Last Bender

2.2

All through junior high Tammy Markham ran and swam and played tennis. Her athletic body was unbearable. I would see her at the pool in her bikini. She had the hairiest armpits of all the girls and used to lie out on her towel on the deck so that you saw her pubic hair sticking out of the sides of her yellow foam bikini bottoms, without even trying to look. And then you had to look. And then that was all I could think about, Tammy Markham’s pussy. In high school we went to the same parties and worked on shows together. She was on the lighting crew. I acted and sang. By then she had stopped playing sports. Her hair was long and unkempt; she ate a lot of acid and wore overalls, sometimes without a shirt or bra.

     My first class at Hunter was Intro to Poetry, and there was Tammy Markham, in the back of the lecture room. I almost didn’t recognize her. She was in a black leather jacket and her hair was just a bunch of bleached fluff. But she had the same chestnut eyes and full lips. After class it was she who came up to me and made the crack about my being a dork. We started talking. I said I needed work, and she said her sister Emma worked at Gaylord’s and was getting her a job. Maybe she could get me one too.

     Tammy lived with Emma in a barbell tenement on the corner of 9th and First. It was a great apartment, $120 a month, with floors so slanted you could roll a marble across the width of the room. She didn’t have radiators, she had scary gas space heaters in windows at either end of the apartment. To warm the kitchen in the winter she would run hot water in the shower (a metal stall in the middle of the room), put on the oven, and boil water for coffee. Then the windows would steam up and the steam would freeze so you couldn’t see out. On a cold clear day the sun would set through the ice crystals.

     Emma’s boyfriend Danny was a legendary book man at Gaylord’s. Danny was a poet, but no one had ever read his work, not even Emma. He was a short man with a big beard and Rasputin eyes, one of those pipe-smoking, cross-eyed gnomes who inhabit the edges of the world, a man of the emotional Antarctic, a human thermophile. Emma told me once that he had so many books in his apartment the floors were bowed. He didn’t bathe at home because his bathtub was full of books. I felt an uncanny stir in contemplating a bibliomania so extreme, or even the need of the poet to read everything. And Emma herself, after four years at Gaylords, had thousands of books. I spent many a winter afternoon bundled up in sweaters and blankets, drinking coffee on her futon couch and reading Henry Miller and Blaise Cendrars while she painted in the corner and the air filled with the smell of linseed oil and poorly burning natural gas.

     Emma got me an interview at Gaylords. She knew the hiring manager there and he would put anyone she suggested on the top of the application pile. I found his office in a back area of the first floor, behind the textbook stacks (which at twenty feet were an awesome thing to behold). He had black hair tied back into a ponytail and was combing over. He smiled, indicated a chair with the flat of his hand and said, “Sit down.” I had never been interviewed for a job before. I had on a blue work shirt tucked into brown corduroys and I had sweated into the armpits. There was a stack of applications on the desk. In front of him, alone on the baize green blotter, was mine, bisected by a sharpened number 2 pencil. He asked me how I was and he shrugged. “So, you want to work for Gaylord’s?” I answered yes. “Well, we don’t have anything on the floor right now. But there’s a job in the medical department as a shipping clerk. It pays $3.35 an hour and goes up a quarter in six months, if you’re still here.”

     And so began my career in books. It was not my first job, but it was the first one away from home, and I did it for nearly six years. By the time I was done, the world was a little more obscured by dirt. Ford lost to Carter and Carter lost to Reagan. Boredom and despair had metamorphosed into jingoism and mass delusion. Or, as Bernard Lonergan says, insight into oversight reveals the cumulative process of decline.

     For six years there was the autohypnosis of pricing guns, laying down the fluorescent orange sale labels over the yellow price tags, hour upon hour of shuttle-click shuttle-click, the white backing tape curling over my hand and piling up on the floor. I learned to lose myself in the radio and the books and filter out the barrage of bad shit that was always happening, the petty politics, the hysterias, the melodrama, but I listened to everything that went on there.

