what they want already. Ollie orders a capirinia and a rum-and-coke, and a plate of little sandwiches, to start with. She almost leaves before Ginger can order, assuming that Ollie’s drinks are for both of them.

“Udo said something about Kiery…the black one…the one with the huge boobs? That she needed to loose a little weight? That’s all. You need to lose a kilo or two, honey. Yes? Kiery was fine with it, she’s a sweetheart and a real pro, but this Elke…” 

“Uh oh.” 

“She says, ‘look at you!‘ To Udo! In front of everyone! She says, ‘You’re fat and old and bald and you’ve got the nerve to criticize us?’“ 

“Good for her.” 

“Hey, Udo thought it was pretty funny. He tells her, ‘Honey, I’m not the one having my picture taken,’ and she replies, ‘Damn right you aren’t.’” 

“I bet Udo was careful what he said to her after that.” 

“He didn’t refuse to work with them again, he only let it be known that he would be charging more the next time. So, she’s already costing us money. Even Willie’s afraid of her! Personally, I think it was a mistake. To cast her, I mean. There’s plenty of subservient little blow-job artistes out there who would kill for this opportunity, no? So, why this one?” He counts on his fingers. “One, she’s too tall…she’s a head taller than the other two. They look like her children in some of these pictures. Two, she has a big attitude. Attitude is something you should only get with a gold record.  Three, she can’t fucking sing and she can’t fucking dance, right? So what is she doing there?” 

Ginger gently removes a creased photo of her (faking a karate kick at the camera) from Ollie’s grip. “Because she’s the one you can’t take your eyes off of.” 

Ollie leans across the table. With a low voice and that grandmotherly twinkle in his eye he corrects Ginger. “Because she’s the one Willie can’t take his schwanz out of.” 

“You’re shitting me.” 

“Shitting you? There’s no equivalent for that phrase in the German language, sir.” Ollie leans back in his chair again and runs his fingers through his thick blonde hi-lighted hair and wipes a hand down his grandmotherly face and the waitress comes with their provision of drinks. 

“When I first started working for Willie,” Ginger reminisces, sipping his Tom Collins, “I assumed Willie was doing that boy…what was his name? Top ten record five years ago? Had a big hit called fools in paradise? Looks a little like…” 

“Captain Jax.” 

“Yeah, him. I assumed he was…” 

“He was.” 

“With Willie.” 

“Without a doubt.” 

“So Willie Gold likes Redskins and Yankees.” 

“Huh?” 

“Boys and girls.” 

“Willie likes anything that’s half his age, minus ten. That’s the formula.” Ollie poured a rum and coke through his smile. “Half his age minus ten. I worked it out.” 

“Glad I’m not his wife.” 

“Tell me, what is it you pity most about her? Her life of unimaginable luxury, or the fact that she hasn’t had to touch Willie’s willy in thirty years?” 

“So this Elke is nineteen.” 

“That’s what she claims.” 

There is an attention-getting Turkish girl sitting at a table on a diagonal from them that Ollie has positioned his chair…otherwise his back was to her…in order to see. She is laughing at something that her female dinner date has said and Ollie’s mouth is open in a sympathetic response, holding his glass like he is about to spit his heart into it. 

The Turkish girl has toothpick arms (silky with dark hair) and breasts like…breasts. Not deformity-large, these breasts, but wonderfully useful-looking. Wearing a short beige low-cut dress she is darker than, with her hair in a thick braid that could be a high-tension cable. Like a lot of girls who end up on television, she is so pretty that she is very nearly ugly…eyes too big, jawline so narrow it’s extraterrestrial, neck impossibly long. They would probably laugh at her in Ankara. Ollie, meanwhile, is projecting future events on the canvas of her terracotta skin; his blink rate is dangerously slow; Ginger isn’t even sure if Ollie’s heart is still beating. 

Ginger clears his throat and says “How’s Kim?” 

“Kim?” 

“Your wife.” 

“My wife?” 

“The female that you…” 

“Ooops, I forgot: you’re American. Don’t ask don’t tell, right?” He winks and speaks softly. “Kim is fine. She reads a lot of classics these days…Kant, Goethe, Nietzsche. Very impressive. She’s in bed all day with a stack of books on one side and a box of chocolates on the other. She says she wants to improve her German. But who does she want to improve her German for, I ask myself. Is she having an affair with a seventy year old professor of Philosophy at Humboldt University? But no, she can’t be, because even professors of Philosophy prefer skinny young students to middle-aged wives who are getting fatter every day.” He finishes his drink. “Don’t look so uncomfortable. And how is your beautiful German wife? Oops, I forgot, you’re divorced, she hates your guts and you haven’t spoken in years. May I please go back to staring at the Turkish girl again?” 

“She’s certainly worth your tawdry dick.” 

Ollie nods at her when he catches her eye. “That she is. Ever fuck around on Birdy, when you two were married?” 

