Last Bender

10.

After the 4th it was brutally hot and I had no plans. I worked all week and tried to find things to do at night besides lie around obsessing that Sally was gone. I keened for her. I rent my garments, my chiton. Where had my wings gone? It was a constant throbbing disturbance of the heart, centered on the node where the blood and nerves mix. A postcard from Florence, the one I did not put on the refrigerator, read, Blech! The food here is gross; all we eat is organ meat. Love,-S. This was just awful! I imagined her giving blowjobs to Christopher in a decrepit Venetian pensione with heavy drapes and rococo framed windows. I took it to work and examined it in the stacks. As I attempted to bring some order to the gentle bedlam of the shelves I knew no peace, but only the image recurring of a faceless lothario doing faceless things to my beloved and her enjoying them more than she ever had my own embraces. The somber mildewy silence of the stacks gave way to obsession.

Out in the world, at Pain et Poisson, I broiled as well. The air conditioning did not work and Patty wouldn’t spend the money to get it fixed, even though it was hot and no one was coming in. I waited through dead evenings or afternoons till I could go home and lie in bed gripping onto phantoms.

I could have stayed at the loft with Lydia gone but I had no desire to live in Joseph’s filth and squalor, especially in the absence of Sally’s censorious presence, for she was the avatar of their mother when their mother was away. So at home I sat and slept in front of a blasting fan drinking Rolling Rock and watching people walk by on the street below. I waited for thunderstorms.

I also went out with Joseph. I thought I would want to be alone but in fact I had gotten used to the stimulation. So when, early in the summer, Joseph asked me over to sing with him and a friend of his I readily agreed. I have a tolerable baritone and always sang in school choirs. I would be afraid to sing alone but going oooh and laaaa and Yes she does, she does, didn’t seem to be terribly risky. There was nothing preposterous about the idea.

So I went to the loft, determined and serious, aware of what a Joseph Babel recording session could be. I walked in, using my key, and there was Judy Braine, the most beautiful woman in the world, seated on the couch drinking a beer and watching TV. Her hair was henna red and she was painfully thin and tall. She turned her black eyes upon me and said, “You must be Alex.”

“Yes.” I sat down next to her on the couch, my heart knocking hard in my skull, thinking, what?

We watched the Israeli army kill people in Lebanon while Joseph set up instruments, occasionally looking up from amps and wires to tell us something more about Kurt Weill’s Johnny Johnson.

Joseph had just started to work at his first job, as a receptionist at the Satyria Studios Print Gallery, in Soho. I went to a Leroy Nieman opening with Sally and another one, with Dean, Joseph and a couple of his Oberlin friends, a Marxist and a fellow traveler, both of whom worked as bartenders, one at The Palladium and the other at a toilet on First Avenue run by a nasty old lady. Tammy took me there on their lesbian night. She insisted on my dressing in a certain way and wearing make up. “Am I to pretend that I’m a woman,” I asked, as she brushed on blush. “Oh no,” she replied. “You have to act like your trying to be a man. It’s easy. They’ll probably think you’re really good.” I was assuming I would be in a bar full of women but apparently it was early and there were just a couple of women playing Ms. Pacman in the back, between the two ripe smelling bathrooms. The old lady was at the end of the bar yawning between puffs on her cigarette and watching Joseph’s friend Bix read the New York Times with a bored expression. He had been a counterman at Dojos, so he and Tammy recognized each other. I was a little relieved there was another man there and that I didn’t have to try to pretend to be a woman pretending to be a man. But I must confess to a certain disappointment too. I had actually imagined picking someone up. I suppose had I managed to seduce a woman in Diana’s den and become aroused, I might have been another Actaeon, set upon by a pack of dogs, in this case, not my own.

Joseph had a desk and a black phone near the back of the gallery, which was like a white cave. Sometimes during the day I’d drop by and we’d look at the prints and talk and go for a break in the neighborhood. There was a Ray’s on Prince and Elizabeth with good Sicilian slices, and the noodle shops in Chinatown, and the Italian bakeries on Spring Street.

He gathered us up off the couch and said, “So I’ve already recorded most of the parts. I’m going to put the drum machine on and play the accordion, and Judy’s going to sing and play keyboard. Whenever there’s a chorus, you sing harmony with her and me.”