     Below, in the basement, worked Carlos, Lord of Shipping and Receiving. He cast a baleful eye upon the lifers and, like an octopus, ruled the nexus, pulled the levers of give and take, controlled the street elevator, directed forklifts to the Bookazine truck, handed over the packing lists and pointed to a pallet. “That there is yours.” “Eliot!” he’d bark, walking quickly away, with one stiff leg, the way a wide man bustles. Eliot was a distributor. Eliot might mean fifty boxes of Beeson’s, an orange book as thick as an unabridged dictionary. He was about forty and the limp came from lifting boxes in and out of the cloth laundry tubs we used to transport books to our respective floors.

     It took about five years to become an old timer. It’s an interesting process I suppose, a little like watching Empire State Building. After two years I was a made man though. Of the shipping guys, only Bruno had been there longer.

     My colleagues were mostly Satan-worshipping, anal vapor-inhaling heavy metal fans from Brooklyn and Queens. One was a dental student that worked on the floor for years. By the time I arrived he was an inveterate malcontent, but a defeated one. He barely spoke, he hated it so much.

     The stockroom was a refuge for floor workers. They congregated behind me in groups of two or three or in the storage room at the back, behind the metal, three-quarter wall, to smoke and gossip about what happened when they saw Twisted Sister at Lamour.

     And so Simon became my only friend there. He had nutty ambitions, and it all started with Hegel, as it so often does.

     AIDS transfigured him and gave him a destiny to fulfill. And maybe it didn’t. I don’t know. He believed it. It was a difference between us. His grasp of a greater reality was fear of death, end of story. Yet that judgment seemed both limited and cruel. And so I had an undecided mind.

     It happened so quickly and yet it happened at a time that in retrospect seems endless. There were hours for talking and drinking coffee, looking out the window at the windows across the street, or into an oblique view of intersecting lines, the edge of brick, the iron ladder and a stretch of sidewalk and a piece of street, through which everything passes.

     He made it known that he wanted a political funeral, and he got one. The speakers treated his family badly and some of Simon’s friends refused to attend, Emma among them, but I wanted to go and I went. They were his wishes. She was in a different position I suppose. He had moved in with her on 9th Street after she found him lying in his bed, covered in shit, dehydrated and unable to move. His boyfriend Buddy had gone out on a drinking binge and hadn’t come home for days.

     Simon recovered and traveled to Spain for an international AIDS conference. While there he visited the Alhambra and had a vision of ascent, to Hurqalaya, a citie half immortal, which he told me about in his kitchen. Since becoming ill he had not worked much on his great project, but there wasn’t much more to do in the way of embellishment anyway. By then he had turned practically every surface of the apartment into a painting, a mosaic or an assemblage. The kitchen ceiling was a lattice of pink roses against a clear sky. On the living room ceiling he had painted a twilight-blue tromp l’oile dome divided into zodiacs with figures and signs done in gold leaf. The walls were sectioned off; into small painted chapels at the corners, and shrines to saints along the walls. Faux marble columns supported the ceiling and these were twined with cherubim. On one wall was the Bishop’s tomb, from Browning. He painted a story from The Faerie Queene in the style of Blake’s Pilgrims. In the living room, as we sat drinking Mu tea and listening to the sounds of the street, he said, in the most ordinary voice, but with a smile, “I stood there watching the sky and the arches in the water, and I understood how the light was reflected in me as in a mirror. I was reaching out of the armature of the sky, and into the city of the sun. I started to ascend through layers of light, and when I was among the stars I saw all of creation whole. AIDS and I are each pieces of the same thing, and it wants to live as much as I do. Now I have to tell people this. They need to know that they will never end AIDS through opposition, but only strengthen it.”

     They came to hear him expound his vision. He sat and talked, sometimes all day long, reciting all he had learned in life to a changing group of sick young men. He talked about Siva as creator and destroyer, of the virus as an Other; he said the only solution to the problem of AIDS was aggressive acceptance. And I guess in that year there was nothing else you could do.

