Teen Angst and Handcream

 

Ginger Green’s destination is a showcase for a supposed rock group at an unlikely venue at the corner where the Ku’damm is crossed by Uhland Strasse. It is an intermittently overcast day. The clouds look like spit on a windshield. It was not easy getting this venue. It was Ginger’s idea but it was Ollie who pulled it off. How Ollie pulled it off…what he threatened or offered…Ginger is almost too frightened to wonder. Ollie refers to the golden demographic of 11-22 as The Bosses. As in, “Yeah, but will The Bosses fall for it?” The band hasn’t taken the stage yet. The band is called Chocolate Chainsaw. Ginger’s brainchild. Ollie didn’t like the name…he lobbied for Soul Soda…but Ginger and Reason prevailed. 

A well known Belgian manufacturer of handcream wanted greater penetration into the youth market. Don’t we all. They commissioned Ginger and his partner Ollie to write a catchy song which wouldn’t reek of jingle and could pass for actual rock. The idea…the good lie…being that the song pre-existed the ad campaign. The song should be able to fake a plausible life of its own. The song should represent a fresh young authentic reality. The song should appear to be written by some movingly struggling band…struggling as in authentic…a band that would have come by sheer coincidence to the attention of the executives at the Belgian manufacturer of handcream. The story will be that a Belgian executive “fell in love with the song and just had to have it for this great new product”. The whole project was reverse-engineered from the plasticky song that Ginger and Ollie slapped together in four hours after lunch the day after the initial call from the ad agency (otherwise known as the House of Good Lies). The song is called “Dreamwalker”. The lyrics have nothing to do with handcream. That’s how the Belgian executives wanted it. 

Chocolate Chainsaw have known each other for two weeks, although they are well-prepared to pretend to be childhood friends. They have been studying. Three of the members are Berliners but the keyboard player Rheinhardt and the lead singer, Lux, are from Hamburg. Lux was recommended as a plausible “rock star” by a manager-friend of Ginger’s and came down by train a month ago, sang the song in a recording studio, and began the grueling process of learning the band’s intensely confabulated back-story. The back-story, as stitched-together as any Hollywood epic by committee, is a group effort from Ginger, Ollie, three executives from the Belgian handcream giant and three executives from the House of Good Lies. The back-story stretches itself the furthest in explaining what the hell they are all doing in Berlin, if they’re British. Lux, according to this tale, is the son of a British diplomat. 

This gig in a McDonald’s is the first showcase. The showcase will be three songs. It’s an attention-span issue. The site was chosen for its strong American associations since the last thing anyone on Ginger’s side of the curtain wants is for Chocolate Chainsaw to read like a German band. The band should seem distinctly British, with Yankee influences. One of the ad guys had said “Clash meets The Strokes” whatever the fuck that meant. Another said “Pogues meet Bon Jovi.” “The Ramones meet Fleetwood Mac,” wasn’t even taken seriously enough to make a bewildered face at.  

The band all speak English with a British accent…this was a prerequisite more important than fluency on an instrument. Germany divided by America equals Great Britain…therefore the McDonald’s. The Kentucky Fried Chicken would have been too weird. Dunkin Doughnuts too unhip. A lot is riding on this show. It will not be a play-back…it will be “real”. The band’s Past will be fake therefore its Present must be real; there are rules about that; conceptual guidelines. The band will really be playing and Lux will really be singing a song they will pretend is theirs while pretending to know each other: they have been coached extensively on the conspiratorial glances and inside gags and mysterious asides to one another during solos they should indulge in on stage. 

The showcase is deliberately set during school hours in the middle of the week to force kids who show up for it to be skipping classes, which adds to the aura around the event. The kids attending the show should feel that they are seeing it despite the best efforts of the Powers that Be. The experience should feel like a secret that the kids will smuggle from the show and parcel out like arbiters of cool to their classmates. After building grassroots mystique this way for five weeks, The House of Good Lies will leak the song into media outlets, hoping to spark an explosion of kids claiming to have loved it first while buying the product (which Ginger can’t remember…was it lip balm? Was it sugar-based lubricant?) as an afterthought. But even that isn’t the main goal of the campaign. The main goal is to hook the kids now in order to keep them as adults and get a lock on their children. The goal is genetic conscription. 

Look at Lux. Ginger looks at Lux. Lux is a tall, thin, long-haired blonde of about 23…neurasthenic in a way that should seem ‘70s rock but reads more as 21^st century atonal. Lux is the victim of too many influences and far too many choices…the self-canceling non-presence of the undecidant who doesn’t know where to start and therefore doesn’t. He feels like an unfinished sneeze. Lux, with his big blue eyes and parenthetical hyphen of a mouth looks and walks like a cartoon. In a rehearsal room he puts on a passable show playing rock star; he prances with a hand on his hip and goes down on one knee with the mike-stand or detaches the mike and windmills it on the end of the chord without hitting anyone or knocking his own teeth out. Milling around in the McDonald’s before show time however he looks awkward and self-conscious in his black sleeveless t-shirt and the long white scarf around his neck and his huge red satin elephant bell-bottoms and Ginger realizes that a drug-free “rock star” is a sad and disappointing thing. He only hopes Lux doesn’t choke. Ginger has seen many a performer choke and is sensitive to the half-dozen or so telltale predictors…cardinal of which is excessive humility and/or politeness before a gig. Which Lux is displaying. He’s clutching a complimentary burger, enjoying the freebie perk. Or maybe he’s really hungry. But Germans are strange when it comes to free merchandise.  

Ginger spots, in the growing crowd of surprisingly attractive teenage girls, silver-haired men who look out of place in a European McDonald’s and pegs them as guys from the ad agency, or maybe Belgian guys from the company, or perhaps a smattering of both. They had evinced little interest, both camps, in having representatives at this first showcase, which everyone very coolly predicted would be “inevitably rough-edged”…but it’s obvious they’ve changed their minds. Or had planned on spying from the start. If any of the well-dressed, silver-haired men are in fact from either the ad agency or The Company, there’s a good chance that this is the only “rock” concert they’ve ever been to and are using a professional excuse to do just once what they never had the chance to do as teenage boys already on the fast track of Euro-Corporate life. Upper-class Germans can guess with an accuracy of within a 5% deviation a man’s income merely by being told his age, his last name and the kindergarten he attended. A name with a “Von” in it is also significant. 

The McDonald’s is now packed to its capacity of three hundred and fifty and to mollify its normal clientele the management is distributing free ice cream in little plastic cups with wooden spoons to everyone and meanwhile giving Ginger fervid looks meaning get them going exactly at the scheduled start-time and get them finished exactly at the scheduled wrap-up time and get these non-buying kids the fuck out of my franchise immediately after. A space of perhaps ten square meters has been cleared around the drumkit and the amplifiers in the main dining room and the space is already filled to the extent that female bodies are pressed against the equipment. It is ten minutes until show time and Ginger squeezes through the peristaltic throng (with its absolutely un-Americanly low average body mass index; imagine squeezing through an American mob from the same demographic and actually feeling bones) towards Lux.  

Lux is propped against the wall, down a short hall, next to the door to the unisex WC. He is chatting with Reinhardt the freakishly tall keyboarder and clutching a second burger with a cartoonishly perfect crescent-shaped bite out of it. When Ginger makes eye-contact with Lux he gestures peremptorily at his wrist-watch and Lux nods, chewing vociferously; chewing so vociferously in fact that he looks like an old-time speeded-up Keystone Cops type film of the silent era; and holds up his burger by way of explanation. Lux falls back into conversation with Reinhardt, who has combined elements of a freakishly tall man’s posture (the round-shouldered slouch of a vulture) with elements of the keyboarder’s default stance (arms folded low across the chest and feet splayed far apart) and added the twist of the terminal adolescent’s addiction to the outlandish and/or uncomfortable by propping himself like a stork on one leg. 

Reinhardt is by far the oldest member of Chocolate Chainsaw but hides the fact under dyed black hair, and a skater’s cap, with the fringe of his hair down over his eyes. At the cap-hidden crown of his dye-job there is a large asterisk of gray which appears almost white in contrast. Reinhardt is 37 and he can’t fake a British accent but they handled that by forbidding him from speaking on stage or during interviews: he’ll be the mute one. Ginger barely knows Lux and Reinhardt not at all; Lux got Reinhardt into the project and that was the one concession he demanded in his contract. 

Ginger notices that Lux is clutching the half-chewed second burger in one hand and holding a third in reserve, still wrapped, in the other, and they weren’t plain burgers after all, but, rather, the slightly more exalted filet-o-fish. This is either a good sign or a bad sign, but at least he’s hungry. Singers with hysterical stage fright don’t woof down filet-o-fish sandwiches just minutes before a gig, even if the management is providing them free of charge. Not the Big Macs or the Quarter Pounders, of course. Just the filet-o-fish or the  plain burgers featuring a pickle and a dollop of ketchup on a bun. Ginger would love to see one of those digital bits of postmodern burger data next to the prototype, a real live hamburger…one of which Ginger himself gobbled down at the first official McDonald’s restaurant in creation, known as McDonald’s #1, just outside of Chicago in the scary suburb of Des Plaines in the year 1964 as a guest of his Uncle Man. But everything these days is a copy of a copy of a copy of a copy… 

A very pretty and tallish fifteen year old brunette in a pink sweater and a low-cut white top and skin-tight white jeans no longer than to the bottoms of her calves…with skin as softly reflective as the surface of a sugar-frosted cookie…tugs the sleeve of Ginger’s burgundy blazer. Every girl in the room is wearing either a vanilla-based or musk-based scent and she seems to have opted for the vanilla, which heightens Ginger’s impression that licking her face would yield frosting. 

“Excuse me, are you, like, with the band?” Her English is advanced MTV. It will take another few sentences before Ginger can be sure that she isn’t American. Her voice is throaty and older and sexier than it should be.  

“I’m the body guard.” 

“That’s very cool.” She reaches to shake Ginger’s hand. “I’m the Tanja.” 

“Nice to meet you, Tanja.” Her hand is a mere trinket in his.  

“Can you tell me, please, what does Chocolate Chainsaw really mean?” She manages to make the question extremely suggestive. Or maybe Ginger is projecting. 

Ginger says “You’ll have to ask the singer, Lux, that question,” and he nods towards Lux, who squeezes just then past both of them with an ironic salute, with Reinhardt in tow, both Reinhardt and Lux giving Tanja craven side-long glances more appropriate to roadies for the band than the lead singer of the band itself but there’s nothing Ginger can do about that. It’s disturbing enough that this fifteen year old hasn’t stopped flirting with 45-year-old Ginger long enough to give 23-year-old Lux the eye. With her weird European sophistication about power this girl has gone right for Ginger over the lead singer of the band she’s supposed to adore, despite Ginger’s pose as a hireling. Germans girls know to look for the boredom…the ones worth knowing are always truly bored. American kids are much more sophisticated consumers of media which is why their pop culture is better…but sophistication about media breeds a crippling innocence towards the real world of power and fucking and animal life. The fatness of the American teen is a symptom of innocence. German girls know better. After two local world wars and a local cold war, they are tuned right into the animal verities. 

“Tanja, I want you to look at my shoes.” 

“Oh, they’re nice. Where’d you get ‘em?” 

“The store I bought them at is no longer in business. Out of business for fifteen years. These shoes are older than you are.” 

“I guess that means it’s, like, time to replace ‘em.” 

“How old are your parents, Tanja? I bet they’re not as old as I am. I bet your father would give me his seat on the U-Bahn.” 

“My father wouldn’t be caught dead on the U-Bahn.” She looks at him quizzically. “Are you American or not?” 

Ginger says, “American? Yeah, I’m American. When I was your age I was an all-American virgin, and there was no such thing as cell-phones, the internet, VCRs, CDs, DVDs, reality TV or AIDS. We didn’t even have answering machines. Don’t you think you’d be happier without all that junk, Tanja?  Don’t you think you’d be happier having picnics and climbing trees and flying kites in the sunshine for a change?” 

“Sounds, like, romantic. Are you free this Saturday?” 

“You’re not getting my point.” 

“Maybe my English isn’t, like, good enough. What is your point?” 

“That I’m old enough to be your grandmother’s gigolo.” 

“Na, und?” 

“You’re just a child.” 

“You make it sound like it’s, like, my fault.” 

“I’m talking about wrong and right.” 

Tanja puts her hand on Ginger’s face and pushes it gently to the left.  

“See that pretty girl in the expensive clothes over there? Talking on her handy? Looks like Paris Hilton but with much bigger boobies?” She pronounces “clothes” as cloe-thus. She pronounces “boobies” as boob-eyes. 

 “Yes.” 

“She’s sixteen, she’s my best friend, and she drives, like, an S-Class. Okay? She’s the happiest person in, like, the world. Her dad is, like, in really good shape. She has her own flat in London and gets really good grades in school and she…goes on dates with her dad because her mom is like, a total, like, bitch…you know? She got the boob surgeries because her dad has…wie sag man…suggested it. Is suggested a word? You know what I mean. Don’t you like German girls?” 

The drums and the guitars kick in and Tanja gets on her tip-toes and shouts “What’s your name, anyway? You never told me!” but Ginger shakes his head and waves bye-bye and pushes his way back towards the main dining room to stand in the deafening epicenter of the Chocolate Chainsaw experience. Anything less than a rude exit would have been a seduction. Ginger is trying to be scrupulous about that. He is trying. The silver-haired men are nodding to the beat at various stations around the room. They are all wearing sunglasses. 

The first song has a thirty-two bar intro to give kids outside or in the WC a chance to drop whatever they’re doing and rush to a spot in front of the”Stage” without missing Lux’s entrance. The third song, the handcream song itself, scheduled to commence in exactly six and a half minutes, is to be the high point of the gig…it’s the song that the silver-haired men flew down here to see. The first song, the opener, is just the mood-setter and is built around a two-bar sample from the head riff of the Animals cover of the Nina Simone song Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood…they are not seriously thinking of releasing a tune built around such an expensive sample, of course, but if the kids flip over it, who knows? The beat is already hooking them. It’s such a heavy, cocky, storm-troopers-on-the-march-into Paris kind of groove. 

The drummer, a hefty kid with black horn-rimmed glasses and a modified Mohawk (short strip on top, lines on the sides) is the best musician in the band. He was participating in a dozen other projects until Ginger began paying him a modest monthly allowance not to. The kid’s a monster. Ginger likes watching him slamming the skins with the professional frown of a proctologist on the toilet. The beat is so solid you could nail sheet rock to it. But the guitarist is merely a mammal and only there because he’s Japanese, which is still considered cool in Berlin; not Japaneseness in and of itself but Japaneseness with a guitar. And the youngest at 18, the bass player, he’s so cute he looks like his own little sister but is far from a Jaco Pastorius…see him grinning that 5-gee moonlaunch grin of terror. He pinches off each elephant-dung fundament on the downbeat with a sexless thud, but it’s okay because the drummer makes it all right. A good drummer is a panacea. Lux has his back to the audience (as per instruction), waiting for the upbeat at the end of bar 31 before he’s to whirl around and grab the mic and deliver the first line of the song, titled Ms. Undastood, which is “Hey I ain’t your toy, little girl, and I ain’t your baby boy, little g-r-r-r-r-l…” 

Everyone in the densely packed McDonald’s, as far as Ginger can see, is bouncing like beans on a bongo, locked into the song before Lux even opens his mouth. He scans the crowd for his partner Ollie Daumen and lo and behold he catches Ollie standing on the very spot that Ginger himself vacated just twenty four bars ago, proving the theory that nature abhors a vacuum, or that Ginger and Ollie are matter and anti-matter…for Ollie is standing with territorial intensity right there next to Tanja, looking quite sly and irresistibly bored and more than old enough to be her father. 

Lux whips around with his wild blonde hair and his eyes screwed shut, lurching across the stage to reach blindly for the mic like it’s a loaded rifle in a room full of lions and he opens his mouth and a buttermilk-colored python of vomit springs out. It coils around the shoulders of several little girls in the front row, suspended solid in the strobe of a camera flash for a millisecond before collapsing down the fronts of their dresses…setting off screams and a stampede in which several teens are severely rattled but none are very seriously hurt. 

Three Structural Definitions of Race

 

A. George Walton was born in 1809, child of a black father and white mother, and died in prison about twenty eight years later, having lived as a man who was good-looking in a manner that predated all hope of appreciation, as if a painting by Yves Tanguy had found its way back to the dawn of the 19^th century only to inspire baffled glares and lots of kicks in the pants, as though a kick in the pants was the only persuasive critique his critics could improvise to respond to the singularity of his appearance: the loopy curls of broth-colored hair, the tawny skin, the full lips and a high-bridged nose sporting freckles…this, remember, during an era when leaded-white faces and lips like livid incisions were considered the very essence of beauty.

