Last Bender

11.1

I washed up the plates and poured a glass of wine and took off all my clothes and lay in bed. I put on TV and sat in the dark watching, waiting.

It was Iron Chef, not my favorite, so I watched This Old House and mostly gazed out the window at the helicopters and the planes crossing the sky. There were sudden bursts of firecrackers; entire packs going off at once, and the whistle and pop of bottle rockets.

Roy used to make time bombs with firecrackers, a dry cell battery and a cheap wind up alarm clock. He’d tape them together with gaffer’s tape, attach a lead to the minute hand on the clock and at 12 on the casing, and hook an Estes Dry Fuel Rocket Fuse up to an M-80 or a cherry bomb. The clock he’d set for 3 or 5 minutes, depending on the situation. Then he’d put it in a garbage can and run up the street and turn around to watch the people freak out when it exploded.

He liked scaring people, causing trouble, but he also loved fireworks. Every time they went off he laughed and clapped his hands like a monkey.

Roy was secretly prudent. He kept careful account of his fireworks, and his drugs, in the notebooks. And he apportioned out what he used, always leaving something in reserve. “Always have an out,” he told me when I was learning to drive. “You get out on the road, you should be thinking five moves ahead. Where will I go if that car stops short. And don’t use the fucking brake unless you have too.”

My mother loved fireworks too. She thought they were grand, whether it was a barge on the Hudson or the sidewalk, or the parking lot behind the building, or on the beach or the backyard. Every year she took us down to Chinatown to buy stuff for the 4th. Afterwards we’d celebrate over bowls of wanton soup and spareribs.

My father pretended to be bored but you could see him flinch every time one went off. It took something for him not to duck under a table. And he would laugh and shrug his shoulders and say, “I had enough of that in the war……and Alabama…..and Mississippi.” The same joke, every time.

Someone on the street yelled, “Joooooseeeee!” And then they laughed loud and hard and kept laughing as they walked on till their voices disappeared around the corner, to go up another street.

I had never thought of Sally as a drunk, but whether she was drunk or not is not something I took away with me from that year, that year she was out of school and I was working for Eakens at Columbia and at Pain et Poisson with Dorothy.

When Sally and I got back to Manhattan from the Island we fell effortlessly back into our old routine. That first night in town we stayed at the loft. It was our second fall and we did things we had done before. We had traditions now. I looked forward to the turning of the leaves and the first cold wind blowing in off the river, and in that expectation, she was there, walking down by South Street on Sunday, in the winter. The streets were empty. There were just the old tenements underneath the towers and the grey river pulsing against the piers.

The Green Market was just a few blocks away from the loft and we would go on Saturdays all the way through the fall till Christmas. Soon there would be apples and fresh cider. But this time things were not quite the same.

Sally was to spend her time applying to grad schools, and I to library schools. But I would be doing so during slow times on the counter at Pain and Poison, as we now called it. Business was way up. We had caught on and Patti wanted to expand the menu to include crepes. They could be rolled out on this machine a salesman showed us one afternoon, and then you spoon warm things over them and roll them up. It could be chocolate, cheese, jelly, peanut butter, or Fluff. Anything at all that rolls flat. Crepes were going to be the next big thing.

Eakens was able to pay me out of grant money he had raised for book repair, and he allowed me to sit in on his seminars, and other classes in the library school. I roved the stacks in search of the hardest luck cases, books with broken bindings and crumbling pages. But this soon proved to be fruitless, there was nothing to be done but box them, which we did. So I started to search for books in dire, but not forbidding, condition, nothing that would induce hopelessness and despair of doing good. Intermediary cases, especially of important editions, signed firsts, eighteenth century books, thousands, in decent but vulnerable condition. And so it went. I pushed my cart through the caverns in search of my books. As many as I could find he would repair with his class.

And so I would return after 9 hours of that and find her sacked out on the couch watching TV. “Djeet yet?” she’d ask.

“No.”

“Whereduya wanna to go?”

“I don’t know. Royal?”

And it would be Royal Indian on 6th Street.

Early in the fall the Lacan folks re-gathered in the living room. Now that Sally had graduated, their deliberations lasted long into the night. Dean didn’t get off work till 12. Antonia and Powell would drift in earlier, and Christopher and Sylvio were likely still to be there from the morning.