     That was at the end. Before that were the marches, and the actions. He and some friends stormed the CBS Evening News. There were smaller protests, the heckling of speakers. And medical work. He was part of a treatment underground, a network of illegal, obscure or plain crazy treatments and drugs that stretched from China to Mexico. I infused him in his kitchen while Buddy watched Turner Classic Movies, with garlic and vitamin c and cucumber extract. He cooked beautiful meals, dressed in his schmatta.

     He said to people, “When I die, take my body and burn it in the street.” And they would have I’m sure, if they could’ve gotten the permit. But what they did do instead was put him in a lavender casket and gather together in the triangle where the F train stops between Houston and 1^st, less than a block from where I sit. There were maybe two hundred of us. After a while, men in saffron robes picked up the coffin and we formed a procession behind it. Others ran ahead, closing off three lanes of traffic on First Avenue, block by block, as we marched slowly up the center of the street. Everyone on the sidewalks stopped to watch. Ahead of the coffin were people playing cymbals and drums and burning joss sticks. Others were chanting, OM NAMAH SHIVAYA, OM NAMAH SHIVAYA. After a few blocks they knew we were coming. Crowds formed at the corners and at the windows to watch, old ladies in kerchiefs sticking out their heads, and kids, pointing and laughing. There were kids everywhere, following at a discrete distance, unsure if it was ok. We turned down 9th Street, passed The Pharmacy (the restaurant where he worked for years as a bartender), and entered Tompkins Square, coming to rest finally in the center of the park. They put the coffin up on saw horses draped in white cloth and opened the casket. The profile of his face was just visible above the edge of the coffin. There was a hush, for how often do we see dead bodies in public?

     The kids could not now restrain themselves. They climbed up what they could, the cage of a backstop, benches and lampposts, to get a view of the dead guy. People started to line up behind a lectern, to speak. Someone said that we, meaning us, the crowd, were Simon’s family, and that a man with AIDS was dead to his parents. Another said he didn’t need his old family and his old life because his new family was the people who were dying everyday. Another talked about how many had died and what Simon stood for, which was an absolute refusal to accept things as they are. They did not talk about aggressive acceptance or the meaning of numbers. Numbers were a different thing to them, going to a funeral every week or two.

     Simon seemed to gaze through his eyelids at the sky, unperturbed by the anger. I watched his mother and father, sister and brother standing at the edge of the crowd, alone and separated from the others by their clothes and by their skin. They were the only people dressed for church, and they were the only black people there, except for the gawkers. His father had white hair. He stared without any sign of emotion, his lips gripped together and his hands behind his back. Simon got his looks from his mother who was tall and extremely dark, with high cheekbones and forbidding eyes. Her hair was pulled back tight and she wore a dark blue hat with a veil. His brother and sister were pale like their father. The brother, an urologist, looked like he had to go and glared at the crowd as if they were the uninsured, while the sister, a periodontist, wore an expression of helpless fear and discomfort. Her banker husband and their two kids were absent. It was true Simon had had problems with them. His sister wouldn’t let him touch her children and his father refused to talk to him till a year or so before he died. And as for the urologist, they acknowledged each other’s existence with an exchange of Christmas cards and an agreement not to talk about anything besides the weather at family events. Still, I wanted to go over and stand next to them. I knew them slightly. It must have been awful for them listening to speaker after speaker behave as if they didn’t exist. But in the end, I didn’t do it. Later that day his father visited me at my apartment.

     I also wanted to speak but I couldn’t. The words died in my head and my mind was blank. What would I have said? What is there to say of pictures? I know only what he loved.

     Simon’s job at Gaylord’s was stocking and sales. He spent his day traversing the hive of stockrooms that combed the building behind the walls of the retail spaces. When the curtained doorways into this netherworld closed behind you it was suddenly dark. From floor to ceiling were old, rough wooden shelves stacked with overstock, trade and mass market paperbacks of self-help books, the big names in psychoanalysis, how to rid oneself of back pain or have a good German bowel movement. It was dimly lit by sooty fluorescent tubes and red emergency exit signs. Surly clerks plied the narrow halls with wooden book trucks, smoking at the workstations. It was trench warfare.