Joseph started to play the accordion. Judy sat behind the Yamaha and sang into a mike and played the accompaniment to pi-koo-koo-peech. He belted out his lyrics in a thirties cloth cap and squeezed the hell out of his accordion or bandoneon. He had a set of traps. He sang all of his songs in his new, soulful, thirties protest style. It was like Woody Guthrie singing the line, My sneak attack/Will win you back.

Judy brought to the parts a trashy electronic cabaret feel. Her voice was good. But she was something to look at singing. My god. Suddenly I wanted to fuck her so badly, I didn’t even feel guilty. I just wanted to plot how. Sally was out of the country. No one would know. And I would have Judy. I just couldn’t let Joseph find out.

Other than rehearse with them and work I hung out with Tammy and Matthew and Simon and Buddy. Soon after the Romna dinner Simon called to invite me over. First we met at Ludlow Street. He tossed down the key and I creaked up the stairs to his apartment. Outside the door it smelled like linseed oil and turpentine. He let me in. I watched him make coffee. “Man, it feels so good to be making coffee here again. I missed this place. Not the city, just these rooms. Home.” He poured the water over the grounds and watched them bloom. Then he did the two-cup one-cone pour, moving back and forth without spilling any. When both cups were full he tossed the filter basket in the sink, where it joined a big can full of brushes and we went into the middle room. I looked around. Stuff was pulled down and plastered over.

“What happened to the cherubs and the demons you had over there?”

“Eh, got sick of ‘em. I want to start over, start fresh. I’ll keep some of it. I want to be fanciful, mix it up more. In Rome this guy I met had just gotten back from Malaysia where he was photographing Hindu Temples. They are so cool, bright colors and cartoony lines. There’s a blue ass playing violin, right there on the lintel, and an elephant with a guitar. I’m working on these Icons. In Italy, I didn’t have much space and I moved around a lot.”

“Did you ever end up taking lessons?”

“No, I wanted to but then I just got sidetracked with the radio station and the incredible scene there. I think when I used to paint small, I would take a big thing I had seen, and in my head, shrink it down. But after a while, I started to think small. That’s how I saw it, small. I paint these pieces on wood, in oils. They’re Saints.”

The faces hovered in the dark varnishes and oils. They were haloed and hollowed.

“What’s going on the wall?”

“I think some sort of totem pole. Ezekiel’s totem pole,” he laughed. “So how was the fourth at dad’s?”

“How was yours?”

“The usual. He cooked jerk chicken and drank Red Stripe and ranted. How’s Roy?”

“Well, catatonic on the 4th, except the end there and then he passed out in the car and I thought he was dead, but I was too scared to take my eyes off the road. It was so dark, I couldn’t see a thing but the guardrail when it loomed into the headlights. I’m pissed at him.”

“What, did he give you more money?”

“It’s stupid. He came over to the loft to hang out with me and Sally before Sally left and we talked about grad school, and she was saying where she was going to apply and I was saying how I would apply to library schools in the same cities so we could pick a place to go, that’s the plan. When I said that, he shut down completely, pfrist, like that. Later, I walk him down to his car and he was ranting the entire way giving me all the reasons why I shouldn’t leave the city. He starts with the apartment. It’s like, go for the jugular. I’d never be able to come back. His plan for me is that I go to Columbia and then work at the New York Public Library. But I could sublet it for 4 years or I could even give it up, follow Sally to the next place. Burn my bridges. That sounds good to me. But to Roy it’s like, I’m betraying him, abandoning him and my mother. And Dawn she doesn’t talk much at all. In enthusiastic bursts. She is a good conversationalist when she’s on the lawn chair with a cocktail in her hand and a show on. But get her to my father’s and she’ll go three hours without uttering more than 2 words. Roy grinds his teeth constantly. He was on Quaaludes and coke. She was dressed like Audrey Hepburn.”

“That’s pretty funny.”

“He drove us out there. Holy shit, I’m too old to get in cars like that. I don’t know why I do these things.”

“He’s not so bad, just totally fucked up on drugs. He should go to AA or something.” It was time to leave for dinner. “We’re making pork loin stuffed with prunes, porcini mushroom risotto, and rapini with pancetta and garlic. We should go.”