B. Von Ziegeldorff drove into town every Friday night to patronize a low club called The Chicken Shack which was famous for appealing to blacks. The drive in from his villa in a wooded, nearly rustic suburb of Potsdam through the throb of weekend traffic often took ninety minutes, during which he either had time to nurture his grievances against society in general and women specifically or listen to an instructional cassette of Advanced English for Germans. Somewhere in the lonely vastness of his car there was also a misplaced cassette of Callas he was suddenly in the mood to hear again after a year-long estrangement from that exquisitely bullying voice, the voice of high culture, because he’d been listening to far too much soul music recently.

C. Ramses sneeks a peek at the graying blonde as she steers gravely home. Or so he assumes. She reaches over and switches on the sound system. The fantasy, obviously, is that they will do the dirty without exchanging so much as a single word and she’s afraid that Ramses will ruin it now by saying a word. She doesn’t know that Ramses Gordon knows the rules of this game so well that he might have invented it; that he can play it blindfolded and has on more than one occasion and that he is thinking, also, against the background of the anti-erotic aria from Lucia Lammermoor, how differently blacks and whites absorb the behavioural proscriptions of Christianity. How this difference has a measurable impact on the respective copulatory styles of the races. How they fuck and how we live. Their guilt and our shrugs and the sacrificial sacrament of chicken.

A. Across the broad map of his short life, having been abandoned at an early age by parents driven chiefly by sexual logic through a low-walled maze of poverty, George Walton served almost a third of his earthly existence in prison. Born James, alias George, alias Jonas, alias James, alias Burley, alias Chick or Chicken John.

B. There was one black in particular. Von Ziegeldorff had made the mistake, early on, of running after all of them at once, like a kitten in a fishpond, therefore catching none, but being observant and far from stupid he soon took note of the fact that the old hands were patiently bedding one after another of the finest specimens the club had to offer, merely by chosing one and bringing to bear a convincing ersatz of passion until the goal was achieved (or quota met) and thereafter moving on. Every black girl in the club, of course, thinks of herself as The One who will prove to be so irresistible that the game will stop with her, therefore perpetuating the game.

C. Look at this respectable middle-aged German lady, for example. The grimly determined look on her face (this is supposed to be fun, lady); the way she clutches that steering wheel as though it’s hot with current: she feels Christ’s eyes on her, his disappointment in her, his weary sneer of disgust. Her husband has no problem with her little Liebesaffären…he encourages her because it absolves him of guilt for his substantial porno expenses. Christ is not so easygoing about it. Christ is not quite so cool. He plagues her with subliminal remonstrations (in which his lips never move, spookily, but his sad eyes pierce her). She wasn’t even raised in an overtly Christian family because Germans are traditionally pagan and she believes that she believes in fucking as a kind of physical therapy…a higher form of jogging…all the more therapeutic if she fucks an Asian, a Native American, or a Black. That’s what she thinks she thinks a liberal West German should believe they feel about it. But a stern (and vaguely oriental) Christ has the last word on all that and she has to hide the physical act itself behind all kinds of masks and filters to smuggle the pleasure out of Hell like a red hot trinket between her legs without fainting.

A. As a boy the tragic mulatto was the object of lazy sport among the poor whites of his acquaintance, though when he was kicked in the seat of his dusty breeches it was as a kind of running gag or after-thought, rarely with enough force to mean tears. As a manchild George fed himself by doing odd jobs for neighbors and once spent a summer doing back-breakingly honest labor for a farmer who paid him with two counterfeit five-dollar bills. “Well nigh half of what was owing me,” as handsome James alias George alias Chicken John put it. A philosophical turning point.

B. Earletta Goins was a would-be disco singer with her own little cassette out called The Story of My Life, released by a local label, an independent based in East Berlin and on this particular Friday night Von Ziegeldorff tipped the DJ a substantial amount to play both sides of Earletta’s cassette, as well as subsidizing free beers for all the patrons in the club (about two hundred people) for the duration of the cassette’s play, making for a good mood and plenty of people on the dance floor to dance beside VZ and Earletta while they danced with attention-getting self-consciousness to her disco music, which was neither truly bad nor truly good but fell within the range of most things.

C. The bedroom smells like…what? A kitchen. It smells vaguely of chicken not fried but stewed. Disgusting. On the walls flanking the massive bed, one on each, are two large wood-framed photos meant to resemble very old oil paintings. There is one of the lady in question and the other of her husband, or what looks like her husband or could be an Ex, and they are dressed up to look like an Iroquois chief and his squaw…the weak-chinned fellow sports an enormous feathered head dress. His lady, in real life the gray-haired blonde on her back on the bed with her eyes closed and her legs up like an as-yet-unstuffed Christmas goose, is black-haired and light-eyed in her sepiatone photo and neither reveal the subtlest shade of mirth, self-mockery, defensive irony or even decent embarrassment in the portraits.

A. After another period of backbreaking in the Charlestown shipyards and then aboard a fishing smack with the olfactory bloom of an African cathouse’s toilet, Walton fell in with a hook-nosed ex-convict named Symmes who mentored him in the trade of bank robbing, the craft of which George failed fully to master, being neither self-righteous nor brutal enough with his pistol, landing in prison in 1824 for a six month sentence after which he dabbled unchastened in the lighter art of the highwayman…with just as little talent. When Walton wasn’t busy being apprehended (being a mulatto in early 19^th century America was a liability in the incognito game), it was easy if unremunerative work, as most of his victims chose to toss him their wallets and flee rather than tussle or risk injury at the hands of a thieving diabolical coon with freckles.

B. “I must confess,” shouted VZ, “I have never before seen a lady of your race with these green eyes of such beauty,” and he mimed his own astonishment, hands on his heart as though it might burst, for also her skin was the color of the pancakes he’d been mad for on his legendary trip across America, during which being a slave to this crude delicacy had given him an insight into the American psyche he was sure he could apply to the swift achievement of his goal.

C. Ramses imagines, quite vividly, the chin-free husband answering the telephone on one of those interminable Sundays of petty household chores choreographed to the pandering drone of television, the day on which long-married Germans speak less than a sentence to each other and he envisions the man of the household putting a hand over the receiver and lifting an eyebrow and invoking, yet again, the worn-out magic of his wife’s name as though it were a mild rebuke, tonally, or the long-suffering request to please stop something.

A. It was only when Walton came upon intended victim John Fenno, returning one evening from a dance across the old Chelsea bridge, that he met resistance and his fate. Fenno was a beefy man and sprang from his cart to wrestle Walton rather than part with his coins or jewelry, invigorated as he was by sexual frustration; had the dance been successful things may well have turned out differently; as it was, the robbery was thwarted though Walton escaped, but not before trying and failing to punish Fenno with a bullet. A suspender buckle saved Fenno’s life and doomed George as he was soon captured.

B. Driving on the fast black road towards his villa before dawn with gems of sparse precipitation fixed like glass moths to his glittering windshield, VZ found himself bedevilled by a sickening internal debate as to whether he dare risk slipping into the stereo his rediscovered cassette dub of a valuable reel-to-reel bootleg of the one-time-only performance of Callas doing Lammermoor with the notorious unscored E-flats included…punishingly high notes Callas tries for with laudable brio but misses, grazing the first E-flat with such a strained shading of the pitch that it’s almost a blue note and chipping the second with a Levantine fraction redolent of the bazaar. In every subsequent performance she eschewed the dreaded E-flats entirely. Wisely. As far as VZ knew, he was the only one on Earth in possession of this wounded version of Donizetti’s lugubrious masterpiece, a discarded run-through of Callas’s premier performance of the piece in Mexico City, 1953, and he felt a craving just then to hear it. Despite the fact that there in the white leather seat beside him was his prize, Earletta Goins, slouched with drowsy pliance, a half smile playing on her chewable lips, lips he fully envisioned in contact with the freckled red glans of his penis and VZ had to think long and hard before changing the sexual weather in his Porsche just then. He could only imagine the anti-aphrodisiacal effect an opera would have on this colored American sex machine. He could only imagine his future grief at never knowing the warm weight of those lips and the breathlessness of those strong brown unshaved legs crushing the breath out of him.

C. Wifey’s on her stomach, moaning and kicking, both hands locked under her thrashing pelvis making an extravagant display of humping alone. Some guy must have told her, thirty years ago, as an excuse for not touching her, that it turns him on. She’s waistless, veiny and pale as an old frog. Ramses very quietly puts his fat dangle of dick away and hitches his pants back up and sneaks out of the bedroom as the gnadige frau whips her egg into its cold-lathered glory. Down the hall and to the left the second floor bathroom door is open and sizzling with the sound of a midday shower and Ramses’s interest is piqued. Is it hubby, home early from work? A nubile daughter, out of school for the day with a chest cold? An impertinent maid, a poltergeist or a poor relation? Ramses eases up towards the invitingly open bathroom door on the plush white carpet, carrying his shoes, boldly curious, holding his breath, with little or no backup plan in place if anyone should catch him.

A. Faced with the gravity of his final punishment, Walton directed that a copy of his memoirs be bound in his own tawny skin and presented to the very Mr. Fenno whom George was sent to the gallows for trying to shoot. White historians take George Walton’s avowal that the gesture was one of esteem for Fenno’s bravery at face value, unfamiliar with the bitter nuances of colored irony. His skin, stripped in a supple parallelogram from his still-warm back after the hanging, was treated to look like a gray deer skin by the tanner, who delivered the stuff without comment to Peter Low the book binder, the latter of perhaps a less pragmatic disposition and therefore much disturbed by the job and suffering increasingly vivid nightmares the rest of his life.

B. I’ve spent so much time and money on this one dream of making sweet love with an Afro-American and on the very threshold of all that and more I decide to risk ruining the sexy mood that all of my efforts have managed by some miracle to put her into with a blast of my so-called high culture? Am I crazy?

C. What Ramses witnesses through the fogged, beaded, soap-scummed shower door is a jug-eared middle-aged black man with love handles and a sagging ass, the cheeks of which are matte and blacker than the rest of him, his large head crowned with a cap of webby, water-matted hair. Who is this man? Where does he fit in the cosmology? Was the guy in the Iroquois photo the Ex or is this the Ex and are things much kinkier around the homestead than Ramses first imagined? This avuncular apparition of a black man with the posture of an utterly defeated specimen. His left armpit foams as he scrubs at it with an eerie lack of energy more suitable to a nursing home sitz bath than a home owner’s shower; it’s like he’s preparing for his own execution. It is a joyless, prosaic, song-free ablution so full of truth that Ramses backs away from the threshold in waves of nausea and a paradoxically simultaneous joy in being alive, the details of which he can claim as wholly his own, his uniqueness in time, the song of his soul in his skin.

Oedipus Rx

Goss slithered out of the hotel bed, careful not to wake the woman beside him. This was not easy: she was the lightest sleeper he’d ever slept with, if that particular night was any evidence. He hadn’t been able to shift a millimeter without getting an interogative grunt from her. His escape from the bed had taken what seemed like hours of excruciating muscle control. He slipped into the bathroom. Suppertime in Minneapolis, he calculated. Sat on the toilet, seat down, lights off, with his elbows on his knees and his head in his hands but he was smiling.

She sat up in bed. The creak of a hotel box spring. ‘Jimmy?’ she said. Not his name. And she pronounced it weird anyway. Yeemy?

Go in there, he ordered himself, and get your clothes. And don’t you say a fucking word.

‘Jimmy?’

Goss stood up, after forming a mental diagram of the location of his clothing, heaped on the chair nearest the television, and he exited the bathroom, ignoring her frighteningly motionless outline, staring straight at the black corner where his pants were waiting to be rescued. Her silhouette registered on his peripheral vision like a shape in a sinister dreamscape. He groped and found his briefs and slipped them on, then his socks, his pants. He got on all fours and patted the floor for his cap and found it. His scarf. His pullover, he recalled, was flung with open arms across the half of the bed they hadn’t used and he remembered kicking his shoes off right inside the door, bouncing them against the wall near the bathroom.

‘Jimmy,’ she sang, softly, sounding very sad.

He shod himself, hopping once on each foot, and got both trembling hands on the door knob and pulled, squinting against the light. He backed out the room with averted eyes, careful not to look as the wedge of illumination closed on her old face as he eased the door shut. He blew out a long breath and turned towards the red AUSGANG sign at the end of the hall before remembering that his jacket, containing not only a copy of Levy’s keys but also all of his money and his passport and the sacred lock of hair, was still hanging in the hotel room closet.

He rapped gently on the door. He waited and rapped again and he tried and failed to adopt a light-hearted tone.

‘Mom?’

Two days before, Goss had been on a couch beside Levy in a café on Königen Strasse called The Supreme Bean. They both liked the music, and one of the waitresses was approachably pretty, so he was often there with Levy after ‘work.’ There were usually one or two dogs in the café, a detail Goss couldn’t get over, and hot coffee was served in water glasses, a technology he had yet to adapt to, but he was comforted by familiar details such as lonely males with powerbooks, lit like young Nosferatus by their desktops. As Tears go by, the ballad second only to the majestic Angie in the Richards/Jagger songbook, was the one playing when it happened.

Goss had never written a song, nor fucked a girl worth writing a song about, but he could remember a time in his life when both activities had seemed like eventual givens. He had almost fucked Tina Yee, and had almost written a song about almost doing it, twenty years ago. It was Levy who had pointed out that every woman whom Goss had ever fucked (not counting his first, a cousin) had been the ex-best friend of the girlfriend previous, proving that Goss was as lazy as lightning when it came to where he struck.

It is the evening of the day…

Goss was clandestinely mouthing the lyrics while Levy talked. He was anticipating with relish the last stanza, containing as it did one of the great couplets in English verse: doing things I used to do, they think are new. Levy, meanwhile, who knew so much about everything that he knew exactly how much of everything that he didn’t know, as he often quipped, was yammering away. Pompeiian snowflakes were animating the cafe window and padding the city, performing a miraculous makeover on the district in which the café was situated.

Something told Goss to look up.

An oldish woman, furred and painted, very tall or on preposterous heels, was pushing through the beaded curtain of the snowfall. Her epic grimace. Her coin-colored bob. Three quarters of a second was all it took. Levy, with his back to her, was still monologing, but Goss’s heart flinched as the beautiful old woman moved across the picture window of the Supreme Bean like a queen puppet traversing a stage. The knowledge, the recognition, was so basic that it was barely conscious. His body knew before his mind could comment. Levy hunched forward in his chair, prepared to deliver the Levy-affirming punchline to his anecdote, banging Goss’s knee for pre-emphasis, when Goss suddenly tugged at and then yanked half of his army surplus jacket from under Levy’s ass.  He held up a finger and said ‘Excuse, please, one second,’ and bolted.

Goss thought about running back for his scarf and gloves but didn’t want to risk losing the woman he was chasing up a shopper-choked sidestreet. She was a long-legged fast walker, like Goss.  She was roughly a block ahead.

She was walking so fast, with a spine so straight and her open coat flying, that Goss wasn’t sure briefly if she didn’t look a bit crazy, haughty and busy in the way of the insanely alone. She was, or had been, he had been told, a performer, if this was her. Goss was 36.That would make her 55. Her bob was luminous in the creamy gloom of the highstreet. In his mind’s eye, Goss, huffingly jogging after the old girl, was an alarming figure…a thug who’d been hired by a jilted plutocrat to ruin her looks or something. But no one else seemed to notice.

In the back yard of the house at 25th and Colfax, one dog-breathed Minneapolis summer during which Tie a Yellow Ribbon had been a hit, a teenage Goss was on his knobby knees, digging a hole behind the oak with a bent spatula. It was a Saturday morning, a lawnmower morning, resounding with the sci fi sound effect of a planet-wide hive and the neighborhood was awash in the green perfume of eau de lawn while Dad added to the ambient roar with his own nasal motor while sleeping a stiff one off. When was the last time anyone mowed this lawn, thought Goss, as he worried a rooty wound in the earth at the mouth of the tree. This was a household of three males sharing the surname Goss, and yet Goss, the youngest son, was the one everyone called Goss. He was back there, in the back yard, behind the oak, intending to bury a picture of Tina Yee.

‘I guess it’s not too right to be doing this over the phone,’ she’d lisped, early that morning. ‘But I gotta be over at Lake Harrriet by noon with the concert and all, huh? So I guess you gotta pretty good idea what it is I called to tell you, huh?’