Christopher cleaned offices. He made forty bucks an hour sometimes. He’d work all night and then come over and pass out on the couch in front of the television. Two or three hours later, he’d get up, maybe go home to really sleep, or else he’d shower and spend the rest of the afternoon drinking coffee and reading or talking to whomever was around, usually Sylvio, who also kept unpredictable office hours. He was an adjunct at Columbia and worked as an editor at Semi(o)texte; yet he always seemed to be there. I don’t know when or how he taught his classes.

The ostensible purpose of their continued association as a group was their plan to finally write and publish the newsletter they had been discussing for 3 years. They were now prepared to begin writing what they had taken all that time to decide they could write. It was a receding goal as their intellectual alliances were not only shifting, but negatively reactive, mired in antithesis and non-coincident. Now, in a rare moment of syzygy, they were dedicated to pursuing a theoretical fusion of Marx and Lacan via Althusser and Marcuse. Sally was split into factions, having read The Making of the English Working Class (a book I had given to the psychiatrist just a few years before!) all summer, and Christopher Hill’s book on the Ranters and what not, and Raymond Williams’ The Town and the Country. She also felt a perverse attraction to Bloom’s Anxiety of Influence. All of this was contre Lacan, whom I called Le Con, and whom she loved equally. So psychoanalysis was her way in to Marx, and Marxists. She read Marcuse, Althusser, and Sartre, but her copy of Kapital remained unopened. She was starting with The Grundrisse. It too had a place mark in the preface.

The house was quiet of crisis; Lydia no longer lay decaying in her nest. She was in San Francisco working and living in a halfway house. Even Joseph wasn’t there as much, mostly very late at night. His day didn’t begin till noon or 1 o’clock, so I never saw him, except through the blear of sleep. So Les Cons sat later and more uproariously each night.

Although I was not in the mood to socialize, I still felt the ghost of conciliation and the fear of the end was still palpable, so I would sit with them till about midnight when it was time to attempt to sleep over the rumble of conversation.

The school search was efficient enough. She was applying to Brown, Hopkins, Penn, Cornell, and Yale. There were library schools near each of those places. I wrote away for applications, made out checks for fees and mailed them. I went to Eakens for a letter. “I’d be happy to,” he said, opening the door to his office. We sat down. There was an old iron book press, a black corkscrew tightening a board against the cover of a book on his desk. He pointed to it. “It was shelved next to a radiator with a steam leak. Fortunately it only warped the boards. The binding’s not bad.

“Just tell me where to send it and I’ll know what to say. I’ve trained a number of them wherever you’re going. I only wish you were applying to Columbia.”

“Do you think I shouldn’t go to one of these places?” I showed him my list.

“Bah, of carse you should goo. You say your garl friend is applying to grad schools?”

“Yeah.”

“Well then, if you loov her, you’d better move on.”

“Between now and then I want to keep working.”

“Of course, of course. I’ll find money for you any day. You’re a bargain.”

“How so?”

“Well, you do the job, you see.”

I started to ask everyone about it, as the reality of leaving began to creep up the back of my throat. A lot of it had to do with the apartment, a fact I could not readily admit, to myself or anyone else. Only Roy knew it, and I had never told him.

I loved living there all summer. It was the perfect place to go mad in. I could shout in my underwear, I could grumble no no no and not care if anyone heard. It was always only mine. Except for that brief period at the beginning, Sally and I rarely if ever stayed there; and the more tightly bound to her I became (because I knew she would be there the next day and the next, and I always felt like something else was going on, something I wasn’t a party to), the less time I spent there. I could go a month or more without sitting down in the chair with a cup of coffee and a book.

Sometimes the feeling that something else was going on would be sexual, but other times it was just a hostile jealousie, a dark, contumacious passion, pure Thanatos and contemnible. But at the apartment it didn’t matter. It was my home, the place I could go to for refuge, where I depended upon no one. It was my territory, my turf. There wasn’t much of it, and the lease wasn’t in my name, but it was mine. I had lined it with my books, all of the walls, and I had there acted out my share of adult anabases, triumphs and penitential wanderings.

Of course, that didn’t stop me from packing up and moving back to the loft, greedily, at the end of the summer, when we returned from the beach. And even though I had spent considerable time there all summer I still had the impression of walking into an old familiar place after a long absence, with its deep scent memory diffusing in my mind and almost new again.