Their apartment was across from The Ritz. It was a small building with a nice facade and clean halls. We walked up a short flight of stairs and were met by a black scottie that came scurrying down. Simon laughed and bent to pet him. “Ronnie gave him to Buddy while I was away. He named him Alexander. I’m sorry.”

“I know what to name my next goldfish.”

“I’ll be lucky to come back as one.” We entered the apartment. It was painted shades of dark grey with track lighting, an exposed brick wall and a loft bed over the kitchen and bathroom. On the wall as you came in was an Andy Warhol Mao, blue, with red lips and yellow eyes. Buddy was stirring the risotto. Seated on the couch was Ronnie, a gnome like middle aged black man with a mostly bald head and thick black glasses.

“Come in,” Buddy said, leading me away from the kitchen and into the living room. Simon took off his coat and started to stir the risotto. I settled in on the low couch next to Ronnie, whom I had met a number of times. He and Buddy and Simon had all lived together many years before in a loft on University Place.

Simon, decorating windows with Ronnie, hooked up with Buddy again. They went out for a while and then Buddy was diagnosed with a rare blood cancer that was not AIDS. That was around when Simon was going to Italy, and so he rented the apartment to Buddy. Buddy taught design at FIT whenever he could, and went in for experimental chemo and vitamin therapy, which left him incapacitated for weeks at a time.

We faced an enormous television that was playing I Love Lucy with the sound off and two low chairs. Buddy sat in one of the chairs and offered me a drink. There was some sort of jazzy disco music on. On the table were crostini and a two-litre bottle of pinot grigio from Astor Liquor. He poured some over ice in a tall water glass and added a squeeze of lemon and handed it to me.

“Thanks,” I said.

“Simon and I sat here all weekend filling up ashtrays watching these. They are fabulous.”

Ronnie shook his head up and down and laughed quietly. “Ethel,” he said. “And Fred.”

“Right,” said Buddy.

“Where did you get the Warhol?” I asked.

“Oh that. I worked for a print shop down in Soho. It was my bonus.” He smiled.

“Was it Satyria?”

“How did you know?”

“Because Sally’s brother Joseph is working in their gallery.”

“I didn’t know they had a gallery. This was years ago. I was a silk screener.”

Simon came in holding a wooden spoon coated in risotto cream. “He’s got a Rauschenberg too. And an Alex Katz.” The buzzer went off. Simon went to the door and said, “Who?”

“Tammy.” He buzzed her in and went back to stirring.

“Well that is so uncanny,” Buddy said.

“Hi everybody,” Tammy said from the door. Simon came out and kissed her. She took off her leather jacket and hung it up in the closet.

“Can I do anything?”

“No,” said Simon, and they flirted briefly. “Go on in and get some wine. Dinner’s almost ready.”

“Good smells,” she said. “Hi Alex.”

I kissed her. She shook Ronnie’s hand. “Hey Ronnie.”

“Tammy.” He smiled. “I was listening again to the Staple’s Singers.”

“Oh my god!”

“Do you want ice in yours?” Buddy asked.

`“You know me, I’m straight up,” she said.

“You know who you remind me of,” Buddy said, pouring white wine from the big bottle into a square purple plastic cup. “My sister.”

“I didn’t know you had a sister.”

Buddy nodded, as if to confirm the obvious. He had a deep voice, as did Ronnie, and they were both a little swishy. They were the wisest fools I knew. Things are not discreet in time but of penumbras; the end affects the course of events leading up to it. The end is not a mere cessation but the end of a story which is sensed long before it arrives. Buddy and Ronnie were well into Act 3. But we didn’t know it that night, there was just a feeling of having settled down. They were in their thirties. They would have been beautiful old men. “It’s my foster sister. I lived with her for eight years. She’s my best friend and my oldest friend. I see my foster parents too, but they are totally fucking crazy. I am not kidding. My stepfather hears voices and reads Edgar Casey books. He’s an apostate Old Order Amish. They live outside of DC, in Chevy Chase. Every year I go to the reunion. August 15th, in this big old park.”

Well, what is there to say about it. It was one of those nights where we drank and laughed and stayed up late together and had a merry time.