You may lose that pale recollection, that fading sense-print, of The First Kiss, but you never forget the first ‘I Don’t Love You Anymore,’ because it’s recurrent, it returns in times of great stress like a retrovirus, and the first occurrence feels the same as the Nth. Despite the traditional disclaimer, it is you, you’re the one, the failure, the disappointment, the faded value. The seed, on the deepest level, unworthy of egg. Goss could always tell when an outbreak of I Don’t Love You Anymore was coming. A tight scalp and an upset stomach usually preceded it. They never look better than on the day they dump you. If there is an equation equating the effort a female puts into her physical appearance with the seriousness with which she guards her egg, Goss suspected that his numerical value in the calculation was hovering near some crucial cut-off point.

Tina was face-up, in cap and gown, smiling, beside the hole. About a foot down, down in the nugatory cakemix of middle class earth, his spatula scraped the corner of a cigar box. Hello. Just a few years earlier, finding a box by accident while digging a hole in the backyard would have been the fulfillment of such a cardinal fantasy that it would probably have given the pubescent Goss a fatal orgasm.

He dug it out with bare hands. Grunted when he levered it up and out and knocked its cold moist jacket of dirt off. An old wooden panetellas box with a clasp and hinges, a little coffin for a photograph of a disturbingly attractive woman. Also in the box was a long lock of ice-blond hair. Goss blinked at the photograph, no recognition, no switches tripped but the lock of hair was eerily-if-inaccurately familiar, like flying had been the first time he’d ever been on an airplane.

The evening of that day while Goss was out with his big brother and his big brother’s so-called friends mourning Yee, dousing the burning witch of his heart with tepid beer at a place near the West Bank called Moose’s, the photograph he’d found in the cigar box that morning disappeared from his bedroom from the top right drawer behind the magic mushrooms, never to be seen again, as discreetly as though it had evaporated. He glimpsed, over breakfast the next morning, the wisdom of not mentioning this miracle. Also glad that he had the ice-blond lock of hair in his pocket. He fought the urge to place it, without comment, on the breakfast table.

Joe senior had been a band-leader, a sax player. He’d even toured Europe. His sister, Aunt Pennie, had told the brothers all about it. ‘Your father was once considered the white Charlie Parker…in Germany.’ But there hadn’t been a horn in the house since shortly after the year Goss was born. The saxophone, with its fetal curves, was a dead sibling you never mentioned. It had become Goss’s stillborn twin, like the one that haunted the dim but intense imagination of Elvis.

Elvis was how Goss and Levy had met, in line to see a Beatles marathon (the rapturous A Hard Day’s Night, the wonderfully of-its-era Help, ‘the tragically under-appreciated’ Magical Mystery Tour, the relatively Beatle-free Yellow Submarine, and the elegiac Let it Be) at the Uptown Theatre, a month before Elvis’s self-satirizing death on a toilet. Levy was short but ramrod erect among a slouching jumble of sideburned lotus eaters near the front of the ticket line, turning suddenly to confront Goss about his t-shirt.

‘You’re wearing an Elvis t-shirt to a Beatles film festival?’ Levy laughed. ‘Man, if we weren’t all hippies, we’d have to kick your lanky ass!’

What you do with your hands when you’re not doing anything with them says a lot about you, thought Goss: this loudmouth has his arms folded over his chest like a drill instructor. Goss’s thumbs were hooked in the front pockets of his dungarees. He hankered after girls who struck limp-wristed postures like Cher (or Robert Plant, to be honest), a pose so feminine that it seemed to have vanished entirely from the increasingly macho planet Earth by the time Goss was thirty, a loss that inspired vague pangs.

‘Do you grok what I’m saying, Elvis?’ Levy’s posse laughed the stingy hiccupping smoke-conserving laughter of the gaggle of pot heads they were. ‘Capisch?’

Twenty years later, Levy was still Goss’s friend, and friendship-deformingly rich. He had a company called The Bombardier Beetle and split his time between Minneapolis, Vancouver and Berlin.

Back in the spare room, listening to Levy’s German girlfriend do something dramatic with Levy on the other side of the large flat, Goss found it impossible to sleep. But when they were finally finished, the noise of his own breathing kept him awake, too. He slipped into his briefs and out of his unfamiliar bed, down the hall into the pulsingly blue-lit living room, where he found Levy’s post-coital girlfriend watching the final few minutes of ‘It’s a Wonderful Life’ in German, but with the sound off.

Goss was prepared for what he found because Levy had carefully prepared him: Liesl liked to go naked around the flat. It had something to do with good health, or self-expression, or equal rights. She reflected the light of the wide-screen television, naked as an Equatorial baby and unremarkably attractive. Nice big hands, though, Goss noticed. Her breasts were like a goatee’d lunatic’s unblinking stare. Like a giant surrealist bust of Lenin transfixed by It’s a Wonderful Life.

‘Hallo, man,’ she said. ‘…this flick is so corny.’

Goss squeezed her shoulder. ‘Corny? Are you kidding? It’s like something out of the Brothers Grimm.’

She laughed as Goss settled on the couch beside her. She lowered her voice and said ‘Levy is completely asleep. He’s sleeping like a baby. It’s always like that after…’ She smiled at the Tv. ‘I put him to sleep. Like a baby.’ She licked her lips. She stared sidelong at Goss and Goss cleared his throat but said nothing. He scratched his head. He was breathing in tiny gulps to avoid whiffing evidence of Levy’s recent sex act. Jimmy Stewart was clutching Donna Reed with all of his might, sending a pang through Goss that made him want to jump out of his skin. Liesl hugged her knees and said, a tad loudly, ‘You know what I hate?’

‘What?’ asked Goss, who assumed he was about to be treated to a diatribe against American kitsch as embodied by Jimmy Stewart.

‘I hate not being pretty enough to compromise anyone’s integrity.’

‘I’ve heard disturbing reports,’ said Levy, softly, the next morning, pacing the new carpet in his furnitureless storefront, ‘…that some of you, in violation of my clear policy on this matter, are smoking while distributing promotional materials to the public.’ Levy’s muscular arms were folded over his growing chest because becoming rich had inspired him to start working out. ‘Smoking on the job is not just simply verboten. It’s also un-lady-like and perfectly disgusting.’

A steady stream of grimacing shoppers, some stopping briefly to use the window as a mirror, criss-crossed the sidewalk in front of the shop. ‘Trust me on this; The Public does not need to see a Santa’s Helper with a Marlboro hanging on her lips!’

Levy, who had specific intelligence on the matter, glared at Nikola B., the fleshily-attractive brunette with blonde streaks he had hired on the spot without any references. Nikola had a china doll face. Everyone else…Goss, and five other employees (many of whom didn’t quite get the nuanced English of Levy’s sermon)…looked on as Nikola then gathered her purse and coat from a pile in the corner and left without saying a word, slamming the front door so hard that Goss was afraid the building would collapse. Goss snuck an appreciative peek at Levy, thinking: You dog.

‘That solves that problem,’ said Levy, tucking his Bombardier Beetle t-shirt into his pants with decisive energy. ‘Everyone else gets a raise of fifty cents an hour.’ There were hats, t-shirts, coasters, tote bags and two company cars bearing the Bombardier Beetle logo, a beetle formed from back-to-back Bs with a thunderbolt exploding out of its graphic ass.

‘Why can’t I be like Levy?’ Goss asked himself, out loud, hours later, making his way to the apartment building, not far from Levy’s shop, which he believed was harbouring his long-lost mother. He had followed the woman that far. But did he really believe this? Or was it a sort of meta-belief… a belief that this belief was possible to believe? What seemed shakiest about this latest in a long line in improvised quests was the lack of gravity in his response to the situation. Where was the bloody roil of emotions he was supposed to be feeling at the prospect of seeing his long-lost mother after thirty five years of abandonment?

He only knew for a fact that his mother had been from Berlin… had followed Joe Goss to The States and bore him there two children and very soon after left. Presumably back to Berlin. She could be there now… a mile, two blocks, a neighborhood away. Yes, she could very well be the woman he saw walk by the café window last night. He would know his own mother, wouldn’t he? Mammals have that going for them, at least. Don’t they?

Last night’s spectacular snow was already melting under the surprisingly fierce efforts of a little white custodial sun. The shoppers Goss squeezed by were unreadable, lugging mandatory purchases and avoiding eye contact.

Goss had asked Levy: what’s with the lack of eye contact in this country? Why do Germans try so hard to avoid eye contact? And Levy had answered by giving aYiddish-inflected shrug and winking. Goss was thinking about this, six blocks away from The Bombardier Beetle, when he slowed and then stopped. He stuck his hands in his pocket and cleared his throat. His heart was racing.

‘Hey, Nicole,’ he said. She was crying. Not sobbing; her face was relatively expressionless, but her cheeks were bright red, and tear tracks decorated them with silver streaks like Christmas wrapping. ‘Nikola,’ she corrected him. He looked away from her, up the street towards the shop, frowning at it. He wanted to say: I’ve been searching for all of my life for the mother who abandoned me as an infant, and I’ve finally tracked her down to an apartment building here on Schloss Strasse…will you come there with me now as I see her again for the first time in thirty years? But instead he said: ‘I’m sorry about what happened this morning.’

‘Why?’

He gathered the collar of his jacket around his neck. ‘Because…I don’t know. I thought you were a good worker.’

She began laughing. Encouraged, Goss said, playfully, ‘What?’

‘I thought Levy is so seductive to the women only because he is an American,’ she said, digging in her purse for a taschentuch; a kleenex; ‘But I see now that it is because he is a Jew.’ She blew her nose. ‘Talking to a female is hard for you, isn’t it?’ She shocked Goss by tossing the used tissue on the sidewalk. ‘You will probably be remembering this conversation for the rest of your life. Simply by sleeping with you in order to have my revenge on Levy I can make your wildest dreams a reality, isn’t it true?’ She gestured at a short balding red-haired scowler pushing impatiently between them on his way up the street. ‘Whereas to him, fucking me would mean less than nothing.’ She studied Goss. ‘Do you understand what I’m saying?’

Digging in her purse again, she produced a package of Marlboros and rattled it perfunctorily at him, but he shook his head. She lit one and took two long drags, staring through a curtain of smoke.

‘So?’ she said, finally.

Her place was a very long bus ride away, and early in the route the bus took them right by the building that Goss believed it was possible to believe harboured his long-lost mother, so he made a mental note about which stop was next for the return trip. As the bus rounded the building’s corner he suppressed the urge, again, to proclaim, ‘I have good reason to believe that my mother, who I haven’t seen since I was an infant, is dwelling in that building.’ He only allowed himself to smile and shake his head with rueful awe as they rounded the corner, but she missed the cue. Her thick hair was in a loose knot, held in place with a pencil, and she untied the knot and shook out and re-tied it twice during the arduously speechless trip.

When they got off the bus, at its Endstation, it was in a neighborhood of fenced brown snow-patched yards and their dead-vine-covered houses of stone. Goss felt as though he’d flown to another city. They walked through a rustic maze of narrow lanes under the naive commentary of suburban birdsong, until Nikola lifted the latch on a splintery crooked wooden gate, and Goss followed her in.

The first thing he noticed was that the front door was unlocked. In Minneapolis they’d all be long-dead by now. The second thing he noticed was that she removed her shoes at the door, so he followed suit, thankful that he was quite by accident wearing two good matching socks, and they shuffled across the darkly gleaming hardwood floor of the gloomy living room.

In the kitchen they found Nikola’s mother busy at the sink with her back to them; she either hadn’t heard them enter the house or chose not to react. Nikola opened the refrigerator and removed a large black ceramic bowl of green grapes and pantomimed that Goss should take the bowl and follow her out of the kitchen. The bowl was heavy and warm; the mother had just then put it in the refrigerator.

Nikola’s room was up a staircase so brief it was ridiculous, down a hallway, last right before a circular hall window overlooking a stone-ringed pond through the branches of a tree in a posture of agony. Goss managed a peek into two rooms along the way to Nikola’s bedroom and was surprised to see that each room he peeked into contained a person.  The first was a teenage boy, the second a man, each wearing a churchgoing suit and tie.

In Nikola’s little room, Goss put the bowl of grapes down on a dresser and closed her door and removed his jacket and tried to drape it from her door knob, which wasn’t a knob but a handle. His jacket shrugged off into a puddle on the floor and Nikola removed her own coat and purse and piled them on top of it. She positioned an old wooden folding chair beside her bed and reclined on the bed, smoothing her dress, her feet touching. Then, as though to a blown whistle only she could hear, she sat straight up and pulled the dress off over her head. She unsnapped her bra and reclined. The breasts of a beached sea creature. Goss was touched at how helpless they looked on land. Her vagina seemed very simple like a fold in a table cloth. She reached and patted the seat of the folding chair and Goss sat down with great care, afraid the creaking thing would split and collapse.

‘No,’ she said, ‘bring the grapes here first and feed them to me.’

Goss hesitated before moving. He was concentrating. Had the look of a man attempting to make something happen with his thoughts alone. Bend a spoon or something. ‘Get the grapes,’ she repeated.

Goss cleared his throat. ‘No.’

Nikola flipped over, on to her stomach, facing away from him, hugging her pillow. Her long hair was peuter pouring from her head. Under the cool spread of her ass, Goss saw a silver strip of moisture recede through shadows and fleece. Had she heard what he said? He wasn’t sure until she responded in the distant unhurried voice of a working woman courting sleep, sighing into her pillow. ‘Then leave.’

‘Get out,’ she reiterated, after a minute.

He was half way down the hall when he remembered his jacket and had to go back and knock in order to have her unlock her bedroom door and open it only as far as was necessary in order to hand it to him. When he left the house, the sky was a clear bleached blue. The blue of something collectibly old and fragile and he was surprised at how calm he felt.

It was possible that Joe Goss, sideburned and swaggery back then, had been in this very neighborhood, had trod these very cobblestoned lanes. Maybe Goss’s mother, a teenager not so much younger than Nikola at the time she’d met Goss’s father, was from this part of town, had grown up in this area and had often used the bus that Goss had ridden pointlessly out there. Goss, who had been born in the small town of Minneapolis, was used to the kind of small-town coincidences that people from Chicago or Tokyo considered mindfucks of cosmic import. He was thinking that very thing when he looked up and saw Levy walking towards him, talking to himself with a self-satisfied smirk.

‘What the fuck are you doing here?’ asked Levy, stopped in his tracks, genuinely surprised.

After Goss deadpanned to Levy that he’d taken the wrong bus to the end of the line and was now good and lost, Levy led Goss back to his car. ‘I have a little business to take care of; won’t be long. Drive you back home when I’m done.’ He pointed. ‘Coupla Playboys on the backseat if you want. Okay? Twenty minutes. Okay?’

But it took so long for Levy to finish his business and return to Goss that Goss ended up climbing out of Levy’s car as night fell. It had been a profitable hour alone, though. He told himself that he’d learned a lot about himself, as well as about the dreams and aspirations of the post-modern, late-capitalist Bunny. They still claim to prefer men who make them laugh. ‘Dipshit,’ he said, with affectionate self-disgust, as he climbed out of Levy’s car. He put his cap on and zipped up his jacket and knotted his scarf and picked a random direction to walk in.

Loping along above the low seare hedge of one chalk-white cottage after another, Goss turned right, abruptly, when he spotted what looked like a major thoroughfare at the end of a darkening lane, a major thoroughfare behind which the sun was crashing, torching the brittle lung of the forest as it ground to a halt in the earth. Where the lane emptied into the thoroughfare, Goss found a bus stop bench in a shelter across the wet black shadow of the road. Seated on the bench was an older but nice-enough looking woman who smiled as he settled on the bench beside her. She waited until he was completely still and said, with an old woman’s precision, ‘You are an American.’

‘Correct,’ said Goss. ‘How could you tell?’

‘You weren’t afraid to look at me.’

Goss laughed. ‘Who would be afraid to look at you?’ He reached for her hand and looked her right in the eye and said, defiantly, ‘Jimmy.’

To his horror and delight, she blushed when she took his hand, confirming what he suspected about his own intentions. She hesitated so long before announcing her name in return that he knew it was a lie, and he knew what the lie meant, and it encouraged him. ‘Margarethe.’ She was tall and slender and profited from what looked like a fairly expensive dye job. Her hair, up in a thick bun, shone like burnished gold in the last light of the day. ‘Where are you going, Jimmy?’ she asked him. ‘Would you like a ride?’

He pulled his cap off. ‘You have a car?’ She was the right age. It was possible that she’d lived in America, too.

‘Yes, I have a car.’