In fact, by now, I was realizing, drip by slow drip, that I did not need the apartment. Roy was not making it easy. Every time I saw him he asked if I had applied to Columbia. He called and left messages in the middle of the night. “Did you apply?” It got so I didn’t want to see him. We had dinner once, twice a week, at all kinds of places, and wound up the night either at Bar in the East Village or the Spring Lounge in Little Italy, or some place in his neighborhood. It all depended where we were.

There weren’t many slow times to talk at Pain et Poison any more, even in the afternoon gutter, which was my permanent place now. But it was a nasty leaf driven day with high winds and falling temperatures. The rain descended in squalls through the dark afternoon. Dorothy and I sat down across from each other at the counter. I had a double espresso and she had cappuccino. We faced each other, each with our elbows on the counter and heads on our hands.

Dorothy was doing the crossword, or had been, until the weather got dramatic and we were totally alone. “So,” she asked, “are you and Sally going to apply to Cornell?”

“They don’t have a library school. I’d have to go to Syracuse.”

“I never knew that. Lived there my whole life.”

“It’s an hour away.”

“Yeah, an hour and twenty to the airport. Ed and I both applied. We’ll know in the spring.”

“Would you really want to live there?” I asked.

She thought about it. “I didn’t used to think I did but now I think I do. We want to have a garden. I want to have children.”

“But you’re only 25!”

She blushed and smiled. “So what. People always think it’s strange when I say that. I want to have kids. I love kids. Anyway, for us it’s time to go. Ithaca’s beautiful, and I have family there.”

“So if we moved there too we would be like, friends?”

“Alex, of course we would be friends. You don’t want to leave the city?”

“It’s not that.”

“Is it Sally?”

“No, I know there are no guarantees, but I want to be with her, I just don’t know if I could be happy in another place. I find them all to be so depressing compared to the city.”

“In what way depressing?”

“Oh, you know, small and grimy with nothing to eat and nothing to do. I didn’t used to think I cared. I’ve been to New Haven and I’ve been to Philly. Please tell me Ithaca is nothing like that?”

“I never went to New Haven. I’ve been to Ethiopia. I got dysentery there. Not dysentery really, but uncontrolled vomiting and diarrhea for a week, with bloody discharge. Then they sent me home with my mother, who would have taken me the first day, but my father insisted it was just tummy rumbles.”

With Roy I took the opposite tack. We were drinking Rolling Rock and playing pool at Bar on 7th Street just off of First. We were losing to two regulars, who were kind about it. Roy ran the table once or twice and kept us alive but I never failed to let him down. “You’ll lose your mind,” he said, before lining up a shot in the far corner pocket. He dropped it and as he walked he continued to speak, his eye on the table. “These other places you’re talking about are dumps. So what, she can’t go to school in Miami? New Orleans?”

“You don’t want me to go anywhere.”

“If it were somewhere worth going–” he made the shot and searched for another. The guys on the other team watched Roy pace around the table with a cigarette in his mouth, and me following him around. “Or someone worth going with.”

“Stop that, you can’t say that! I love her.”

“Yeah yeah, yeah. You love her. But does she love you? You’re going somewhere for someone. That’s like, against the rules.” He had no easy shot and tried to take a very hard one involving many balls. It failed and left them with a shot.

“Against the what?”

“Slivovitz.”

“No.” I waved my hand.

“It’s not fucking absinthe! Jesus. And what you’re not listening to is what I’m saying. You’re moving for all the wrong reasons. You don’t just pick up and go because a flaky academic chick is going to school in a dump. You count for something. You always sell yourself short. Why shouldn’t she move where you want to go?”

“I don’t want to go anywhere.”

“Aha! You see, you don’t want to go.”

“That’s not what I mean.”

“You said it.”

“But what I meant was I wouldn’t initiate it. I am willing to go along with it. More. More than willing.”

“Yeah, and are you really willing to give up that apartment? Forever? The best place. The cheapest rent. Where you know you can always afford to live. You’d give that up for her. Your family, your friends, and your home. I just don’t see it. What do you see in her?”

“What do I what?”

“Dude, I’m not the only one who doesn’t get it.”

“I can’t explain who a person is if you don’t get her I can’t make you but I would, yes, I would happily give up an apartment that isn’t even mine. I don’t need that place, or this city. I can live anywhere.” I took my shot and missed it.