“Often.” 

“Ever hate yourself for it?” 

Ginger pauses before answering. “Sure.” 

“Liar.” 

“Maybe Kim’s depressed,” Ginger offers. Ollie snorts. Ginger thinks: that’s the worst thing about the Unhappy…the funniest, sometimes, too. They can never seem to imagine the suffering of others. 

“Excuse me for one moment, please,” says Ollie. 

He gets up and saunters to the girls’ table with his hands in his pockets, a move that will call attention to his beautifully tailored suit, and he stands there, his back to Ginger, rocking on his heels. The Turkish girl’s dinner date, a chubby blonde (it isn’t poor fat, but rich fat) in a backless dress with a waist-long ponytail (fake), smiles over her shoulder at Ginger. She lifts her wine glass in a pantomime toast and mouths some big-voweled words he can’t make out. There is lipstick on her capped teeth. 

Ollie’s wife Kim came over to Berlin on the same boat that Ginger did, so to speak. He saw her around town quite a lot back then, in all the expat clubs, a sweet-faced little woman in outlandish platform shoes who developed a reputation for being somewhat of a fag-hag. This was years before Ollie even knew that black doesn’t rub off with a rag. Ginger heard he met Kim at a party that featured a German professional Michael Jackson imitator who later performed at their wedding. 

Marrying Kim may have temporarily alienated his parents, but it changed Ollie’s career forever: a German record exec with a black American wife gains knowledge and experience overnight; he shines with the quasi-authentic gleam of reflected soul. Ollie became super-credible and his higher-ups at Heart Cell began to behave as though he suddenly knew what he was talking about. His marrying black, a calculated move or not, benefited him musically in much the same way that Sammy Davis Jr.’s conversion to Judaism about 50 years prior had benefited him: in any case, it only really mattered to insiders. Ollie started getting the jobs; signing groups, matching the singer with the single, executive-producing albums. So what if his black wife Kim is about as funky as the Archbishop of Canterbury? 

Ollie brings the two girls, Inisha (accent on the first syllable), the Turkish one, and Petra, the blonde, back to his and Ginger’s table, dragging their chairs. Inisha Ozgören, born and raised in Munich, of pure Turkish descent, is first of all German, however; this is clear in her posture, the angular disposition of her neck, the way she purses her lips when speaking. Her posture is quite regal.

“Petra, Ginger, Inisha, Ginger. Ginger, I’ve been explaining to the girls,” he says, spinning his chair around and sitting in it backwards, “that we could use a little expert opinion over here. Otherwise, it’s gonna be a long long night.” He winks at Ginger, and Ginger winks back. Ginger finds it extremely amusing, as usual, that they are all speaking English. The girls speak English with an English accent. Ollie gestures at the promo stills of Q-Teez that are fanned across the table and says, to their guests, “So what do you think? Be brutally honest.” 

He winks at Ginger again. “Market research.” 

“She’s attractive,” says cherub-faced Petra, dismissively, ruddy-cheeked with wine, smirking at a photo of Kiery. Before this, Ginger had no particular feeling about this light-skinned black girl, Kiery, but now he feels protective of her. He remembers Ollie saying that Udo the photographer had warned her in front of everyone that she needed to lose weight, and that Kiery had taken the criticism cheerfully, and it makes him want to hug her. 

Inisha picks up another photo of Kiery wearing an evening gown and motorcycle boots and she squints at it, biting her lip. It seems to Ginger that sensing a sudden opportunity has sobered her; she begins thinking very hard. “This one looks a bit butch, I think,” continues Petra, with a giggle, indicating Yumi. Petra’s counterfeit of an Oxford accent is flawless. 

“Inisha, don’t you agree with Petra that Kiery is attractive?” asks Ollie. 

“And this one,” adds Petra, raising her eyebrows, indicating Elke. “Rather arrogant, I’d say. Too skinny. I don’t find her one bit….” 

Ollie cuts in. “But I’m still interested in Inisha’s opinion…” 

His persistence is comically nightmarish; he is pushing at something, shouldering a door, forcing it, until it gives way. He is too drunk to see that the door isn’t even locked.  “Don’t be shy,” he is saying. Let it go, Ginger is thinking. He suddenly hates all the drunks in the room. All the horny old men; all the hard-eyed daughters of pragmatism. He wants to go home, eat a snack, read a magazine and masturbate, but Ollie is holding the afternoon hostage. They can’t leave the table until his demands are met. 

Inisha shrugs and smiles helplessly. She is thinking, and telegraphing the thought, that this other dark girl in the photograph is cute, yes…but…certainly no better looking than Inisha herself, who is bound by good manners to keep this opinion to herself. Thank her good upbringing. Ginger glances at his watch. Ollie nods at Ginger gravely, as though he is still meant to take both Ollie and the conversation seriously, and Ollie is drumming on the table with pensive fingers, concluding, “Something tells me that our Inisha doesn’t quite agree.” 