He closed one eye. ‘Why are you waiting for the bus if you have a car?’

She smiled as though Goss’s reasoning was quintessentially American. ‘For one person, it is not worth it. For two, yes. Now we are two.’ She stood and smoothed the dress under her open jacket. ‘Come.’

6 Counter-Intuitive Love Songs

 

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.

Princesses Street

  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 said “She’s German, but you’ll like her,” is that what P had meant? Only that she was beautiful? K was insulted.

Flustered at first by her chemical effect on him, he was actually relieved that she looked the way she looked as he ushered her into the living room, closing the big double doors behind them as she crossed towards the bright windows, raising her arms as though to herald the sun. It would make it simpler…even pleasurable…to say “no” to her. He didn’t feel one bit sorry for her. Born with everything, and still she expected more.

“This is the wonderful flat!” she whispered sharply, obediently humoring K’s peculiar edict of sickroom-silence. “And the address,” she winked, “It is what is perfect for me! ‘Prinzessinnen strasse’. Yes, living here I will feel like the princess! I have seen this place in my dream!”

Embarrassed by her futile enthusiasm, K gestured at the little round table beside her, where he took most of his meals, and asked her if she’d like a cup of coffee. Thinking that it was expected of her to agree to everything, she said yes.

She took a place at the scarred wooden table as he left the room for the coffee pot, telling herself to calm down. Her heart was beating so fast and so hard that she could barely hear anything else above it. The flat was so large and so cheap…it was unbelievable. She could live here like a human being. A human being again! Things had looked so black only a few weeks before. She wouldn’t allow herself to have the thought…even in relieved astonishment…that not very long ago, she’d seriously contemplated the most drastic cure for her suffering. Cutting herself with the same unsentimental gesture with which she destroyed certain canvasses.

It was important to bury, if not erase, those hideous thoughts…to hide them from the American. Americans love success, and positive people…they love uninhibited winners, and abhor the miserable, the lost, the unsure or depressed. She would impress him with her positive outlook…with her luck…and he would give her the flat. She wasn’t above flirting mildly with him. P had said, looking her up and down himself, “He’ll fall in love the second he lays eyes upon you!” and she had profited, and suffered, countless times from the ability to trigger that reflex.

Being so beautiful was like having the ambiguous power to spit fire: you were as likely to burn yourself as illuminate the room. Usually both. She had come to think of her beauty as a kind of signal beacon that invariably attracted her nemesis, the malevolent spirit that she’d been on the look out for since adolescence. It flitted from man to man like a wolf crossing a stream on the only available stones…exactly the way in which an apparently arbitrary path can be said to be predestined.

K returned with his little pot of espresso, closing the double doors carefully behind himself so as not to awaken his friend, and approached her solemnly where she sat smiling at her place at the table…the little round table he’d rescued from the curb in front of his first flat in Berlin…and it gave him pleasure to think that if she knew the table’s history, she’d lift her elbows off of it in horror. He’d fucked his Italian girlfriend on that table, holding her by the ankles like a gardener pushing a wheel barrow full of flowers up a hill. Some of the best, and worst, meals of his life had been eaten on it.

A stupendously drunk Brazilian actor, in this very flat, had sat at that table late one summer night and played that game…the macho game of sharp knife and a hand palm-down on a table with the blade hopping with increasing speed between the splayed fingers…and he had cut the index finger of his left hand almost entirely off, at which point he started crying, like an innocent victim of the world’s relentless injustice.

K took a good long look at the Artist and asked her, quietly, if she liked the view.

The War on Talent

  As in many fields, America leads the world in the war against talent. I was discussing this notion with my imaginary friend Dr. Painloss, who was reluctant to cede to nice American heads the crown in this matter.

“What about Germany?” he said, with his ambiguously European accent. I could see his point, what with all the permanently lip-synching pop stars over here and the novelists whose novels are nothing but rambling essays of derivative philosophical posturing and all the painters who can barely draw or mix colors and the dancers with no authority of movement nor sense of rhythm and the beggars who aren’t even witty about demanding that money be dropped in their caps, etc.

“But having no talent,” I corrected him, “is not quite the same as waging a war against it, although the one sometimes leads to the other.” We were sitting in a cozy café in East Berlin where the waitress displayed no visible talent in the field of service; we’d been sitting there already for a quarter of an hour without even being offered a menu, and the dirty plates and glasses from our table’s prior occupancy had yet to be cleared away. The waitress was beautiful, which put me on to an interesting train of thought: is physical beauty, in some obvious yet rarely analyzed way, talent’s enemy? Can the war on talent be connected somehow to the rise of the modern cult of physical beauty? But this train of thought was derailed by Painloss’ child-like querulousness.

“But I don’t quite get,” he frowned, “how it is you hold the country of your birth to be the first of all nations in this regard. Surely, in Iran, where the censorship is so powerful that entire art forms are forbidden on pain of death…”

“Ah, but I’d draw the distinction between America and Iran in my conception of a war against talent because Iran has an excuse for almost every extreme in attitude or policy…religion. Ridiculous as you and I may find it that a modern government appoints itself the murderous henchman of an invisible, misogynistic super-being, it isn’t talent itself that the Iranians seem to object to. Whereas in America, you see, it’s held that talent is an evil in and of itself, by definition, to the extent that it discriminates, and isolates the lonely many from the few. But there’s something more insidious at work there, I think.”

I smiled over Dr. Painloss’s head, hoping to attract the attention of our physically perfect waitress…but to no avail. She was very busy, leaning over the counter to chat with her equally handsome boyfriend. When I lowered my smile again to Paingloss’s level I saw that he was glaring at me.

“Well?” he demanded, finally.

“It’s just this: talent, especially at its upper reaches, generally seems to cost more and to sell less, and it makes all kind of difficult demands…consider the word diva. I sometimes wonder if behind the fatwa on extraordinary ability in my homeland, some kind of bottom line corporate malfeasance isn’t at work…”

Painloss, always delighted by conspiracy theories (the more rigorously torturous the better), chuckled. My good-natured friend, a true intellectual who was himself so replete with ability that his example oftened inspired feelings of inadequacy in his close acquaintances, myself among them, was older than me by a generation. But it was obvious that his advanced age was no alibi for his physical shortcomings, which were best summed up as ugliness converted to charm by frank self-awareness. No model myself, I am at least presentable, physically, if not nearly as charming as Painloss. As a reward for my middling endowment of charm, I have a wonderful mate: a good-natured, intelligent, and physically beautiful human. Recently, she and I vacationed in America, and I related a pertinent anecdote from the trip to Painloss while his gaze drifted towards our perfect (and neglectful) waitress. I said:

“The thing about America is that there´s no room for the acceptance of failure/boredom/depression/disgust or poverty to be seen for what they are: fully natural states. I think America adds insult to injury by treating these states as misunderstandings at best and diseases at worst when in fact America is just delusionally optimistic about the power of positive thinking. Rather than eradicating poverty or failure, the goal should be de-stigmatizing them. The difference between the two approaches being that the latter action is actually do-able, which makes it so very radical and taboo. We´d rather sell bumper stickers and give benefit concerts and tout government programs to eradicate the bad stuff because it feels better to do so, and looks sexier and maintains a status quo that the plutocrats (and the Gods themselves) are more than pleased with. Meanwhile, the language is suffering: it´s making less and less sense; it´s banging against louder and bigger disconnects…which in turn, of course, breeds nation-wide insanity.”

“For example, by accident, my mate and I attended a marathon, called GRANDMA´S MARATHON, rather late in the day. 5 hours and thirty minutes after the start (and about three miles from the finish, and two hours after the runners with reasonble times had already showered), we saw an hysterically cheerful mother of three, traipsing with her children against the flow of the run, clapping and shouting WOO HOO YOU´RE INCREDIBLE!!!!…at everyone. It goes without saying that such encouragement is meaningless when applied to everyone, and depressing in the context that any runner there to hear it was so patently NOT incredible (as a runner of marathons, at least) as to render her cheerleading a very wicked satire.”

“The main point is that being unable to call someone a mediocre or even suck-ass marathon runner elevates marathon running, and all such activities, to a level of importance that trivializes real human life while deifying the abstraction of excellence for its own sake. Not being free to call a fat person fat elevates being skinny to far too important a meaning. I mean: can we allow for the fact that human life is wonderful and happily full of sensations and well worth living despite individual failures at many relatively unimportant things? It must work on the Central Nervous Systems of both source and object, I think…this relentless compulsion to valueless praise and hysterical encouragement. Hyper nice American optimism is in truth tragic and really about hopelessness: the palliative care in a terminal cancer ward.”

Pleased with myself, I settled back in my seat, arms folded over my chest, and smiled. I waited a polite interval for Dr. Painloss’ reaction to my diatribe and when none was forthcoming, I asked him, “Well, what do you think of that?”

“Excuse me? What do I think? Of what?” he replied, softly, with a distracted air. He was staring with such heartbreaking wistfulness at our Absentee Waitress’s shapely behind that it dawned on me that my poor dear friend was lost in a dream that only the cruelest person would wake him from.

The Graduate

 

Miriam with the curly blonde hair that when you looked closer was full of white and gray. Her point being that everyone knew she had two college-age offspring from a previous marriage. Who would she be fooling with a dye job? Robert didn’t want to seem timid or dull in Miriam Wallace’s eyes.

Robert had first met Miriam during the Christmas season after his twenty-second birthday, the Christmas he flew back to Philly from Minneapolis to tell his parents he wouldn’t be going to graduate school. Turbulence on the flight had strengthened his resolve. Turbulence and his rotten stomach. His bachelors degree would have to be enough. He’d told his father that he needed time to consider his options and his mother, from the next room, the kitchen, had shouted, ‘Your options to fail?’

They drove, not slowly, the twelve blocks from Wayne Avenue to the Wallace house in Mount Airy on streets so icy and some so steep that Robert had a hopeful premonition that they would all die silent and angry in a grisly wreck. His mother angry at his father for his father’s laissez-faire attitude to discipline as Robert was growing up; his father angry at his mother for attaching so much weight to the opinions and judgments of outsiders; Robert angry at both of them for his existence and, more pressingly, the churning guts courtesy of the evening’s outcome. Robert’s mother’s technique of what his father called ‘analytical sarcasm’ was devastating and had left Robert longing for the corrective violence of a bowel-puncturing crash. The fatal relief of it. They drove by five  illuminated black Santas in a row without comment.

Robert’s vision of an impact had been so vivid that it felt like a dream of the afterlife when they all found themselves on the Wallace’s dark front porch fifteen minutes later, kicking clots of snow off their heels as if they meant to demolish the building. Miriam Wallace answered the door in a ball gown with that bemused look of hers. She didn’t know Dot or Alan terribly well and Robert seemed new to her, though it’s possible that she’d petted him once at a bar-b-cue when he was child.

‘Vampirella,’ said Robert’s mother under her breath as they followed Miriam into the living room. Miriam Wallace was tall, leathery, svelte. She had boyishly short curly blonde hair and definition in her biceps and an ass in the shiny dark material of her low-cut backless gown like a wet plum.

Forty minutes prior to their arrival at the Christmas party, right before Robert’s confession that he was ditching the notion of grad school altogether, Robert’s father had confessed, with Chablis breath, that he and Robert’s mother had been ‘fairly dedicated swingers’ in the ‘70s. And that Victor Wallace had been among the discreet circle of friends who had taken their Updike too seriously. Nineteen seventy four. His father said further that Victor, an architect, had fellated him and that the man sported a goatee in those days that looked like an Irish au pair’s fussy pussy. The women seemed to have been more interested in seeing Alan’s cock in Victor’s mouth than in each other and weeks later Robert’s mother was still making his father wash his penis with Phisohex before relations. Robert’s father said Victor had coughed the semen out into his cupped hands with his back to everyone, and then he handed Robert a glass of Chablis and said, winking, ‘This isn’t freaking you out, son, is it?’ Beaming.

‘No dad. It’s just that I have something I need to tell you.’

The swinging had lasted no longer than the whole country’s appetite for Scrabble and fondue. When Victor’s first wife Marnie, who was such a ‘cutie’ that Robert’s father had endured Victor’s ‘finicky’ blow job just to ‘get at her,’ died of breast cancer, the two families of former swingers used the funeral as a watershed; an excuse to wipe the slate clean. The surviving adults behaved as though the swinging had never happened. As though Victor had never tasted Alan’s semen or that Marnie and Dot had never awkwardly petted and kissed or had intercourse on numerous occasions with each other’s husband while the others watched and sometimes photographed it. They only socialized still at all because pointedly not to socialize would have been a tacit reminder of the unspoken. There stood Robert’s family on the Wallace porch on Christmas Eve, alive and brooding.

Miriam Wallace had paid no particular attention to Robert at her Christmas party for the first hour or so after he’d arrived. As Robert put it, in her arms in a rented bed a year later, it seemed as though it was an idea that ‘kinda sorta creeped up’ on her. Miriam said no, it wasn’t that. She’d had a lot on her mind that night. Her husband Victor, also responding to whatever nostalgia trigger a combination of mulled wine, Christmas, and the anticipatory angst of seeing old friends after a gap of years can create, had bragged to her about the swinging, too. With the notable twist that in his version of the confession, Victor hadn’t been the one coughing the semen out. Though Miriam stopped short of adding this detail when the topic came up. Let the boy keep his illusions. There is no kinder sentiment.

They were three assignations into the intermittent affair and spring had arrived in the form of green lawns appearing through block-long scabs of slush. More dangerous driving conditions; a self-conscious, rhythmless slow dance behind the drawn curtains of the motel window. Afterwards, Miriam, up on one elbow in bed, tracing random arabesques on Robert’s hairless chest with the finger of a much younger woman, told him, ‘You can’t imagine how jealous I was. It was bad enough that pictures of Marnie were still up all over the house, fifteen years after she’d died. Some of her clothes were still in the guest room closet, for god’s sake.’ She said, ‘Then I have to find out that Victor fucked Dot and Alan and this experience he shared with his dead wife the titless saint? Give me a break.’

As Miriam described it, Victor, clutching a wineglass with one hand and tugging the waist of his wife’s gown with the other, had pulled her into his study while friends and a token neighbor or two were singing along teary-eyed to a scratchy Joni Mitchell album in the living room. The scratches and skips on the record are the sound of our wrinkles, Miriam remembered thinking. That’s when Victor made the confession, producing a manila envelope of faded Polaroids from the back of a locked desk drawer for proof.

‘He was so proud of himself I wanted to slap him.’

The sun was setting in the curtains. Miriam and Robert had known each other for over a year. It struck Robert as his eyes darted from Miriam’s heaped clothing on the chair nearest the bed…to her fur-trimmed coat on the door…to that Panzer-like purse on top of the television and the lipsticked water glass beside it…that she had made the room her own. That is, although Robert had chosen the motel himself and made the reservation and would soon pay for the room with tip money it felt like they were trysting in Miriam’s boudoir. He felt bound by the rules of decorum imposed by being her guest. He couldn’t just get up and switch on a light, for example, or take a piss without asking. The mere thought of voiding his bowels in the motel toilet…her motel toilet…was beyond the pale. He wondered if this was something she was good at, taking over a space, and was it just her or tall, attractive, adulterous wives in general. And yet, he reflected: ironically, she is the guest of her husband’s dead first wife in her own home.

Miriam squeezed the hollows in Robert’s cheeks together in a way uncannily like his mother had done when he was a boy and she was a happier, more playful person and said, ‘You better not be thinking this is anything like a scene from The Graduate, buster.’

‘What?’

‘The Graduate. You better not…’

‘The graduate? Which graduate? Who?’

‘The film. Dustin Hoffman! You…’

‘Who?’

‘Simon and Garfunkle!’

‘Simon and what?’

‘Jesus fucking Christ.’

Miriam said nothing for a long time during which Robert could actually hear his Swatch watch ticking on the counter beside the sink in the bathroom. He thought: there are people who could pass gas in front of an attractive woman and laugh it off with a joke and people who’d rather hold it in for hours of discomfort and I am of the latter group. Although I admire the former. Life must be so much easier for them. He stole a glance at Miriam whose hands were covering her face. He came to understand that she was crying. He tried to imagine what the rest of his life would feel like if he let one fly beside Miriam under these circumstances. Hot and hissing and green like absinthe…the poltergeist of a rotten egg. His actual insides, exposed to the open room and her judgment.

‘Miriam.’

‘No.’

‘Miriam. No what?’