     After I graduated from Hunter my father stopped sending me an allowance and I started to look for ways to save money. For years I had lived off of deli food, pizza and cold sesame noodles. Knishes at Yonah Shimmel. I puzzled over it with Simon. “Start cooking for yourself,” he said. “Hazan. Classic Italian Cooking. And Irene Kuo. The Art of Chinese Cooking. You can eat for days on what you spend getting take-out. But don’t go nuts with the shopping. Stick to the neighborhood. Go to the farmer’s market.”

     The psychiatrist sent me two hundred dollars with a note saying he figured I would need a little money, now that I was out of school. Roy had told him I was too poor to eat, which wasn’t true. The psychiatrist loved to eat. He was a big man, 6’ 5”, and athletic, so he really wolfed the food down and couldn’t bear the thought of anyone going hungry. More than that he enjoyed the occasion, the excursion by car, subway or train to a destination spot, a small country inn or a Chinese restaurant in Chinatown one of his colleagues at St. Vincent’s had recommended. One of his favorite stories and one of the first he told me was of a little shop in Vienna he went to after school to buy a hard roll, “Split, with about a quarter inch of hot mustard on it.” Then he laughed his head off, as he did when we told him we’d been to Luchow’s with my father. “Ah! Nazis.”

     Roy kept in touch with the psychiatrist as he did with the whole extended family, including the New Orleans branch. These my mother had largely abandoned, with one exception, Roy’s namesake, her old Uncle Roy, whom she brought up north for a Seder once. I was twelve and it was the first time we didn’t go to our father’s family in Riverdale. The psychiatrist was enthusiastic, but didn’t really know what to do; he was more of a Zionist, and a rhetorical one at that. That left my mother, a lapsed Catholic, actually, a Catholic hater, to take over the duties. She delivered a reasonable performance, having witnessed enough of them, and her restraint in the realm of parody was amazing. When we got to the business of hiding the afi komen Uncle Roy pulled me aside and said, “When your mama worked in the circus, she danced on a white horse, did y’all know that?”

     “No.”

     “Oh yeah, she was something. She wore these pasties that made her titties bounce up and down like this.” Whereupon he placed his hands on his chest and flapped them up and down, saying, “Boom bada boom bada boom.” Then he fell asleep on my shoulder and started to snore and drool. I didn’t know if he had died or what. I don’t think it could possibly have been that a thread, rope really, of white drool was hanging out of his mouth onto the lapel of my jacket, but that is how I remember it.

     I decided to be methodical about things and spend the psychiatrist’s check on a basic list of Italian ingredients, since pasta was cheap, and I didn’t have a wok. Hazan is severe, if not dictatorial, and my aim was to please. But where would I find dried anchovies? My bank was on Lafayette Street, so I started in Little Italy, wending my way across Spring and down Mulberry then over to Mott and up, slowly filling my bags with ingredients. I bought a Bell and Evans chicken on University, and then headed over to Second Avenue where there was a Polish butcher. He had pork necks. There was a shop on First Avenue which had large cheeses hanging from ropes above the counters, jars full of marinated mozzarella and artichoke hearts. The odor of the cheeses emanated up from the floor and mingled with the smell of smoked meat. I have read that when they buried people beneath the chancels of churches, the odor of death hung in the air, beneath the incense. It was rather like that. Here I got an assortment of olives, capers, prosciutto, cheeses, oil and vinegar, and good Italian pasta.

     Across the street, next door to De Robertis, was Pete’s Spice, which had a ramshackle collection of dried herbs and spices in giant jars, on shelves that ran the length of the store, all the way to the back and continuing up the other side. And in the center was a whole jumble of barrels full of coffee, dried fruit, nuts and tea. I lugged the bags next door and had a cappuccino and a chocolate cannoli. Then I walked home, stopping every few blocks to pass the bags back and forth between my hands, to see if they would be any lighter that way. Anxious as I was to get home I could not resist buying a loaf of semolina bread at the bakery between 3rd and 4th. It lodged between my knuckles and the top of the bag.