Ginger wants to say: who gives a fuck? 

“It’s obvious,” Ginger says, to tease everyone, “that Inisha doesn’t care for this pop music nonsense, Ollie. Give the girl some credit for having a brain! Why don’t we talk about something interesting for a change?” Ginger gathers up the promo shots as though to put them away, yanking two from Petra’s fat fingers. He says, “Ollie and I were discussing Nietzsche earlier. One of Ollie’s best friends is an expert on Nietzsche. Her name is Kim, right, Ollie? Kim something, I forget her last name. Ollie, what is it you told me that Kim was saying about Nietzsche? Something about…” 

“You have the most beautiful hair I’ve ever seen on a man,” says Inisha suddenly, turning to Ollie, ignoring Ginger utterly, “may I touch it?” 

He bends sideways towards her and gives her his head like a puppy, like a lamb, resting with a sigh on her bosom, and she clutches at his yellow hair with her graceful hands with a yelp of delight. Ginger ignores this, leafing through the stack of photos. He says, for the sake of saying something, gesturing at a photo of Elke, “Is this her natural hair color?” 

“What?” Ollie is in an awkward position from which to see the photos, being as his head is wedged in Inisha’s cappuccino bosom. 

“This girl, Elke. Is black her natural color?” 

Ollie sits up. Inisha, Ginger notices, manages to keep a hand on Ollie. Ollie is no Fred Astaire, but to an Ausländer female he is a rare commodity: an upper class German with a glamorous job who doesn’t mind flirting with a foreigner. Being Turkish, there is no way in Hell this girl is going to give him a sliver of pussy without an engagement ring, reflects Ginger, which means that poor Kim, his wife, will have to go, even if Ollie doesn’t actually end up proposing to Inisha. Ginger thinks all this in the time it takes for Ollie to reach into the inner pocket of his blazer and extract a credit-card-sized digital camera. Scrolling through shots, he finally finds what he is looking for. He hands Ginger the camera. “It’s a wig,” Ollie says. 

Ginger is shocked: he is looking at a pre-makeup, pre-wardrobe photo of a pretty blonde…and he recognizes her. “This is Elke?” 

Ollie nods. “I like her better in the black wig. She’s kinda boring as a blonde. I mean: a blonde in Germany…what a concept.” Ollie reaches for his camera. “As a blonde she looks like a fucking…hooker. Which is…” 

“Exactly what she is,” says Ginger. 

2. Ginger, Birdy, Cough 

When Ollie settled the bill and all four left Chez Guevara together, he took Ginger aside, and tickled his ear with his lips, like a drunk will do, whispering, “Sure you don’t want to join us?” and “Don’t forget: I’m with you for the next two hours. Call me tomorrow.” He tossed his car keys to Inisha.

Inisha and Petra had a six room flat in Stieglitz, and that’s where Ollie intended to spend the time he’d be pretending to spend with Ginger. But Ginger is a bad alibi, because he’s friends with Ollie’s wife Kim and Kim knows that Ginger is clean these days and rarely even touches red wine…his party days are over…but last minute infidelities always have a slapdash air about them that prove that the perpetrators want, most of all, to be caught. Ginger could picture poor Kim at three in the morning, woofing down a large pizza with everything on it, blinking at the television, waiting for the sound of Ollie’s key in the front door key hole. Ollie will tiptoe over the threshold, flooding the flat with pussy, hoping that Kim is asleep. Ollie’s infidelity was Kim’s punishment for getting fat, and Kim’s getting fat was Ollie’s punishment for not loving her any more, and Ollie’s not loving Kim anymore was Kim’s punishment for being human and needy and simply there…and Ollie’s ever loving Kim in the first place was his parent’s punishment for god knows what. And so on, back to the beginning of time. 

Ginger, waving, walking up the street as Ollie’s car peels off towards the bloated late afternoon sun, can remember another instance, years back…this is almost a déjà vu…during which Ollie had contrived to leave Chez Guevara with a woman other than his wife with the identical monomaniacal intention of doing childishly naked, tenderly violent things for an hour or two before slithering home. That time, Ginger had been rather drunk, or drugged up, or something more characteristic for a musician than the sober introspection he is rehabilitating his reputation with these days. There had been lots of back-slapping, and mirthless hilarity, he remembers. It was late at night, or rather, an early Tuesday morning, when he found himself on the sidewalk in front of the restaurant, he could remember, because he’d thought, with bemused alarm, when the party was in full swing, This is a little much for a Monday evening, eh? 