He pulled her hands away from her face and he flinched: she wasn’t crying, she was laughing with mirthless glee like a deaf child torturing a cat. She rolled off the bed and fetched her purse and got her cigarettes and lit a Kretek and sat with her back to him. She puffed like it was a thinking tool or a method of divination. She turned to squint and said ‘Okay, the problem is this.’ More puffing.

‘An older married woman having relations with the young son of her husband’s friends, there’s plenty to hide. But in our case, ja? My husband encourages this. He asks for details afterwards. We’re just doing it in this motel room to give us the illusion that we’re indulging in an illicit thrill.’ Puff.

‘We could be doing this at home and Victor would be reading the New York Times downstairs in the fricking breakfast nook. Or washing the dishes. And he’d call up the back stairs and ask if anyone wants an herbal tea. He’d serve us on a breakfast tray complete with linen napkins. How erotic is that?’

‘What we do isn’t erotic?’

‘You think it is.’

‘I always assumed that anything anyone did with my erect penis was erotic.’

She turned her back to him again and blew out an empty blue thought-balloon of smoke. Robert passed wind and waited.

Salter’s Luck

 

Salter woke up with Lola shouting at him that there was oil fucking paint on her Jil fucking Sander.  He couldn’t at first tell if he was having a heart attack or being caught in an earthquake or both, but Lola was so up in his face that she appeared to him to have one long ice-blue eye in the middle of her forehead, a monstrous organ of inhuman beauty, a lens through which he could not see the future but through which the future could plainly see him, despising the information it gathered. 

On the street ten minutes later he said “Shit!” catching his reflection in a shop window: his t-shirt was inside out.  Never dress in terror. No wonder those Jap girls had giggled at him. He’d dressed in a rush and run out of the house without checking. The ribbing of the seams visible on the inverted black tee shirt wasn’t so bad…it looked like a fashion statement… but the “wash in cold water” tag hanging off the back of his neck was embarrassing.  In that case he headed for the park, rather than a café, and wouldn’t bother looking for a new girlfriend until he had a chance to get home and change. Never approach a woman with anything less than utter confidence. Which is how he’d ended up with Lola.  

He sat alone under a two hundred year old tree for two hours, enjoying the indirect pleasures of the Southern California sunshine…the tepid clear-milk breeze, the leaf-cut kaleidoscope spangling the yellow grass at his feet under the tree. Fucking squirrels, too. Funny about squirrels: no one seemed to appreciate what a nightmare life would easily be if squirrels decided to go militant. Make mosquitoes look like a blessing. Make mosquitoes look like gifts from God.  If rats had half the talent and energy of squirrels… 

Later, when Lola was at work, placed like a white queen at her post at Chez Guevara, luminous under the track lighting, he crept home and started work on something new rather than bothering to change his clothes and bike over to Pacific Beach in hopes of finding a true and lasting Romantic Love.  The name of this new painting was “Oil Fucking Paint on Her Jil Fucking Sander” and he got bored with it after about four hours of pointless messy work on it, slopping the cadmium red around the canvas with a palette knife like it was lead-based tomato paste…why not just eat it all and kill himself? But would it kill him, or simply fuck him up? Like he needed more of same. Eyes bulging, mouth drooling and mute. Brain-damaged. Incontinent? But here’s the thing: a similarly afflicted woman could always find a fella willing to hump her at least once.  

It was too late to make it to the beach, too early to sleep and too soon to call Lola at work to see if she was still in hate with him. He grabbed the phone, nevertheless, with red paint glamourizing his hands and punched the number with a relatively paintless thumb. 

“Chez Guevara, can you please hold?” 

“Yes ma’am.” 

Brief pause of recognition and then the “hold” click.  He’d half-hoped to get Jem, who could always be counted on to flirt with him a bit before handing it over to Lola, thus proving his worth to Lola. Jem…he remembered that it was short for “Jemima”…what kind of parents named a girl that? He could never have a girlfriend named Jemima. Names were important to him…a bad name was worse than bad breath. He’d backed out of something once with a model named Santana…you couldn’t even abbreviate that hiply…what would he have called her around the house? Santa. 

He caught himself nodding to the black black jazz they treated him to while he waited for Lola to release him from the tasteful limbo of  “hold”. A CD burned from an authentic and scratchy old 78. He couldn’t help visualizing a synchronized chorus line of Al Jolsons in shoe polish, dwindling towards infinity, strumming banjos and grinning like skulls while being buggered by an equal infinity of Satchmos. Black black jazz for a white white restaurant. Friendly racism. Does any Ethnic Group valued chiefly for the quality of its suffering stand a chance? 

When Lola got back on the line, Salter was relieved to find that she was half-whispering conspiratorially in the phone to him, so he knew he probably wasn’t in danger of Fargo in bed that night. Fargo; Siberia; name your frigid wasteland. Relations were normalized and he so badly needed the existence-confirming sensation to be had between Lola’s legs, the cool oyster of her involuntary grip. 

“Get this,” she hissed, “rich fucker just dropped $42,000.00 on a dinner for five.” She pronounced “fucker” fokker. Otherwise her speech was thoroughly Americanized, which is to say ornamented with luridly nasal banalities. ”I don’t know why but the servers thought he’s going to stiff them so each one goes spits in his butternut squash soup.” She waited for Salter’s gasp, clucking her tongue. Then the punch line. “Eight thousand dollar tip.” 

She got home at one looking eight feet tall in her heels and goldish dress and her hair a platinum blade. He was watching television like a good boy when she clomped into the bedroom, waving hello but not speaking, as though speaking was a form of touching and she wasn’t in the mood, but he got a bobbing erection the instant he saw her.  

She unsheathed herself standing, her breasts and then hair lifting and falling as the dress went up and off and she clomped into the bathroom in her heels and nothing but and she brushed and flossed and dabbed her makeup off and proceeded to snore and smell of soap on her side of the bed within thirty minutes of walking in the front door, all with nary a word, nor nary a gesture to Salter to come and partake and partake and come. He wouldn’t even have minded the usual: missionary position and get it over with. No touching the tits, don’t mess up my hair and keep that finger away from my rectum. 

He was sitting there knees-up beside her, treated to a view of her tawny back and pale damp wing of hair, clutching the remote, gritting his teeth like a Russian serf on a block of ice, cursing his humiliating neediness. O wretched man that craveth a fuck! Tears began laminating his eyes. 

Robbie The Robot warped and blurred, swimming in it. Salter was ostensibly watching “Forbidden Planet” (Walter Pigeon, Patrick O’Neal, and Ann Francis) with the sound off and strained to make sense of the movie through the seawater filter of his grief…the lion-like monster,  visible only as raw energy, was howling like a banshee and trying to claw through the protective force field around the ship. A crew member…a hero with a lone blaster…was seized and ripped apart. Ann Francis with her buttery hair and the spanking sarcasm of her dotted pout startled a recognition in him for she was his genuine Sexual Ideal and correctly pegged the futility of his sex life to her unavailability.  He needed a 50’s-type nubile tomboy lacquered siren in his life. He really needed this. It was no joke. He was crying. 

So Salter had thought that the day had fixed itself but he’d been wrong. Lola was obviously still mad at him, or simply tired of it all and had retracted into her morally unassailable cocoon of sleep, the hard shell of I need my rest that a girlfriend who pays for everything by having the only job in the household claims as her terrible Right.  He snuffed the television and the reading lamp on his side of the futon and stood up out of bed.  

He suddenly saw himself running across the bedroom from an impossibly distant corner, axe hefted over his head, bringing the blade down with a scream of regret to cut his frustrating girlfriend in two, but the very cartoon of it horrified him and made him sorry and love her all that much more, exacerbating his desire, which frustrated him further, which re-ignited his anger, which again made him see himself running across the bedroom from an impossibly distant corner with an axe hefted over his head, bringing the blade down with a scream of regret…to cut himself in two. 

He staggered miserably into the living room with his unrequited hardon. He milked himself, kneeling, across the gleaming black pumps with arched backs like onyx cats stacked in a diptych of sadism and sexual snobbery under the coat hooks by the door. He squirted three long draughts of solder-colored semen into her two hundred dollar heels, gasping, steadying himself with a hand on the sleeve of a coat (that anomalous coat) which stood there like a priest with his back to Salter’s indiscretion. Not the first time he’d fucked her shoes. Afterwards, as he crouched there, postmodern shoe rapist, still burning with a richly satisfying orgasm, he thought of this exchange: 

Lola: “Honey, I hate to break it to you, but as a painter you have no talent whatsoever. Not that’s visible, I mean.” 

Salter (with a shrug): “So?”   

That had been six months ago…she’d dropped that A-bomb on him six months ago…what was left? What was next? What horrors to come? Everything (one thing he’d learned)…everything escalates. Hunger, porno, Vietnam. She’d be punching and kicking him next. Stabbing him in bed while he slept. Putting her weight on a pillow mashed over his face. Scissoring off his… 

In the kitchen, in a drawer, looking for those very scissors with which to cut open a bag of chips so as not to waken Queen Lola opening it, he happened across an old name tag of hers from innocent days extinct, from just three years ago, at the “Yacht Club”. That four-dollar-an-hour job she’d had when they first got there.   

He looked at the name on the name tag. Where had she evaporated to? That sweet girl with a heavy accent who had been grateful just to be there, in America, and work a shitty job with chubby Mexican teenagers for colleagues in order to support him. Where had she gone to? Salter held the tag up to the light. He wanted to kiss it. He wanted to die.  

L. Beedo.  

He ate the chips. Quietly. Fifteen minutes later he was dressed and out on Fifth Avenue, pushed along by a sultry breeze that the heads of the palm trees were applauding. The avenue was tawdry and worn in daylight…as sunfucked and urinous as any street in Tijuana (a four hour walk from his door)…but at night the same stretch was mild and crisp and luminous, burnished by the smart scuff of Yuppie footwear, ablaze with Tiki torches of dirty gold or neon glyphs of organ-pink and money-green, and scented by Gay cologne and charcoal braziers. He felt lightfooted and better-looking in the dark and he walked at an optimistic clip, looking for something to buy, or for something to happen to him, or a convenient combination of the two.  

He walked by the Tea Leaf and Rockit Records and the boarded-up and tramp-infested deco-era Bijou; then the Starbucks on the corner, the Rite Aid parking lot across the street. Along which he did a left towards Sixth Avenue up Robinson. Then a right towards the park. 

What really hit him as he sailed along was the sheer number of people…couples…who seemed to be happy. Was the world, or was it not, a place of either terror or boredom that changed only briefly, at the very end, for the very old, into a place of terrified boredom? But there they were, the dozens, the hundreds, holding hands and swinging their arms in that triumphalist goose-step of love, babbling giddy goo-goo to each other. Salter had to wonder how abnormal he was. Had it been him all of these years? Him and not them; her; It? His problem and not The World’s? 

Standing at the corner of Sixth Avenue and Upas, Salter near-swooned as his mind came that close to accepting the notion that the Misery he once considered merely typical of Life (or systemic) was in fact just his own and his own fucking fault, not even necessary, just the result of faulty thinking and consequently bad choices that could be blamed on nobody else. But he was saved from this devastating epiphany by a pink convertible that was honking like a drunken straggler from an Italian wedding caravan at the traffic light across from him.  

Salter was wary. Me? he pantomimed and the car honked a delirious yes.

The pink convertible was some kind of vintage car…Salter didn’t know from vintage cars… with white tires and a lot of chrome and what sounded like the salvaged motor from a B-52 roaring under the hood. The car looked like a birthday cake. Piloted by a white-haired gent in a Commodore’s cap (Salter didn’t know from Commodore’s Caps but that’s how he would have described it to the police) and beside the gent in the convertible was a white-gloved woman in matching white shoulder-length hair, presumably the gent’s better half or lady-friend or however the old put it these days. 

“I said,” said the duffer when Salter had scurried out into the street to lean over the convertible to hear him, “Would you like a ride young man?”

The duffer gunned the motor for emphasis. Or to pressure him. Salter was 30, and the old gent was 66, so, arithmetically speaking, the offer of a ride in the gent’s car was no different than if their respective ages had been 5 and 41.  

An ancient alarm in Salter’s skull (finally activated; ringing in a thick skin of dust) went off and just as quickly sputtered quiet and Salter got in the car, jumping (and banging his elbow in the process) in back as the light changed. It was the naïve belief that a man with a woman is never as dangerous as a man alone that contributed to Salter’s decision.   

The old guy twisted sideways to face Salter as he drove, saying, “This is the only city in the world that it makes sense to own a convertible in. Others are too damned dangerous or rainy. Are you from the area?”

He was talking like a man in a gale. He was a white-haired ringer for the actor Don Ameche. Salter was, in fact, tempted to ask the old guy if he was related (or even Ameche himself) but instead merely limited himself to responding directly to Don’s query.

They drove as far as Robinson and did a swaggering u-turn so wide that they nearly took the door handle off a parked car on the other side of the four lane road and headed back the way Salter had been walking when they picked him up.  With his eyes on the road again, Don Ameche smiled in the rearview mirror.

“We’re practically neighbors then. We do this every Friday night…” he inserted a pause to indicate his companion, whose hair bestirred itself indolently like a tattered white flag on a berthed yacht…whose teeth were aimed at him in the simplest smile… “We see something new every time.”

He added, “For example, I’ll bet you didn’t know that there’s a banana tree in the yard of that bungalow on the corner of Robinson and Third Avenue.” 

“No,” said Salter, surprised, “I didn’t.” 

“Delicious. Stolen fruit tastes better in an open convertible at night, you know. And you probably weren’t aware of the fact that there’s a full-sized statue of the comedian Jonathan Winters in the backyard of a place up there on Point Loma. On a six foot plinth. A prop from the movie ‘The Loved One.’ We saw that when it first came out, at the old Bijou.” He thought a moment, searching his brain. “Evelyn Waugh.” 

“Really?” Salter had never heard of either the movie or the comedian or Evelyn Waugh. He wasn’t even sure about the word ‘plinth.’  

“Awful lot of movie people down here,” concluded Salter’s genial host. They were idling at a red light at the corner ofLaurel and Sixth. To the left was Balboa Park and its orderly arrangement of sky-scraping palms attended by a vassalage of shorter pines lurking in low darkness. The old woman was touching up her lipstick and her drawstringed mouth was alternately pouting and grinning at Salter in the rearview and Salter was thinking: what have we here? A crucial detail was all wrong, of course: the combined age of the two was a good deal more than one hundred; but otherwise things seemed to be shaping up into one of Salter’s hoariest fantasies come true.

Rich couple picks up a young stud. They all drive to a deserted stretch of the beach. A towel is laid out on the sand. The millionaire with his arm around the young stud’s shoulder: I love my wife but I’m impotent…please…I don’t know how to ask this, but could you…would you? She hasn’t had one in years. ..

“Vincent Price had a house over there, back a-ways, in Mission hills, overlooking the Airport. Lindberg Field. I always had a problem calling it ‘Lindberg Field,’ you know. I guess I’m showing my age, but I can never hear the name ‘Lindberg’ without remembering one of those awful ‘Lindberg Baby’ jokes.” 

He assumed a perfect deadpan and turned with his right arm along the top of the seat and looked at Salter and cleared his throat theatrically and said, “Say, what do you call a…a, uh…oh, wait a minute. That’s not how it goes! Dammit! I’m useless! I just thought of one the other day…” 

A classic specimen of one of those old-time couples, thought Salter: the man doing all the talking; the woman just smiling…beaming, really…mostly at the man himself, oblivious to outsiders, while the man, her ‘hero,’ talks. Salter tried to remember. There was another example. It rang a bell. But he couldn’t…who? Who. It would drive him crazy if he couldn’t remember where he’d seen it before. That look on her face.

And then: yes : those Reagans. Salter tried his hand at small talk.   

“So, you two are married, then?” 

Don was still idling at the intersection of Sixth and Laurel, despite the long-ago fact of the light going green. Was he still trying to remember a Lindberg Baby joke? The traffic light blinked and its eye turned red. The old guy was staring at something to the left, away from his wife, in the park maybe, so intently just then that Salter guessed that he hadn’t even heard the question, but as Salter cleared his throat and undertook to repeat himself verbatim, the old guy replied, overlapping him, with a distant voice, “For a very long time.”   

For a very long time.  

Which sounded so nice. It sounded so nice that it made Salter regret every single fact of his life as it was, and made him hunger for a change, it made him long for a second chance, and the first thing he resolved to throw out before relocating into the shiny new home of the Duplex of his re-organized Soul was ‘Art,’ that dusty thing. That furry brown dust-caked 19^th century attic heirloom called ‘Art.’ Fuck it! Toss it! Filthy old bristly bearded hoary repulsive thing! Musty thing! What had it done but ruin his life? ‘Art!’ May it nevermore be freed from the restraining cage of inverted commas!