     My apartment is on the fifth floor. It’s kept me fit to this day, lugging things up and down those stairs. I am certain that I have helped to erode the marble treads. My dander darkens the grout between the small floor tiles on the landings. It could not have been a love of beauty and workmanship that led the slumlords who built these places a hundred years ago to use good materials, to ornament them with tile, bold trim and moldings, and cornices of scrollwork and figures. These are just the things that were mass-produced.

    As I approached the third floor I debated with myself whether to put down the bags and rest or forge ahead when I ran right into Sally. The four Greenmarket bags weighed like anvils on my arms. Even the back of my neck hurt. She about walked right by me when I said, “Sally!” a little too eagerly. The fact is I had not forgotten a single moment of that night at Issa and Puffy’s, nor of our walk home. My brain was like a shroud stained with that image, and so were my sheets. I had contemplated every splinter of the memory till they became as facets of a crystal. Now, we stood together in the sordid light, which emitted a low frequency buzz, and she still looked good. She looked better than ever. 

     She smiled and stopped and asked me how I was, trying to kiss my cheeks. I shrank a little and didn’t put the bags down. I just stood dumbfounded, arms stretching slowly earthward. I could feel my face turn bright red. Not because of Sally, but because of the strain.

     “Those must be heavy,” she said. A typical academic gloss of the obvious.

     “Not at all,” I said.

     “So is this your building?” She was on the step above me, and we were face to face.

     “Nah. I deliver groceries.”

     “Oh, I thought you worked at Gaylords.” She caught her breath. “I’m so thick sometimes. Let me help you. You look like you’re going to get a nose bleed, Alex.” She said Alex in a certain way, leaning on the L a bit. It was, very liquid, the way she said my name.

     “I hope not.”

     “So I see Roy and Lydia sometimes but you’re never with them,” she said, ahead of me on the stairs.

     “Roy and his friends kind of freak me out,” I said directly to her ass, which was in a black leather skirt. “He’s my brother and all. But it’s never good when I get involved. I just don’t like when things go out of control and Roy’s acting crazy. It exhausts me. Just the embarrassment is exhausting. And he always has to engage.” We were at the door, panting. I got the keys out. “He’s an idiot. That’s not fair. He’s not an idiot. Just impossible.” I kneed the door open and felt for the switch. “He’s very bright about all kinds of things.”

     “Oh yes, I know what you mean. Just when you’re about to dismiss them as hopeless they say something so funny you know they have to be smarter than they let on. There is something about Lydia that fascinates me. It’s her utter disregard of taste. She has no bourgeois manners, none at all, and she never has. Where do you want these?”

     I pointed to the yellow Formica table between the stove and the double porcelain sink. “There.”

     She looked around the apartment and said, “God, where will you fit all this stuff?”

     I hadn’t thought about that. I looked at it through her eyes, the ball of blankets and sheets at the foot of my bed. There was a half wall between the rooms with a doorway framed in thick moldings, crackled high gloss latex on top of layers and layers of oil paint. The sink and the fridge were miniature versions of the usual thing. And the two of us felt like a crowd. Sally made the place feel both small and empty. I said, “Well, I’ll have to fit it into those cabinets over the sink. It’s my latest project.”

     “What is?”

     “Cooking. I’m fed up with pizza. I can’t even afford it.”

     “Don’t they pay you enough?”

     I laughed. “The job is only part time. It doesn’t matter about the pay.”

     She was a little disheveled. Her hair was messed up and there were smudges of mascara around her eyes. “Part time. Why not full time?”

     “The union. To bust the union they cut everyone to part time.”

     “I’ll tell my grandfather Lev. He’ll come down and picket.”