“You sure you don’t want to join us?” Ollie had whispered, just as now, only in that case the girl (Thai) was giggling and climbing into the driver’s side of Ollie’s Porsche. The German Pop Economy had been much healthier then. Then, as now, Ginger had declined the offer, not that he hadn’t felt righteously tempted. His wife (Ginger was then married to a striking blonde he called Birdy) was not doing her duty in the conjugal arena…and who could’ve blamed him for getting elsewhere what wasn’t forthcoming at home? Was Ginger ready to bury his dick along with all the other pleasures of his receding youth? But, in this case, the available girl just wasn’t his cup of tea. Unlike his wife, who was his cup of tea until she went too cold and bitter for reasons he swears are unknown. 

That first time Ollie said You sure you don’t want to join us?, Ginger had declined the offer to join the debauch and waved Ollie and Ollie’s new friend off and he walked a long walk through a cold-boiling fog that smelled like an old hat and swirled like curtains parting to absorb Ollie’s Porsche. Ginger remembers: it was early in the year. February, perhaps. There were still Christmas lights strung through bare-branched trees in postures of agony along the way, seams of gold in the translucent rock of the fog, and the view was magical, especially as he approached the massive black baroque bridge over the river on Friedrichstrasse, which he could never cross without thinking of sex.

Birdy and he used to call it the Fucking the Enemie bridge, because it had been spray-painted with that slogan, in neon orange, solecism included, by skinheads during a Mayday parade right after the Wall came down. The bridge became a big part of the jargon of their private mythology. Ginger would call her and say, “Meet me at Fucking the Enemie…”

Or she’d start a story with: “I was walking across Fucking the Enemie this morning…” 

The graffito had long-since been removed, but not the memory. It was very quiet, the walk home that night after getting too drunk with Ollie. Standing on that bridge on that warm night in February, he had just recently begun to become what he felt was middle-aged and he was thinking of his inward-collapsing marriage, and his Unca Jerry, strangely…his great-Uncle Jerry Miller, who had put dreams of Europe in his head long before he even knew what a Big Apple was. Back when Ginger was a free-ranging waif in Chicago. Ginger’s mom had been Jerry’s confidante (Unca Jerry was the family hair stylist; he’d cut your hair and psychoanalyze you at the same time), and, years later, he tried it with Ginger, but Ginger was too young and Unca Jerry was far too old to confide in anyone. But he liked telling stories, and Ginger, as a fatherless kid, would do. He was the perfect audience, in fact. 

“Germany was like a nasty drunk. The drink was power. By the time I got there, the war was over…it was like the aftermath of a wild party…some were sheepish, some were defiant. You had to be careful. It’s not common knowledge, but a lot of Americans got killed over there in the so-called peacetime…had their throats cut, or got lynched…white trash getting lynched! Army kept it quiet. See, they didn’t want popular opinion back home to turn against American involvement.” And Ginger would say, tell me about the German girls again, Unca Jerry!

Ginger hugged himself in the fog, and gulls were floating in linked spirals over a rusty barge that was moored to the far bank, stacked with tires. Another barge, upriver, came chugging from under the torn blanket of the fog. Before reaching the bridge, he had passed the Friedrichpalast, a relic from the Communist era. The Friedrichpalast was East Berlin’s version of Carnegie Hall, and he was recalling times that he and Birdy, in the raw fever of early courtship, had picnicked with candles on its steps in the dead of night. Being within walking distance of her flat it was a favorite spot, back before this neighborhood became chic; before, even, it was entirely safe. 

It looked like Brooklyn, when the skinheads hadn’t yet been shoved by rent increases and snooty cafes deeper into the crumbling East. You’d see them swaggering out of the grocery store with their jumbo provisions of beer every morning, as fit and uniformed as any army, in jackboots and stove pipe jeans and suspenders, running in large groups to catch the tram, marching towards Prenz’lberg for a football game. What was frightening sometimes was how good looking some of them were…you could see them eliciting the secret sympathies of working-class Germans; the hero worship of children. The “skinhead” brand had enormous name recognition. Skinheads seemed to take strength from the liberal disgust heaped on them; they had the advantage of being underdogs. This area was still dilapidated enough in those days to feel like home for the scruffy arm of fascism, so Birdy and Ginger had to be alert, they had to be watchful, discreet about holding hands, because they were on their turf. 

You had to be careful. It’s not common knowledge… 

It was about as safe or unsafe for Ginger as living in Harlem would have been. The skinheads weren’t always necessarily looking for trouble, but they were also the least likely to miss an opportunity to send an arrogant American to the hospital. Birdy had a weird apparent compassion for them that made her even more attractive to him, at first, because she claimed to see them as a species of wild animal being robbed of its habitat by the necessary evil of encroaching development. 

“Soon,” she would say, “they will have nowhere to go.” 

“Except to school,” Ginger would answer. 