Where was Salter’s convertible? Where was Salter’s love-dumb, worshipful wife? Where was all his stuff, his security, his piece-of-fucking-mind? Somewhere back there, at some juncture so remote that he couldn’t even remember what sickly-sweet pop song was a hit on the radio the day that he did it, he had turned Left when so many others…so many others!…had kept on going. Kept on going on that long straight road. The long straight road of happiness. So easily achieved! You just remain on that long straight road. That’s all! No turning right; no turning left…just: straight. From now on. Tomorrow, in fact, as a first step…Salter nodded to himself as he blessed the back of the head of the Happy Duffer in his Commodore’s Cap. Tomorrow. First thing. He was going to buy a tie. 

The light changed green again and the car moved forward, as effortlessly as a breath, or a liquid downhill, advertising wealth, and a jet bellied directly overhead on its way to Lindberg Field and Salter hollered, “It must be great to grow old with someone you love!” and he was nearly choked with emotion as he hollered it, touched as he was by the serene beauty of human completion seemingly radiated by the white-haired couple, the living opposites of Salter’s world and Salter’s monotonously unspectacular luck, but Salter vowed to change all that, inspired by this couple. First thing tomorrow. A tie; a blazer…a navy-blue blazer…he repeated himself at a lower volume. “It must be great…” 

“Rubbish,” laughed the old coot, over his shoulder. “We can barely stand the sight of each other.” 

Salter laughed back at him. Weren’t old guys always funny in the same way? Never quite slap-your-knee funny (to anyone under fifty), but just as reliably never unfunny, either. Wry. Are young people ever ‘wry’? That’s one thing age could give you: a sense of…

“I suppose you think I’m joking,” he said and then grunted, like a man on the phone on the toilet, doing something complicated with the gear shift and clutch or whatever as the car took on the hill that rose up like a striped black whale before them, “But I’m not, I promise. ‘Hate’ is too strong a word, of course.  But…” 

“But, no. Love? No. I can see how you’d get that impression. Nice old couple, cruising around in a convertible on a Friday night, right? Not a care in the world! All smiles…” He winked in the mirror. Then:  “But that’s just nerve damage.  See? Look: that’s a permanent grin on her face, like a Jack-O-Lantern. Pure luck it didn’t freeze into a scowl, really…I’ll give The Good Lord credit for that much.” His eyes touched lightly on Salter’s in the rearview again. How far can I go? they seemed to be saying. How far…

“She’s ten years older than I am, but you’d never know it. Got a collection of face lifts older than our grown children. I even started naming them! The last one I called Griselda. That’s the nerve damage right there, if you ask me. You can only lift a human face so many times …something’s gotta give.” Then he released a sigh so long that Salter could smell his breath: bananas. “I could have had two convertibles for the money I’ve spent on making a seventy-five year old woman look seventy!”  

Salter had never realized, before now, how genteel…how delicate…he really was. He was unbearably embarrassed. His face was as red as a blood-blister; as numb as heel-rubber; he didn’t know what to say; it wasn’t as simple as being trapped with a bore, or in a conversation gone shamefully wrong, at a cocktail party; he was in a moving car. Not that the car was moving so fast… a gifted jogger could have caught up with it.  Should Salter politely inquire about getting out at the next light? Perhaps old Don was deranged; without a doubt rude; but was he dangerous. Did he pose a threat. 

They were headed for the Highway. Salter could see it clearly with his Tales From The Crypt imagination: a Luger in the glove compartment. Which was stuffed in beside a bloody roadmap which was folded around a sandy, black-edged, ear-ringed ear. Or: thirty two wallets. Or: Mexican scalps on a belt. A fetus in a jar? Don Ameche was shaking his head. Then he exploded with a guffaw that sounded like an Apache War Whoop that made Salter jump in his bones. 

“You must think I’m awful! But don’t worry, I forgot to mention, the poor thing can’t hear a word. Deaf as an old boot!” He leaned on the horn and raised his voice over it and shouted, “AREN’T YOU, NAT? AREN’T YOU?” Then shrugged. “Can’t read lips, either. Couldn’t be bothered. I keep this happy look on my face,” he nodded, grinning, “And Old Yeller  just thinks I’m saying nice things about her. Haven’t done the Hokey-Pokey in a Coon’s age. Mostly I abhor the smell of talcum powder. Turns me off.”  

After a long pause he added, with extra significance, “I’m dying for a little company,” and he waited a calculated interval before slipping a shy glance into the rearview mirror. But Salter was already gone, tumbling on the blacktop, over and over. Laughing like a loon.

He limped back home. 

 

The Patriarch

 

He’d been meaning to start a notebook with all such examples but the resolve to do so faded every time. The same with the general notion of keeping a journal. In school he’d had friends who’d faithfully recorded their thoughts and experiences, inspired to do so by a certain charismatic English teacher. He could imagine these friends as responsible old women and men of the future, cleareyed and crisply dressed, validated by framed children and grandchildren as they angled pens over diaries on rolltop desks, recording in a fine clean script another day in each orderly life. The steady accretion of meaning.

Every attempt he made at starting a journal devolved into parody and then boredom. He always found it impossible to pretend that what he was writing during these attempts was unselfconscious and private and for his or its own sake. He immediately pictured an audience and what he should and yet couldn’t reveal and whether the style was literary enough. He’d lost track of the number of nice little moleskin notebooks he’d bought, only to leave enigmatic markings on their first few pages and toss them in the trash with a sigh of relief. And yet the urge to write things down kept coming back, a compulsion that refused to cure itself.

His grandfather, as dead as the Mesopotamians now, had kept a journal. Hundreds of volumes were found boxed in the basement after his death. They were stacked like bricks behind old luggage and the rusted treasure of a 1930s Tyco electric train set, an epic of secrecy recorded in stingy, leftslanting code. Secrets so faithfully kept increase in profundity until the eventual deaths of all concerned devalue both the secrets and the effort of keeping them and render the keeper quaint or absurd. A figure of vain pathos. Even if he started keeping a record there were so many important events that had lingered in vain for so long before disappearing completely from his thoughts, erased by subsequent moments of greater intensity but far less meaning,  usually to do with sex, the pursuit of which had occupied his twenties after an embarrassingly late start and precious little return on the investment, that to start now would only prove that his life was already largely forgotten.

Warned to get to the station early, he’d been up before dawn. Dressed in a strange cold room in fumbling darkness because he couldn’t find the switch. Borrowed flats were usually poor ones. Student housing or workspaces without bathtubs and in this case the only heat was supposed to have been provided by a coalburning stove he’d been afraid to meddle with. He could feel he could see his breath, moist as ectoplasm, dark as it was, dark as not being, or never having been or seen, as he blew on his hands as he polished the catechism of streets and corners and left and right turns in the path to the Altona station, the reverse sequence of the path to this flat inscribed on the envelope the key had come in. The envelope he’d carelessly tossed in the trash and which he had no intention of digging for. He got his clothes on and patted the floor around the mattress for any small possessions gone accidentally unpacked and found his passport.

The sound of the lock engaging as he shut the front door and the irreversible gesture of the key pushed back through the letter slot and the heft of a sack over his shoulder plus the rundown beauty of the hard blue sidestreets at dawn were the sensual pleasures of departure he always looked forward to. The selfpity he’d felt about having to wake in a strange cold flat before sunrise to make his train changed, quickly, as his head cleared, into a smug glee, the sense he was getting away with something he imagined having to do with disturbing the sleep of schoolkids with his bootsteps up the cobbled slope in a narrow pass between red brick buildings that wouldn’t have looked out of place in Chicago. The slot between the buildings like a flute and the rising birds the bubbles in it.

Booking a ticket the last minute for the New Year’s weekend had tripled the fare, straining his budget, which had kept him out of trouble in the end. His ears were still ringing from the massed fury of firecrackers on Saturday. The fucking things had bounced down the street and rained from apartments, the air a black sack of bright hot beads, the aggressive cheer of the Germans, their inherited urge to make war reduced to this slapstick with pyrotechnic beauties attached. So now it was Monday morning, day after the aftermath and his ears were still ringing. His boot heels loud on the cobbles. If as a child he’d have heard such bootsteps echoing outside his bedroom window at dawn on a school day he’d have dreamed a whole future of farflung adventures for the man in the boots, the sailor/troubadour/Christ figure of his childish imagination, but he himself was now this figure, or less.

When he boarded the train at Altona he found the carriage almost empty and the aisles still wet from a mopping. The vinegary disinfectant the Germans think smells fresh. He slid the compartment door open and saw that he had his compartment, which would normally seat four comfortably, entirely to himself, and the next thing he’d noticed was the weak oppression of a cheap perfume, the type with the faintest whiff of vulva about it, some working class teenager’s erotic Christmas gift. He saw the torn silver square of wrapping paper in the ashtray built into the window sill and he fingered it, imagining the smalleyed boy who’d hoped to receive pleasure in exchange for the offering. Feeling superior to this boy he’d dropped onto his seat and thanked his good luck in being alone. But now he thinks, staring at the Slav reflections on the window backed by rolling snowfields, that some version of this same thing keeps happening to him, over and over again and that it must be the fundamental scenario of not just his life but Life itself, this kind of twist, these mean little inversions of fortune,  the mournful catchphrase about a thing being too good to have been true.

The first stop after Altona he’d held his breath. Few climbed on the train and all of those who had walked right by the sliding glass doors of his compartment. So far so good. Sigh of relief as the train edged out of that station. The morning was lowceilinged and it shredded into a flurry over the tops of the old stone buildings he rolled past and then the flurry thickened as the countryside opened its hollowed flank to the tracks, the deathly ice of bronchial trees in a hardcream field fanning out.  The view from the train was splendid and evoked the euphoriainducing religions that predate all cities. He felt the euphoria himself, a feeling of pride towards existence and solidarity with the living world whether or not this world ever held him in its thoughts.

It was the fourth or fifth station, after twenty minutes of peace. Twenty minutes of the warm compartment and the clotting snow and old German lithograph view and him there drifting in his thoughts. It was then that his mood fell. As the train eased to a halt along a platform dark with the shifting jostle and rucksacks and hills of worn luggage several rows deep his thoughts all turned to shit. Lüneburg, the city near where they’d caught Himmler,  he knew that for some reason, all those fucking people, the jig is up. He gathered his duffle bag and the book he’d unpacked from it and drew himself up. He’d seen many young hatless heads in the crowd and many blondes at that so there lingered a good chance that the bad fortune of being on a train that pulled up to such a crowded platform would turn into the good fortune of a female shape as foretold in all those wet sessions alone with his disgusted selves. Maybe even a pretty one, with English, but not so much she was haughty, quick to correct him. On her way home after New Year’s. He’d had Germans attempt to correct his grammar more than once and the next time it happened he’d be ready for it.

But there they were, not a pretty girl at all, at the sliding glass door of his compartment, the father fumbling with the mechanism of the handle as though he’d never been in the 20th century before, scowling, shaking his big mop of graystreaked hair and scratching at stubble with the air of a mountain village patriarch, disdainfully ignorant and tough as old roots. The headscarved woman in a shapeless bundle beside him and then somebody’s grandmother and the chronically ashamed teenage daughter behind them all, lugging the stunned baby like a depressing cold lunch.

He couldn’t possibly have managed to disguise the look of horror they must have seen through the door the moment before they and their sole possessions crowded into the compartment with him. They heaved a suitcasesized toaster oven on the space beside him and then a clanking box of kitchenware on top. They were still stacking shopping bags on the luggage rack overhead when two collegeage girls appeared in the doorway of the compartment like the final torment, frowning at their tickets and then at the compartment number over the door and back at their tickets again.  There was no doubt that they all would have gotten along wonderfully well together for the duration of the trip to Berlin.

‘I’m sorry,’ smiled the blonde, who was not sorry at all, in her ski pullover and tight jeans. She spoke in the formally condescending German she’d have used in a bakery. ‘I think there is somehow a mistake. Perhaps your tickets…’

The patriarch cut her off.  ‘You want to complain? Go get the police,’ he said, without for a second even looking at her or otherwise interupting his work. He and his headscarved wife were securing things in the overhead while the daughter and grandmother sat on opposite ends of the facing banquette. The baby could have been a doll, or dead, for as much as it moved or made noise in the girl’s lap. The blonde blinked a few times and said, ‘This is not very polite!’ and she and her darkhaired girlfriend marched off.

For a long time after their departure he nurtured the hope that the girls had gone to fetch a ticket collector or porter but he knew it was more likely that, being young, they were flexible enough to find other seats and still not wellformed enough to know how to handle a confrontation so ruefully he pictured them sitting with their arms around pulledup knees on the blackhard carpet with the rest of the student overflow in the dining car or some lounge, joking about it with handsome boys. American girls, especially middle or uppermiddle class, would have handled it as an affront to their human rights. Would indeed have gone to fetch someone in uniform, the driver of the train if necessary. This was one instance when he’d wished for Americans or even the old kind of German.  But that last thought and its implications made him feel so guilty that he tried to catch either the grandmother’s or the teenage daughter’s eye to give them a reassuring smile as though it were in his power to give. But this didn’t happen. Not once in two hours of travel.

We hate because we are hated.

From right to left, reflected in the window, floating like slackjawed ghosts over snowscape, the teenager, patriarch, headscarved wife and old crone with sexy thick white hair in two plaits to her lap down her layered top. None of them had much to say and when they did speak in their coughing, swallowed language, whoever spoke would not look but continue to stare into the middledistance, just as whoever the remark had been aimed at would not so much as tilt a head or cock an eye to respond. Clearly, history was having its way with these people. He thought: that’s the mistake, the belief that it’s a constant roar of white noise that we’re all contributing to, all being affected by, all the time, forever. In fact, the sound of history being made is discrete, a sharp shock or a cluster of them. Gunfire, near or far. What was the suburban America of his and his parents’ youth but a safe haven from history? Where time is quiet.

Several times the patriarch leaned over him, so close that the heat from his lap was felt; actually seemed to brush his cheek; and he handed first tangerines, then later salami and later still crumbly bread and cheese for the headscarved woman to prepare in her lap, tossing it down without looking. Mundane circus trick. When she passed the lobed tangerines to the family she made a perfunctory gesture of old world manners across the compartment at him but he smiled and he shook his head no, the smile wasted because she picked up the ‘no’ with her peripheral vision, and that was the first and last effort to communicate between the two camps. The American and the refugees.

The first fifteen minutes of the journey after their appearance stretched to accommodate what seemed like a week’s worth of thoughts. Three days back. Wandering the cold, surprisingly empty lanes of The Reeperbahn, all alone, in the late afternoon of the last day of the year, the sky already black, he had felt as cut off from any sense of human purpose or belonging as he ever had in life. He remembered feeling dizzy from it, the sense that it didn’t matter in which direction he chose to walk or how fast or with what facial expression or whether he bothered to remain on the sidewalk or suddenly walked into traffic: it truly didn’t didn’t matter. A vertiginous feeling. He’d thought: I could scream obscenities, or gouge my own eye out. What is it that holds everything together? You could slash a hooker’s throat with a boxcutter or use the same tool to slice your own thing off instead. The sun wouldn’t fail to rise the next morning.

So this is what they call Nihilism.

The hamburger joint with an Indian motorcycle gleaming in the window felt like a lifesaver after that train of thought and he’d realised he was powerfully hungry and with just enough money in his pocket to splurge on a grotesque meal of warm American plastic he crossed the street and pushed the door open and kissed the prospect of a discount handjob goodbye. The global American hamburger joint that the Germans he knew jokingly referred to as the American consulate. The very thought that he’d been saving his Deutschmarks for a handjob made him smile faintly as he ordered and it hit him like effusive praise from a ghost how young he was because the schoolgirl taking his order was not even young enough to respect him. He took his tray to a table at the window near the Indian motorcycle and watched the occasional clump of tourists tromp by through ankledeep snow, drunk and with their collars clutched, bored already at the sight of towering hookers dressed for Las Vegas marching in the opposite direction towards whichever sidedoor with a gray rainbow of accreted pisstains on its low right corner or whatever angerfilled car idling at a curb. He’d thought: it’s true, I’m young, there’s still time. Staring out the window and chewing that slop.

He glanced across at the headscarved woman, her man, the grandmother. In aggregate emotional age one thousand years old. But surely that’s a thought that only the old have: I’m young. If not old in years then old in chances lost. The grandmother with her carved brown face…a face like something found under an apple tree. She’d done everything she was ever going to do and had the serenely blank expression of someone who wanted no more; would go when they called her to, easily. Who is the better human? The one with so little potential who fullfills it completely or the one with so much potential he can’t possibly hope to match it with real deeds, real accomplishments?