     “Yeah, and my father’ll shut ‘em down. The fact is I work part time so I can read.”

     We were standing close again. My heart was thumping. I looked at her neck. There, just below her ear, was a hickey. Little packets of jealous fury blazed and folded. She turned from me and looked around some more. Through the doorway into the other room you could see out the window. When the sun set it shined all the way from the west side, through the streets, and lit up the brick facades, while the sky behind them was dark and grey. It was as if the bricks were made of fire and the concrete moldings around the windows and the cornices were marble white, but taking on the hues of the air. She nodded and said, “This is nice, cozy. Mind if I look around?”

     “Please. It’s a little messy. Would you like something to eat? I have olives and brea-”

     “No thanks. I just ate.” She wiped her mouth with the back of her hand and turned bright red. She looked away and entered the other room. “It’s a nice studio.”

     “It’s not a studio. There are two rooms.”

     “You should knock down this wall.”

     I started to notice how dirty it was. Dirty clothes on the floor, dirty dishes in the sink with cockroaches crawling on them, even the windows were dirty. And the clutter was alarming, the converging accumulations of separately evolving piles of magazines, mail, notebooks and cassettes.

     Her round, straw inflected eyes dilated on the cramped books on shelves I put up with nails in the corners. They watered slightly as they touched upon each spine. She picked up the Selected Wordsworth off the upended, plastic milk crate I used as a night table and read out the opening lines of the Great Ode,

                   “There was a time when meadow, grove and spring,

                   The earth and every common sight,

                   To me did seem

                   Appareled in celestial light,

                   The glory and the freshness of a dream.

 

          “I have to write a paper about this poem and I have no idea what to say.”

     What was there to say? We ourselves were half clothed in that caelestiall light.

     She read out some more, in the slightly strident tone of her neighborhood:

                   “It is not now as it hath been of yore–

                   Turn whereso’er I may,

                   By night or day,

                   The things which I have seen I now can see no more.

                   Who’s to say where one thing starts and another ends?”

I searched the poetry titles and pulled out Wyatt:

                   “They flee from me, that sometime did me seek,

                   With naked foot stalking in my chamber.”

     “Who wrote that?” she asked.

     “Wyatt. A Man of Honor. Henry the Eighth’s ambassador to Spain and France. Supposed lover of Anne Boleyn. I wrote my senior thesis on his defense. I compared the rhetoric of his diplomatic dispatches to Shakespeare’s kings and courtiers, and then to the direct speech and stunning coherence of his defense against treason. It’s amazing to read. He’s very peculiar. He wrote the first English sonnets, out of Petrarch, but turned their sense on their head. They don’t seem to scan well but the man composed for the lute, and he didn’t have an ear for verse?”

     “Why haven’t I run into you before? My boyfriend lives in 10. I’m here all the time.”

     “I didn’t know you had a boyfriend.”

     “Yes. Christopher. He’s gay.” I said nothing and she attempted to explain. “He’s had other girlfriends, but they don’t last long. I’m having a party tonight. Would you like to come?” We were standing at the bedroom window to the left of the bed, watching the buildings across the street darken, and the rain start to fall.

     “I think I can come, but I won’t know anyone.”

     “You’ll like my friends. It’s a soiree, really. The Lacan Studies Group is coming, and they’re all grad students, and poets.”

     “Uh huh.”

     “And Joseph, my brother, might have some friends. Lydia won’t be there, I promise. Just a little party, and a soiree, with poets.”

     As soon as she left, I felt a retreat coming on and resolved not to go until I realized that I was supposed to go out to dinner with my mother and her third husband, the chiropractor. We were going to Peter Luger and the thought of all that dead flesh rotting in my large intestine for two weeks was sickening. I called my mother to see if I could get out of it.

     “Are you taking a girl?” she asked.

     “Yes.”

          She chuckled. “Hun, go have yourself a good time. The chiropractor and I’ll get the steak for three and eat it all ourselves. Any leftovers we can feed to the pooch.”