She liked his contentiousness, he liked what he first assumed was her compassion; they’d picnic at midnight and fuck in broad daylight in isolated corners of various city parks. Her sexuality was magical, it was manic, she came to Ginger after he’d suffered through a string of detached lovers and her obsession with the basic biology at the core of the act was a revelation. She’d accompany Ginger pantyless, in a short skirt, to matinee movies that nobody wanted to see, documentaries about the DDR, and sit on his lap facing the screen, skirt hiked up, grinding her narrow hips between the armrests, and it was like fucking the narrow gap in a crowded elevator’s closing door, ripping his dick off going down. She didn’t like oral, she had no patience with anal, she never once gave him a hand job…mostly because all of these techniques represent profligate wastes of semen. 

She warned him, from the beginning, that she wanted to get pregnant. They didn’t have to think about it, they didn’t have to try…but she wouldn’t work to prevent it, either. If it happens, it happens, she would say, but I’m hoping it will. Every time we screw, screw as though you’re stuffing a baby in me. Screw as though your DNA really means it, ja? He liked how she pronounced it: skvoo. 

“Look at that,” Birdy would gasp, pretending to be shocked, her hand over her mouth. “Flaming elephant trunk! Bring it to me!” 

She wasn’t on the pill, and she threw all his condoms away the first night he slept over, rifling through his travel bag. “I’ll raise the offspring on my own if you don’t want this,” she’d announce, climbing off of him afterwards, cupping her pussy with both hands, careful not to spill a drop. “But no more abortions, that’s clear.” 

The first night they picnicked on the steps of the Friedrichpalast, she summed up her romantic history for him with a shrug, crunching a carrot and staring sadly at his lap: “Three boyfriends, three abortions.” What she didn’t say was that two of the abortions had been with one particular boy, the dangerous one preceding him, with whom she’d had the longest and most intense relationship: an “intelligent” skinhead, ten years her junior, named Frank. 

Ginger got the facts six months into their relationship, when they were talking seriously about getting married. They were both 35.  He confessed that he had dabbled in drugs once, long long ago (not true), and she confessed…that she had been deeply in love with a Neo-Nazi, not so very long ago at all. They had been together several years, Ginger’s Birdy and her small-town Fascist. Certain elements of that philosophy, she shrugged, are only common sense… 

Ginger was shocked, but undeterred. The simple fact is that she was the prettiest woman he’d ever been with; she looked like something out of a jewelry box. Her limbs were fragile and smooth, her hair was wavy moonlight, her skin was frost on a windowpane. He could see the blue veins pulse in her opal breasts when he sucked them. She was translucent; she made him feel darker, stronger, when she straddled him, her hair pouring down on his face. 

“Jews own all of this,” she’d sigh, nodding at the Ku’damm, West Berlin’s equivalent of State Street, and Ginger would laugh at her, pointing out the absurdity. Birdy hated Israel and Turks and Slavs, but found anything American impossibly cool. He therefore saw himself as her patient reformer. “Oh God, these Gypsies, breeding like rats,” she’d sneer, clutching him as though for protection when they were approached by concertina-playing children on the U-Bahn. So Ginger would make a point of correcting her by giving the little beggars money, and calling them cute. No stranger is stranger than an early self, the self you were ten years ago; no mockery or disappointment more crushing, either, probably, than if the old and new you could meet. Beggars with concertinas get nothing but glares from the new Ginger. About that perhaps Birdy was right. But the rest? 

Ginger didn’t think about any of Birdy’s “issues” at the time, of course…all he cared about was being in love, and fucking about four times a day, and dreaming out loud with his girl…she of the eyebrows so blonde that they couldn’t be seen unless you were kissing her…dreaming out loud about their future children…their raucous brood. They married in a civil ceremony at the Bezirksamt Prenzlauerberg; each of them brought a witness that neither of them knew; afterwards they paid the two off and went west for ice cream. He baptized her Berthe Neudorffer Green with a dollop of rum raisin on her forehead. “My uncle probably crossed this very bridge fifty years ago,” he told Birdy, as they walked back home across the Fucking the Enemie bridge that evening, “isn’t that weird? How life repeats itself? Like a loop.” And every repetition adds a layer of irony. They moved into his flat on Kantstrasse. 

“Deeper! Deeper!” she’d gasp. “Don’t waste a drop!” 

There were precursors of Birdy way back in ‘44, watching the Americans roar into town in their muddy jeeps, or striding in a loose phalanx across the bombed-out squares like swains on their way to a country dance, walking with the unrepeatable cool of souls that were soaking with country reels or swing music, milk-fed boys with heavy thighs, clanking with heavy equipment. Unca Jerry had entertained Ginger with his inappropriate stories, about his soldier time, maybe set in Berlin, maybe in Munich, and Ginger could picture him crossing this very bridge on Friedrichstrasse, with a rifle slung over his shoulder, helmet under an arm, chewing his clove-flavored Beekman’s gum and watching a colored platoon marching by in the other direction singing “White Christmas” with ironic gusto, changing “White” to “Weiss”. 