He was hounded by unformed talents. Or their ghosts. By his so-called potential and there wasn’t a so-called great book or movie or masterpiece of music that didn’t fill him with contempt and the thought that he could have done it, he could have created that, he could even have done it better. Nothing was beyond his reach. One simply needs a method. A technique. He could mock himself, though: I have the soul of a famous artist. The world looked, when it bothered to at all, and saw only a young man standing impatiently in the space the famous writer/painter/musician/film director was meant to occupy. A kind of place-holder.

He didn’t even have a job: he had the money his grandfather had left him. An amount just small enough, or so his grandfather had believed, to force the young man to find honest work to augment the stipend. But his grandfather had had no idea how cheaply he could live, or that he’d choose to live even more cheaply in Europe. Worse: in Germany. Where they’d threaded two bullets through the old man (then young), two bullets from opposite directions, accounting for the frogged brown arm with which the grandchildren identified him like something out of a bedtime story calling him Hoppy behind his old back. Pap Hoppy. The frogged arm, Pap Hoppy had once confessed, (with his back turned) had undercut his confidence and caused him to marry the first plain girl who’d have him. Not the formula for a happy life but the inspiration for a richly secret existence as recorded with patient care in journals no one would ever be able to read.

This girl, what was she, seventeen? Not pretty but very skinny which was attractive in and of itself. Skinny but gracelessly present in the chest, a dark line tracing the lipstick of her thin, resentful lips and her blond hair showing roots. With as much access to television as any teen North of Sicily she might have passed for American minus the shrewd expression. Worrying the dull baby’s little white fingers like prayer beads. Was that her little brother or little sister lying insensate in her lap and how had the headscarved mother, as packed away as an ageold football in layers of patches and repair tape, ever managed enough nakedness to conceive it? It would have been accomplished with a defecatory grunt in a dim room with grandmother’s black eyes shining like Pan’s from the corner. Or maybe it was the girl’s baby. He exchanged a look or two with her but there wasn’t enough imagination on the whole train or even the world to finesse those disinterested glances into any kind of flirtation.

The Birthmark

And then there’s Frederick, who discovers that The Sheltering Sky is premiering at the English-language cinema right up the street, a ten minute walk from his rented room on Hauptstrasse. Not another Odeon! Cinemas called Odeon and restaurants called Tivoli: failures of the entrepreneurial imagination. Having reclined in the dirty velour seats of various Odeons in seven American states he thinks how if he ever runs his own little arthouse cinema  -a dream on par with living in a lighthouse- he’ll call it by its proper name, which would be Odeum.

He turned thirty a month prior, in London, weepy-drunk in his sublet with two slags he snagged in the off-license. The even-drunker, if that’s possible, blonde had three feet of thick braid sashing her bare back and asked him if he’d like to have it and Frederick slurred his assent in the form of the eternal question. So he found a chopped gold snake in the bathtub the next day and spent a tense noon struggling to reconstruct the events. He eventually found the courage to check the freezer for a head or a blonde tit in a baggie. He packed it in his luggage with the tailored shirts laughing.

The little bald refugee from an Otto Dix painting asks Veer ah yoo go-ink and Frederick shrugs so slowly the gesture becomes strange to him before he completes it.

-Oh, you know. Look around. See what’s what.

The last thing he came to Berlin to do is sit beside a panting homosexualist as the cinema lights go down. He doesn’t know for what he came to Berlin but he knows it wasn’t that. He knows so little so well. He can feel Herr Ludwig watching from the kitchen window as he saunters up the street with his hands in his pockets under fizzy warm twilight. Banshee brakes, infant muezzin, dogs in the gene joy of fight. Frederick recalls a news item concerning an opera lover who’d baked feces (authorities never specified if it was his own) in a tray of fudge brownies and had given one each to every of the dozen unrequited loves in his apartment building and Frederick makes a mental note to politely decline any food or drink Herr Ludwig offers. The word feces seems blacker, Greeker,  with an “a” in it. A church bell older than the country of his birth is chiming the hour.

It must be some sort of omen that The Sheltering Sky is playing the very day he lands in Berlin,  though the idea of Debra Winger playing Kit Moresby (playing Jane Bowles) elicits a sneer as he waits in line to buy a ticket, thinking of apter actresses and astonished to see people drinking beer from plastic cups in the cinema foyer and one of the patrons Frederick espies holding just such a cup at chest-height is not much more than ten years old, upperlip frothed as he chats, open-faced, with his parents. Frederick is finally granted the sensation of being adrift in a foreign country.

Dressed in a light gray three-piece summer suit and Italian shoes that Bowles himself would approve of, he eases into his dirty velour seat (Germans to the left, Germans to the right; Germans in front and behind him) and nods off under the influence of the after-tasty narcotic of jetlag, dreaming Herr Ludwig is Paul Bowles in disguise, a ruse to test Frederick’s sincerity.

“But how could I have known?” pleads Frederick.

“To be is to know,” chides Mr. Bowles, stripping out of his bathrobe. He has beautiful breasts.

Later that evening, wakened by an usher and reluctant to go ‘home’, Frederick wanders downtown, following the bus route, a forty minute walk the first half of which takes him through a Turkish neighborhood with operetta-like touches of the bazaar, showing fruit vendors crying out and burka’d matrons at waddle like sinister nuns and veiled glances from sloe-eyed houris with infidel-bashing tits. The Germans are a spectral presence and remind him of UN inspectors in their own country. On Marburger Strasse he finds a nightclub called Limbo and the angled black doorman nods at Frederick’s suit.

He is staring at an exquisite little blackhaired girl in a party of six at the VIP table under the window of the DJ’s booth. Her lipstick is as black as everything else in the bitter bang and webby fog of the long room until someone lights her cigarette, turning her lips for an instant the color of poppies, a bloodred field Frederick saw from a bus in the Sierra Gourda in Andalusia while writing in a now-lost notebook, stories about Levantine girls who make love like damp Joans of Arc in smoke-vomitting flames and either attempt murder or commit suicide after the party and in doing so reveal themselves to be the protagonist’s long-lost twin. Or something.

Winter comes to Berlin with the unspectacular viciousness of a jilted lover.  At the height of the  summer one blindly intuits that life will never be cold again and it is exactly then the cold comes falling back as the enemy’s pulped face on the window or heirloomed breaths of the mythical ancestor’s tubercular sleep, a misery so general it’s an insult.  Six months of drinking and smoking and fucking in darkness. The notorious German dream of bunker life.

Frederick’s affair with the blackhaired girl thrives in this desolation. They meet on a blustery corner and exchange those double-cheek kisses and shiver indecisively in front of one cafe after another until finally abandoning the pretense and hurrying back to his room on Hauptstrasse where Herr Ludwig gives voice lessons at his baby grand to the greatgrandniece of Gustave Mahler. Cackling under a duvet at the caterwauling Mahler. Sariah is always all over again so sweetly tentative, so eager and afraid, as though her virginity stubbornly heals between fuckings. He thinks she fucks like dogs swim. They always seem surprised they can do it.

How it started. He took her to the third day of a Hitchcock festival in a cinema so small that the ceiling was someone’s living room floor.

They are watching The Birds in German and can hear a pavane of footsteps crisscrossing the parquet overhead. Out the Ausgang and on the street into the night in which everything appears to be pretending to be busy they walk for a block of ruminative silence until Sariah, who emigrated from Iran with her dissident mother as Khomeini came to power in ‘79, says  I believe that is the most religious film I have ever seen.

“Religious?” guffaws Frederick. “Au contraire. The most misogynist rant in film history! Fellini’s City of Women is nothing compared to The Birds, as far as that goes, my dear. ‘Bird’ is working class British slang for ‘girl,’ as you know. Don’t forget Hitchcock was British.”

“I mean, what, you have this hen-pecked bachelor, no pun intended, played by Rod Taylor. Rod. Right? And all the other important characters of the film -his girlfriend, his ex-girlfriend, his little sister, and his mother-  they’re all women. Okay.”

He ticks the points off on his fingers. “The girlfriend’s a frigid tease, the ex is a slut -that’s why her hair is dark -his mother is a clinging, emasculating shrew, and his little sister is a brat, also dark-haired, implying that she’s going to grow up to be a slut too. Meanwhile, the mother and the girlfriend are almost mirror images of each other. Their hairdos are identical, which means a lot in Hitchcock, who was the most hairdo-obsessed director in film history. Our hero, Mitch -rhymes with bitch, if you please -wants to, ahem nest- with a girl who looks like a young version of his own mother, invoking the Oedipus complex. Which ends up putting out the eyes not of Mitch himself but of his exgirlfriend, in a perfect example of substitution, since the resemblance between Rod Taylor and Suzanne Pleshette, who plays the ex, is uncanny. The birds, like Freudian harpies, pluck out her eyes.”

“The female romantic lead, his girl friend, Tippy Hedron, she goes from being a perfectly coifed snob and a tease in the beginning of the film to a -a disheveled, catatonic loony by the end.”

“Remember that the first blood drawn in the film, in fact, is from Tippy, who’s trying to strike a silly, an absurdly elegant, pose in the prow of a beat up old motor boat. She’s wearing a jadegreen Dior dress or what have you. As a matter of fact, as I now recall, she’s even got the nerve to be freshening up her makeup with a compact as she’s sitting there in this filthy boat, proving how vain, how shameless, how typical, or Tippy-cal she really is. Her nose is in the air, her bosom is high and hard, her spungold hair is immaculately coifed.”

“Between the tease, the shrew, the slut and the brat, this guy, Rod Taylor -Rod, for Chrissakes- he doesn’t have a chance! The illogical savagery, the unpredictable pattern of violence, of the birds, is just a metaphor for the daily reality of life for a guy among these women. All women.”

He finally looks over to see a silver eleven of tears runneling the Persian girl’s cheeks and down her neck to salt the never-sucked breasts in her schoolgirlish jumper and jacket.

Frederick is trembly climbing over her, sliding into her, the yellowtiled stove a stone headache of heat behind them as he relishes the strenuous work of mining her innocence for pleasure. Sariah with the Salome hair. Hair like a garment and pussy her little black lamb with its fiercely trusting grip. He jigs her across the room, gasping in her mouth, her legs around his waist, her brown back slamming the door. Fraulein Mahler wails across Herr Ludwig’s basic chords. There is homework all over the warped parquet and he steps in it. He slips on world history and comes.

Sariah has her seventeenth birthday. Frederick extends his visa. Herr Ludwig discusses opera in German with Sariah at the kitchen table while Frederick washes the dishes in his silk pyjamas. She looks so worldly with that cigarette in her mouth.

Summer is the relief that everyone has promised. The city gushes green and the Tiergarten park is clothed in flesh, the women blasé about unpacking their marshmallows, the men strutting their bellies and cocks, the gregarious Turks organize epic barbecues in their nudity-free corner of the park with music and card games and dancing. The Germans keep apart and sun themselves with mute efficiency. Sariah studies the earth at her feet as she and Frederick traverse a field of what looks like an obscenely neat aircrash.

Their relationship is topsecret and they become as crafty as addicts at the protocol of deception. Sariah’s mother isn’t even aware of Frederick’s existence for that first half year. Sariah calls him from pay phones, or leaves scribbled notes about when and where it is safe to meet. As their second half year commences, Frederick is introduced as an English tutor. The matriarch unwittingly pays for them to see R-rated English language movies at the Odeon. The day before Sariah tells him she’s pregnant, Frederick dreams it: he’s following a long trail of tiny footprints in warm snow to a tree. He looks up the tree and his mother is in it, hung by a leafy umbilical.

At Chez Jacques, their favorite cafe, Sariah says her period is late. Frederick finishes his spaghetti, staring at her in the tender light, the dingy Moorish pale gold walls of Chez Jacques. He looks at Sariah and sees it in her, a mistake the size of a thumbnail and lodged in her core. Why does he feel such peace at that moment? She, too, is unaccountably serene in the face of this disaster. Why does genuine peace briefly fill them with its fearless heaviness? They are bound by an Old Testament pact that hinges on a sacrifice. On a real death.

Her belly doesn’t grow very much in six weeks, but fat lines, the consecration of a ghostpriest’s ashed thumb, bisect her navel and her nipples and the breasts balloon and her scent changes from musk to cinnamon to saltwater. Her mother tells her she looks like the moon.

You look like the moon, Azizam.

A foggy morning. The slender birches along Mahlerstrasse hooded in ectoplasm. Cross Mahlerstrasse and then Alymerstrasse and hurry between two buildings and over a carless blacktop to U-Bahnhof Hirschfeldtplatz, descend to an empty platform. Wait in silence. Stare down the tracks.

The waiting room is ringed with occupied chairs. Sariah stands with her arms at her sides at the receptionist’s desk while Frederick sits stealing glances at the other patients. One in particular, all alone, is sniffing and gulping and rubbing her raw wet cheeks with the sleeve of an old sweater. She appeals to Frederick’s mercy with crushed pink eyes and he cowers behind an obsolete Vogue and  it occurs to him right there in the abortion clinic, months after the fact, that Sariah’s religion-based reading of The Birds may well have turned out to be the freshest interpretation in years, an interpretation he himself could have appropriated, but he stepped on her argument with his glib presentation, showing off, and now it’s too late.

He has just gotten to his incomprehensible horoscope when a nurse calls out a broken version of his name. She is walking as fast as a dreamfigure down a long white hall but he catches up with her and she points at the door he is to enter and says hinter rechts (rear right) without stopping.

The room is divided into six cubicles, each cubicle made of three rolling walls and a curtained entrance and in each cubicle is a high bed, on wheels, affording minimal privacy on a sort of honor system. Flustered, Frederick turns left, or links, rather than right and enters the wrong cubicle, parting the curtains. He comes upon a girl, shirtless in a bra but no panties, knocked out and skinny on her bed, the inverted italic v of her legs bent open, her eyes just fluttering slits. Her bruised white arm, the i.v. needle still taped to it, is at a wild corpse angle, reaching, but not reaching, for the leather backpack, square with textbooks, that sits on a chair beside the bed.

She is young, tall, with wild blond hair like slashed violin bow horesehairs piled on the pillow. She is blond in all the places where Sariah is black. Around the mound of her sparse pubes is a saucer-sized winestain or how he sees it as a shockingly well-placed comment which purples the skin around the furled lips and stains the lips themselves nearly glossy black as burnt sugar against which the wisps of her bush are pale as devilglows of static under a duvet on the longlost night of a boy’s first masturbate winter.

Frederick, angry, can imagine the creep who has gotten her pregnant making jokes about it. About the birthmark. Jokes about Negroes or blowtorches. He can imagine how this unexampled angel is probably ashamed to fuck and how the birthmark’s kicky ugliness has undercut her ability to select an apt lover because our souls turn so sadly on trivial pivots and Frederick can well imagine this lucky creep exploiting the wound and pumping long-stroked into her with an exaggerated sense of his right to.

children are not the future: the old are, obviously; are you stupid?

The hour was late, so late that he could expect either to witness unquiet ghosts walking the halls of the hundred year old house or fetching harlots fellating donkeys on internet porn. Okay, “fetching harlots” is grandiose. But he had an education. He wasn’t some whatever in overalls with plaster on his knees. He was unhappy with his girlfriend and what else was there to do? Other than be a voyeur to a donkey at this late late hour. Or watch the ghosts walk. Or let the ghosts watch porn.

He ejaculated to the volume-down sound of braying. He realized that he’d reached a sort of low point and the aftermath felt exactly like eating a stick of butter. Or two. You just want to back away from your own saturation. To masturbate to a brief film about a pretty girl putting a donkey’s penis in her mouth and gagging explosively on half a pint of probably caustic semen means what about how one feels about either pretty girls or donkeys? But what a great word.

Harlot.

-But donkey should be an adjective.

His girlfriend, Gwenda, asleep downstairs, was a lawyer. Sleeping a lawyer’s off-the-clock sleep, her spare-time sleep. A fitness fanatic with a nice enough body but a not-entirely beautiful face. In fact she was plain. In some lights she was not even that. Let’s be frank. While her worked-on biceps and trim waist were no illusions, her substantial bust had turned out to be somewhat of a mirage when he’d unwrapped it, greedy hands trembling, unravelling the bulges into lots of cotton wadding and air.

-What was the name of that song about vaginal moisture? A big hit. Early ’60s.