It wasn’t until long after Ginger lost his virginity that he finally worked out that all of the tantalizing tales that Unca Jerry told him at bedtime about the hungry long-legged “frauleins” he’d encountered in the roofless clubs and waterless flats of the liberated city had more than probably been kerls, rather: boys named Fritz and Heinz and Bobby. How close “kerls” is to “girls”. In Unca Jerry’s descriptions they always had smart, short “pageboy” haircuts and “dangerous tongues” and waists like writhing serpents. Fucking the enemy: that’s a hard thrill to beat. Standing on that bridge on Friedrichstrasse in the fog, he pretended he could see Unca Jerry down there, hidden with a friend in the shadows, the tunnel echoing with the suck and slap and sighs of dark water. Of all the ghosts Ginger was then dealing with, Unca Jerry was the easiest with which to commune. 

A weak-chinned man with a very low hairline and vampire-white skin (well-dressed but in a state of Dionysian disarray: his coat seemed bright and bristling new but for multiple cigarette burns on both sleeves) emerged from the fog and approached Ginger where he stood on the bridge. It was three or four in the morning…the night had boiled its last weak lumens of natural light off and was at its greatest density, the darkest liquid at the bottom of the pot. This was the time of the morning when anyone out in it found his or her self in a perfect position to deliver a soliloquy, alone on stage and clutching Yorrick’s skull, the eerie audience (of who? of what?)  rapt. The slightest gesture would take on great drama…the unexpected addition to the stage of another character could only be greeted with dread. 

“American?” the man inquired, with a not very posh British accent. He asked it with a smile that anticipated Ginger’s response with great pleasure. He leaned on the 19^th century stone balustrade of the Fucking the Enemie bridge with his back to the water and nodded at Ginger’s curt affirmative. He put a palm on his forehead and said “Christ,” and whistled and marveled, “I’ve been at it all night, mate, and I’m not half knackered. When in Rome, as they say. Do people live in this city, or are we all just thrill-seeking tourists? Tell me, do you live here?” 

Again, Ginger nodded. 

“Well you’ve got more energy than me, mate, I’ll hand you that. If I did…this…more than a few times a year…” 

He looked away, down the road into the fog, laughing. “Oh dear. Dear dear dear. I can read your mind, you know. You’re thinking: what’s this poof on about, right? You’re thinking: here he is, him in his quiff and his fucking New Romantic shoes, about to put that disgusting question to me.” He turned to face Ginger with a grin so huge it was frightening. “Am I right?” 

“Listen,” he winked. “Put your mind at ease. Me, I hate queers. No, really, I fucking hate them. I hate them so much…to be honest, my lady is quite puzzled by it all…she calls it my affliction. What do you have against queers, she says, what about Freddie Mercury, she says, you bought A Night at the Opera like everyone else…” he placed his hand on his forehead again, “…ah…but what’s more queer than going on and on about how much you hate queers, is what you’re thinking, right? That’s just your entry level Freud, innit, no news there.” 

He took a step towards Ginger and Ginger sobered and straightened up quite suddenly, and he made sure that his height and weight were clear and preemptively threatening but not in a provocative way (situations could escalate very rapidly…violence could strike like lightning…events occur in two seconds that participants regret for years) and he took an involuntary step backwards. But the man was simply handing Ginger a business card and saying, with the sniff of pride of a retired snooker champ now selling Caribbean cruises,  “Barry Coughlin…friends call me Bazza, or Cough… and I’m the best drug dealer you’ll ever have. Take it.” 

Ginger found that his wife was awake when he got home, reading Thomas Mann. She didn’t even look up from the page when he entered the bedroom, though she had buttoned her pajamas all the way up to the very last button (does any woman alone in a well-heated apartment button all the buttons of her pajamas?) when she heard him at the front door.  He stripped out of his shoes and coat, hung the coat in the closet and walked down the hall to the bathroom. 

Living in a household where children have been wanted badly, but are never possible, is exactly like living in a household where children have died. Or, no, it’s worse, because children who never really existed are more demanding, craftier, make greater claims on us; needy little demons with dangerous access to our imaginations. They can’t be talked away: they don’t even have names. Like the missing who never make the transition to being officially dead, they disturb our sleep, and shame us out of laughing too hard, or too long, or even at all. Not only that, but somebody has to take the never-articulated or vaguely implied blame. The terrible responsibility for un-conceived children he didn’t want with all of his heart in the first place. 

When the doctor told her that she was incapable of pregnancy in large part due to an infection she’d suffered as a result of her third abortion, the first thing that happened was  that Ginger’s wife’s interest in sex vanished completely, quite literally overnight. The next thing that happened was she became the missing children, the children they couldn’t have:  several of them, not very lovable, brats and terrors…a petulant one, a cruel one, one who disagrees with everything you fucking want or say or stand for on principle, for the pure pleasure of throwing the battered logic right back in your face. This was hard. They had been married two years when the doctor delivered his verdict: if you ever want children, you will be forced to adopt. There are children in Romanian orphanages… 

The rectangle of little bulbs around the vanity mirror in the bathroom was blinding. There was a circular magnifying mirror on a telescoping arm mounted to the wall to the immediate right of the larger mirror and Ginger could see a big red eye, making its miniscule adjustments, left and right and up and down, taking everything in. Something about the bright light (it was like Florida in that bathroom whenever he wanted it, even on the drearest and Berlinest of days or nights) cheered him up, counter-balancing Birdy’s effect on his will to live. The bathroom door was bolted and he was blinking at his complex reflection, weighing a two ounce baggie of brown flake crystals in his cold right hand. There was a hot-air balloon painted to look like a Restoration-era moon hovering directly over the building at that moment, perfectly symbolic of his predicament, but Ginger had no way of knowing this. 

He was thinking: The devil approaches you on a bridge over a polluted river at three in the morning in Berlin and gives you…free of charge…a drug that nobody has ever heard of…and you…what. Take it? 

He was thinking: I can crawl off to bed now and lay there, curled up, fetal, my back to her as she reads, a patch of skin on my spine the only point of contact between our bodies, there where my spine will touch her fully clothed ass or thigh, where I will feel myself glowing, and her cold flesh sucking at my desperate, generous heat…and that is our sex life. I can lay there with my useless erection, eyes shut, back to her, enduring it. My torture is her only source of strength. She’s always reading those books. I can lay there to the sound of another page turning. Hatred is healthier than this. I pray for hatred like the crucified pray for death, but it never comes. The closest I can get is sleep. Do I want to sleep? 

He wasn’t even sure how to take the drug (shoot it? smoke it? lick it? sniff it? stuff it up his ass in one of Birdy’s suppositories?) but he took it. He chewed a few flakes, sitting on the toilet’s lid, head in his hands, waiting for the kick and within minutes, for the first time in months, he didn’t care. About anything. 

And even Unca Jerry, way up there in Heaven, couldn’t see the harm in that.

  K was already up and making the first cup of coffee of the day by nine o’clock, early by almost any standard in Berlin. He was awake and busy so early because of the phone call he’d gotten from P, a Brit that K knew from his early days in the city. P had called to ask if K was still planning to give up his old flat, and if so, would K consider giving the flat to P’s friend, an Artist? “She’s German,” P warned, “But you’ll like her.”

Ten minutes later the Artist herself called and they agreed, through the medium of her awkward English and his pidgin German, that she should come over to look at the flat at noon. He’d taken both calls in bed and dozed again for a little while after laying the phone on the pillow beside him.

He had a disturbing dream and woke to the sound that the phone makes when the receiver lies out of its cradle for too long, which his dream had re-invented as the ambulance-mocking siren of a blood-red hearse. He backed out of the bed, rubbing his arms as though its sheets were soaked with the nightmare.

K put the espresso pot on the boil and got straight to tending the oven. There were three ceramic ovens in the flat, all beautifully ornamented in Belle Epoque style, because the flat was quite old, but he only used the biggest oven, a gigantic green monster in the living room, to heat with. In fifteen years he’d mastered the technique that the oven required…putting a certain number of coal bricks in at certain intervals, and never letting the fire go out completely. Also, the key was keeping the flue shut at all times, unless he’d overslept and was forced to start a fire from scratch. Keeping the flue shut bottled the heat in the oven, where before he’d let it escape up the chimney…a lot of expensive hot smoke. Nowadays the flat was always warm, even during that very cold winter. K looked out the living room windows, rubbing his hands together.

He looked out across the frozen park, and the long row of cookie-colored buildings on the other side of the boulevard, behind which the naked sun sheltered. Dogs fussed and sprinted and a short broad Turkish woman in a tan raincoat and a frown-framing white scarf was crossing towards K’s building in a slow diagonal across the stiff brown mud. He imagined she was walking straight from Istanbul with news of a death in the family.

What a morbid, if surreal, fantasy! He began to worry that the nightmare he’d had would infect his thoughts all day. He stared with hunger out the window, looking for an image to replace the optical aftertaste of the nightmare. He wanted to crowd his eyes with Life. Unfortunately, because of the season, and the neighborhood, he only managed to gather faint impressions of it. There was a blue haze of smoke, pressed down below the roof-level by the heavy lid of the cold sky, soaking the buildings in ectoplasm. All those coal-burning ovens. He opened a window and leaned out and inhaled and it could have been the smell of a mining town in Kentucky. But the neighborhood, poor yet chic, was called Kreuzberg, the ghetto assigned to Berlin’s congenital underclass of Turks, invited and then snubbed as post war labor. Turks and Bohemian Germans and thrill-seeking American students, who were easily identified because the heels of their shoes were always new, mingled in the cafés and on the streets in the summer.