There’s cheap porn for those who like women and expensive porn for those who don’t and plenty for those who aren’t sure. Very few are sure. Like almost everything, it’s funny when you think about it because, think about it, the point is, okay, you sit through a film, not always short, waiting patiently for the payoff which is basically some male (human or dog or donkey) ejaculating. The chowdery or birdshittish or gasoliney semen, emitted by the spoonful or the cup. You’re saying you find this interesting.

Which is fine.

He was no male model but he was a lot better looking considering his gender than she was considering hers. In fact he was the best looking man she’d ever touched. Which may not be saying much etc. His relatively good looks were not an issue, initially, or, that is to say, they were an issue but in such a way that Gwenda benefitted from it. Call it Affirmative Action of the heart.

When he first saw her wearing that camelhair coat which rhymed almost religiously with her waved and buttery hair in the muted light of the subway tunnel under Christmas carols and timed festive electronics and everything. That stuff in the air called childhood. He knew straight off she wasn’t what you’d call attractive but she was something, in the aspirational competence of her effects, the hairshape and lipthickness and bustle-swell of the coat in its bosom, promising so much, though what, exactly?

-Da Do Ron Ron.

He used his sly system of saying hello to open things up. His system was I mock myself internally like Burt Reynolds while doing it but also he was quite serious in using that mustache voice he used that usually worked though the smallest part of him (the part he thinks of as his original infant humanity) felt silly. Hammy. But it worked.

-People are afraid of great actors.

It took him weeks to admit everything about her actual face to himself. By the night of full disclosure, when the makeup had grazed or sweated off and the roots had grown in and the wave had frazzled to lustreless wires, he was already, however, dangerously intrigued. He wouldn’t say smitten. Smitten was the word he was saving. “Smitten” he was guarding in a box.

-He had trained himself to speak in a lower register.

-He tweezed his eyebrows regularly.

When he made the decision to give off certain signals indicating he wouldn’t be averse to becoming the thing labeled boyfriend in her phonebook, it was with this in mind: that looks aren’t everything. And they aren’t. Weren’t. Are they? Were they? After the seven different kinds of hell his many moviestar-model-grade girlfriends had put him through, from his eighteenth year clear until the year before the night he pleasured himself watching a harlot giving pleasure to a donkey, he had come to the conclusion that a sweet-natured, forgiving and generous personality would be a welcome change in a bedmate.

No more dragon ladies, ice princesses, black widows or femme fatales. From now on: plain Janes and peppermint Patties. The Girl Next Door in an ugly suburb. He felt a sudden hunger for a lot more gratitude and much less condescension and coming to the conclusion that a ‘homely’ girl was the answer to his prayers felt like growing up. A Bar Mitzvah of sorts.

“Finally,” he thought to himself, as he kissed Gwenda’s wounded little underbite face that very first time after that sappy movie, a snowflake intact on her eyelid as he drew himself near, “you’ve learned your lesson.”

The smell of pine needles. His smile stuck shark-bulged in a blue ornament.

Things were great with Gwenda for the first few months. She laughed at many of his jokes and treated him to a detailed recap, every evening, of the day’s rich legal adventures. He discovered that during sexual congress on her living room carpet at a certain distance and angle from the floor lamp in muted light in the missionary position she resembled Meg Ryan, a famous actress of the era, but only in his suffused pre-orgasm deliria. This was a pleasant discovery.

He met her sister (slightly better looking but still rather homely though he did toy with the idea of etc), did most of the cooking, accepted expensive gifts and wondered if getting Gwenda pregnant was out of the question. He was toying with the voluptuous thrill of throwing his life away. The only thing that gave him serious pause was the thought of an ugly baby. Half-ugly at best. Accusing him with Gwenda’s small eyes and high forehead.

He shuddered.

One night, after the snow melted and all the childhood had vanished from the warming air, they fought rather passionately over something disproportionately trivial and she revealed herself, like a rainbow-colored cocoon splitting to reveal a fearsome black butterfly, as a strikingly effective bitch. Ugly faces are better at bitchery than beautiful ones, regardless of what the beautiful prefer to believe. He gazed upon the mask of her sarcasm-twisted features and thought: “She’s a bitch and she’s ugly,” and that’s when it dawned on him.

He said, “Do I look fat in this?” and her silence spoke volumes.

2.

Dearest Nate:

Perhaps I’m hallucinating on a grand scale, but when I go out in public and observe human beings at work and at play, I don’t see very much of this post-gendered world of yours that you defend against my arguments, as hard as I try (even squinting). For the most part, I see women/girls dressing up and/or pushing prams and I see men/boys horsing around, ogling cleavage, and scratching themselves. When I attend ‘fancy’ functions for people with better jobs and higher educations, I see women dressing up…and men ogling cleavage (and very discreetly, from time to time, scratching themselves). My married friends are either sexually bored-with-each-other and stable, or cheating like minks and totally comfortable indulging in passionlessly vicious verbal punch-ups in front of company.

I’m not saying I’ve never observed this state of PC Dyad Grace you seem to be eulogizing with your pep talks…I’m saying that PC Dyad Grace as I’ve observed it is generally larval, and, approximately six months into a relationship, moults its golden skin to become the twin brown moths of the lovable slob and the tolerable nag (before time gradually prefixes each adjective with an ‘un’ and an ‘in’, resp.)

The day I stumble into a happy, egalitarian, romantically sex-healthy relationship, I’ll lose about 70% of my friends, who will rightly consider my new found bliss to be a freakish and unforgivable betrayal. As post-humanly above reproach as my mate and I will be to each other, I’m hoping he’ll still get an atavistic thrill out of the fact that I can twist open jar lids, without much effort, that he couldn’t dream of budging. And me? I’ll get an atavistic thrill out of the way he looks dripping naked and pink after a shower. Anyway, you may call me a dreamer, but I’m not the only one.

Hope this letter finds you safe, warm and very dry,

Ain’t college life wonderful?

(The sarcasm of a spoiled brat, I know)

3.

Thursday evening I am on my way home from the studio. It is about 9pm. Half a block from the front door of our apartment (the large one, the old one with high ceilings; the one Ingrid inherited from her father), I pass a figure, a noirish cartoon of mercury arc light and shadow wedged in a doorway, a little guy with a cell phone, Italianate, pleading in heavily accented German, “I love you, I love you, please…please…tell me what I must do.” It’s a scene from a movie with subtitles I’ll never decipher and sub-plots I’ll never know. And yet it’s the oldest movie on Earth. It’s pre-Colombian, pre-Christian, pre-English.

I love you, I love you… please…

I’ve been there, I’ve cried for love, I’ve never pleaded, I’ve never begged for it, never offered to die or kill for it, but I have cried real tears, tears that felt like they were cut right out of the jelly of each eye with a dull blade but always I was shrewd enough to know that begging never helps. Some of my ex-girlfriends, the ones who no longer speak, who don’t answer my calls and letters, who duck me on the street or actively propagandize against me five, ten, fifteen years after the fact might call me a womanizer. Simply because I didn’t stop at any of them in the long search for my happiness.

What am I, a ball on a roulette wheel?

I’m sure they ascribed it to a short attention span, or adolescent sexual whatever it is, the fact that I often showed signs of restlessness a month or two into it, but nothing could be further from the truth. Both parties (I sound like old Gwenda here: the plaintiff and the defense) are well aware when the fit isn’t right, but only one party ever seems to have the will or the courage to admit it and utter the magic phrase that will dissolve the contract.

-I love you, I love you…please…

The desperation in that guy-in-the-doorway’s voice: I’m haunted by it. It could power an Edward Albee play. A gypsy camp. The energy of an ego collapsing. He reminds me of what it’s like to be young, although he isn’t so young, he looks a bit like Peter Lorre, but being young is being desperate. In my middle-aged wisdom I know too well that if things don’t work with a woman, she isn’t The One and if she isn’t The One, why bother wanting her so much? The answer to that mostly rhetorical question, speaking from experience, is prestige. Prestige plus sexual intoxication, although sexual intoxication is so closely circuited with prestige that it’s technically inaccurate to list them as separate values. Who knows what Peter Lorre’s girlfriend…or ex-girlfriend…looks like. We can’t say with any certainty what his scale of reference is but it’s clear from the force of the pain in his pleading that this woman is a commodity he desperately wants to keep. A beautiful woman is a poor man’s Porsche.

You’re wrapped around each other in bed, auras blended, indulging in sticky warm penetrative intercourse. That high clear chime of addiction you detect above the mechanical comfort of humping is the thrill of possession. You’re thinking, as you pin her gently by the wrists, decorating her perfect face with a garland of worshipful kisses, “She’s mine, all mine, only mine.”

-Maybe she’s a 19 year old girl from the suburbs of Minnesota who looks like Grace Kelly and pees with the bathroom door open, charming you with her bravery. Because what if?

-Maybe she attends a tony hairdressing academy where half the instructors are snobby vain homosexuals who walk as though they’re wearing capes and the other half are aging heterosexual operators, sinewy-single and baked-looking, Roy Scheider in “All That Jazz”.

-Maybe they all hate you, you, a poor boy, a college boy who drives a fifteen year-old rust-scabbed hatchback and owns just three pairs of scuffed shoes who gets to fuck this flickeringly cinematic blonde and all they can do is glare when you drop her off in front of the academy on a brilliant August morning with a lingering kiss plus nuanced references in posture and smirk to sexual taboos that were breached the previous night.

-Or maybe that morning.

-They glare through the green glass walls of the provincially fancy, faux-Manhattan wellness and hair salon and if they could know that you and she had spent the summer in a menage-a-trois with your most recent ex, a tall brunette with cut-glass features and a mild gas problem, a heretic with something to prove in her second-hand suits from travelling salesmen who ranged from Iowa to the Dakotas to Missouri and Illinois, all three dancing together to Bauhaus in neoned clubs and sneaking mathematical fucks in the toilet, they’d hate you even more.

-You want to call me “sexist” because it will feel good.

-We all want to feel good.

Like many young Bohemian romantics, I believed in an anthropomorphic Universe when I was too young to know better. I believed in a Universe that was both aware of my existence and concerned with the delicate work of guiding me with signs and nudges through the maze of its horrors and rewards. Like many middle aged men who have subsequently suffered the scarred disillusionments of common experience, I went from the comfort of my lyrical animism to the bleakness of abject disbelief almost over night: the ‘Universe’ became a vast black mechanical box of perfect coldness and harsh light and I was nothing but a molecule bouncing around in it.

-She’d do a mild kind of hotdogish fart and dare you to say something.

-He wrote none of the above. The above is an impersonation in a deep-yet-fey voice. This is still a third-person narrative. This is still Gwenda and this is my story.

4.

From the age of nine, she’d adopted her Aunt Aggie’s husband Nate as the adult to listen to and emulate in general and follow around like his somber little potbellied squire. When she was free to do with her time as she pleased, she chose to spend it in Uncle Nate’s company. The comedy that she and Nate presented to anyone who might catch them entering a room together or walking up the street in tandem to buy the morning Tribune, two chins lowered and four hands in four pockets, was far from apparent to her at the time. This strange rapport with Uncle Nate, to whom she wasn’t even related by blood, was baffling to the adults in the family but clear enough to her, if not to Nate. Nate was the first person on the planet Earth who’d asked her opinion on an important issue and she’d appreciated that.

They’d been sitting on packing crates after lunch. Nate had come over to help another one of his wife’s sisters to move and his future shadow and his future shadow’s mother had been conscripted, too. It was a depressing little apartment they were gathering into boxes and the one to which all the boxes and furniture were going wasn’t even far enough away to play a good game of running bases between former and future front stoops. It was right next door in a long block of red brick buildings with green paint on the trim. The dented rain gutters and the fake shutters, screwed to the wall.

She was seated in what she thought of as a grownup slouch on a packing crate in a warm spring breeze from the open door when Nate, who was seated on the adjacent packing crate, reading a magazine while everyone waited for the caretaker with his pickle-reek to come and confirm on a checklist that no fixtures had been stolen nor walls violated by nails larger than a certain size and that working lightbulbs had been left in the bedroom, bathroom, kitchen and living room sockets. Nate looked over his shoulder at her, obviously disturbed by something he’d just read.

“Let me ask you something, kiddo. Honestly. What does God want from us humans?”

Obviously, in retrospect, it was a rhetorical question. It tickles her now to think that her relationship with Nate (dead ten years next Friday) had been based, initially, on a misunderstanding: a nine year old’s misapprehension of the proper protocol for dealing with a rhetorical question. She’d taken the apparent request for input seriously, flattered beyond any previous value that she’d managed to experience, and worked on the problem with Jesuitical diligence all day, carrying boxes of silverware and small appliances and bags of linen out one door and right back into the next one like a robot, silent, frowning, lips very vaguely mobile with a secret symposium convened to address Nate’s question. At the end of the day, when every item in flat A had been transferred to identical flat B and the grownups were vetting the notion of ordering two or three large pizzas as an unprecedented treat, she approached Nate when they had a moment alone and said,

“He wants us to stop.”

“Who wants us to…?”

“You asked what God…”

Uncle Nate was genuinely impressed and so perfectly deserving of his new shadow that he suppressed his first impulse to get his wife’s or sisters-in-laws’ attention in order to announce, “This kid’s a damn genius! Did you hear what she just said?” He played it cool instead.

“Could be,” is all Nate said, with raised eyebrows, and from that day they were almost a father and daughter arrangement. Maybe closer than that. Like salt and pepper; snow and hot cocoa: Nate and his special little Gwenda.

-He taught her the surefire method for charcoal fires.

-He taught her that arm wrestling is all in the wrist.

-He taught her to think before saying thankyou.

-He taught her that Bruce Lee was genuine and that David Carradine was bullshit and that a faculty for detecting the difference could be applied to almost anything in Life.

-Why does Time consume perfectly happy children for the sake of producing all these wretched adults?

5.

I once quipped to someone that suicide is a lot like smoking or drinking: if you don’t try either before the age of nineteen, you probably never will. But I didn’t know what I was talking about when I made that witty remark and there’s some evidence to suggest that the wittier the aphorism, the less it will actually apply to real life. It would have terrified me to know back then that so many years after the remark, I would have nothing and no one and no apparent reason to live. Despite my money; my professional success; my knowledge.

Burdened and blessed with the kind of intelligence that made me the little star of my grammar school and had me bagging college-level reading scores in fifth and sixth grade, I am living proof that while it may be the case that the moderately above average in intelligence have the world on a string, the freakishly gifted are in for tons of trouble.

I remember fresh workbooks were handed out in the first week of second grade, intended to last for half the school year; however, knowing no better, I completed every exercise in my workbook by the end of the day, oblivious to whatever it was the teacher was droning on about at the blackboard while I breezed through the (to me) elementary exercises. All the answers I had filled the blanks with were correct, but rather than being amazed, Mrs. Johnson was angry. And rather than feeling special as a result of my feat, I felt guilty and ashamed.

Any hope of ‘fitting in’ was lost long before that point, and so what it occurred to me to do was apply my intelligence towards money-making and a solid position in society.

Now what?

6.

-A photo of Gwenda at 15.

She had a mild crush (her only foray into what could have been a life-affirming lesbianism if only she were wired that way) on the girl who took the picture and wrote tons of poetry that summer.

i.

a plum is waiting

at the center of the world

for just the right tongue

ii.

is a plum a plum

before you have eaten it?

or just a theorem?

iii.

this plum got warm in

the sun and smelled better than

every one of us

iv.

refrigerated

cinematographically

blue plums at midnight

v.

these plums are famous

for never being those but

what if you mixed them?

vi.

this artist painted

nothing but plums until he

finally got one right

vii.

don’t pay me dollars

pay me in plums but just one

very lovely plum

viii.

la petite mort is

the state of brief amnesia

of the plum just loved 

 

7.

I cried shamelessly in the presence of the doctor and her very young trainee nurse, the first time in my life that I had let myself cry in front of strangers. Part of my blubbing was lack of sleep (the contractions came at 5 a.m.) and part of it was the pain I knew that my lover had gone through to bring our child into the late morning light of the sun. But most of it was mingled grief and gratitude about the distance I had come to the first day of the life I’d always dreamed of. With the circumstantial poetry of so many significant coincidences in this life, the birth happened on the first sunny morning in a months-long block of cold gray gloom. The tears in my eyes as I looked at her refracted brilliant sunlight. I had packed CDs for the birthing room that we never had a chance to use but, still, some delirious hybrid of Beethoven’s Ode to Joy and Bo Diddley’s Little Girl blasted in my head as I wept and my daughter came forth and the Past made its exit with a blast from my beloved’s operatic screams and yes, yes, yes, our baby girl is beautiful.

-I am smitten.