K was surprised when the doorbell rang: if it was P’s friend, she was three hours early. It was also too early to be the mailman with a package. One could never rule out the possibility that it was the man who spot-checked to see if you had paid for your radio and television licenses; a separate fee for each individual television or radio. K had thus far eluded that fine, the kind of luck that was exactly equivalent to his managing to have lived in Berlin for fifteen years without once being splattered with pigeon shit. But he knew his time was coming.

When K opened the door he broke out in a huge grin and hugged the man standing there, who had to drop the two suitcases he was carrying in order to receive the hug. Just like him to show up this way, after four years, without warning!

“You bastard!” shouted K, with pleasure.

They had coffee together in the kitchen, where K tilted away from the table on the back legs of his chair and laughed into his coffee cup at his friend’s stories. His friend, who had married a pretty-but-icy German girl and moved to The States with her, was now fleeing back to Berlin, an optimistic refugee, talking hopefully about a divorce, and looking for a nicer girl to forget his recent mistake in. She didn’t have to be stunning, but she had to be nice, after what he’d been through.

Of course, he mused, all the better if she’s stunning and nice. And rich, with her own big flat. Why not? And what would it hurt if she was also a good cook who could cut his hair and tighten the buttons on his coat occasionally? And who was he to look a gift horse in the mouth if she was fluent in English, loved his stories, and encouraged him to publish? And a nymphomaniac on top of it?

They laughed with their hands clamped over their eyes. They couldn’t stop laughing.

K told his friend that he himself was moving to a trendy neighborhood in the East, to Prenzlauer Berg, and that his friend could take over the old flat…he gestured dismissively at the whitewashed walls…in exactly two weeks. It was cheap, K had renovated it extensively, and the neighbors were relatively quiet. His friend asked him exactly how much the rent was and he couldn’t believe it when K told him…it was half of what he paid, in California, for an apartment that was a quarter of the size. That was a good sign: his first day back in Berlin had produced a windfall.

He said “God, I’m tired!” and K showed him to a little room with a neatly made bed in it, and a lamp on a table and a small white ceramic oven at the other end of the room; it would take hours for the oven to become even mildly warm, and K hadn’t used it in so long that he was sure that it needed to be cleaned. They put the suitcases together at the foot of the bed and K went and got an electric radiator, rolling it down the hallway with a jovial admonishment not to use it so much that the room actually felt warm…electricity in Berlin was still expensive.

The traveler kicked off his shoes and got under the covers fully clothed, because the sheets were so cold. The electric radiator hummed soothingly beside the bed. K had pulled the curtains and the room was dark enough to sleep in. The switch on the radiator glowed orange, like a Christmas light, and he slipped into sleep as his eyes directed his soul into the hearth-like color.

K went about his business quietly around the flat, so as not to disturb his slumbering friend. He closed the kitchen door and washed the dishes with a trickle of water, stopping himself, in the middle of a song he’d started to hum, with a disbelieving grin. Four years and not a word, and now boom! Just like that! But K admired the nerve of it; the spontaneity. He thought of the days to come.

His friend will sit on the edge of the wobbly old table in the living room, staring out across the park through these open windows. Birds will remember their immemorial songs. and dogs will tussle and bark and sprint on the firm mud. Turkish women, in their tan raincoats and white head-scarves, will cross the park in plodding diagonals towards Prinzessinnen strasse…

Just at that moment, the doorbell rang, and K thought: shit.

P’s friend, looking for a flat. K’s first ridiculous impulse was to hide, to remain absolutely still, pretending that he wasn’t home, which would cause her to press the button repeatedly, which would wake up his friend, which would complicate the situation further. He didn’t have time to improvise a story; an excuse for why he couldn’t give her the flat; as he hurried down the hallway.

He opened the door with a finger over his lips to hush her greeting. She smiled and reached for his hand and whispered “I am the Artist,” and K gestured for her to follow him into the living room. She was unusually attractive. She was so striking, as it turns out, that his face was burning and he was glad for the chance to turn his back to her as he led her down the long dark hallway.

Rather than working in her favor with him, however, her beauty irritated K. She looked like a Nazi’s idea of a perfect specimen, with the razor-sharp platinum haircut and precise manner to match. She was tall, and elegantly slim, with just enough bust to be alluring, but not so buxom to ruin the lines of her outfit, which looked to K…who admittedly knew nothing of women’s clothing…to be expensive.

There are men who love men, and men who love women, and rarely a type that loves both (the type called “Saint”) and K was a man who loved men. Not sexually…when it came time for sex, his choice of a partner was invariably female… homosexuality was nothing more than a concept to be generous about in his well-educated circle. His love for men wasn’t erotic. He definitely lusted after women…the more distant they were, the more he lusted…but he preferred the friendship and the company and the stories of men. For K and his friends, to be honest, women were usually nothing more than an exotic-but-timeworn topic of discussion, like Hong Kong.

When P first called that morning, asking for a place for his friend The Artist to stay in, and he’d