Endangered Species, 3.3

3.3

For days after that I languished in the most divine state of love-stricken wasture, waiting for her call. Nothing else mattered. All there was in the world vanished before the image of her hand.

Simon had decided not to quit work after all and was in a horrible mood. He and Leonard glared at each other and neither dared approach the other though work demanded it. Simon was the best, the most experienced and reliable floor clerk. He could find any book on the floor and, because of his charm and looks, he could sell anything.

I stood in my place, listening to the last gasps of socialism on WBAI. Floor worker insults washed over me; I was in a state of profound indifference.

Simon spent more than the usual amount of time standing at my side while I worked, talking. “I can’t look at that little prick any longer,” he said.

“She held my hand Simon, and I did nothing.”

“How much can one man take? You heard what he called me, and I made faces.”

“She says sex and gender are different things.”

“What difference does it make? If you and I go out the door, who gets the cab? The socially constructed Negro or the socially constructed Caucasoid? And why would I put up with people wanting to kick my ass because I like to fuck men if I had a choice? Why?”

“But would you be white?”

“Hell no. Not for one minute.”

I carefully placed the packing slip on top of the histology textbook and wrapped it in bubble pack.

“People know what happened. They’re talking. They’re wondering what I’m gonna do,” he said, looking suspiciously back and forth. It was a dangerous time. Everyone was waiting for the counterblow. Leonard had his people. They took breaks and smoked over the partition. They came in and asked questions. They talked to me. Leonard opened the door.

“The Ice Man cometh,” Simon whispered. “I’ll see you later.”

Under the counter I kept flattened boxes. A little searching yielded one that would fit perfectly, if I cut the sides down a little. I searched the boxes, under the counter, until Leonard left. Then I finished the job to Gary Null going slowly insane over the course a single health show.

After work I walked home. The city, viewed by so many as an indifferent, hostile place really is an emotional amplifier. It is kind to the lonely, its major product. When tortured by doubt the very doubtful nature of the place flares up and lights the sky. The chaos is a fitting context for one’s own inner dissolution. In times of plenty, there they are, the lovers and the millionaires in pairs and triplets and even gangs of ten. Suicidal despair has its minions too, and the dark secrets stake out every corner. Luncheonettes are home to those abandoned to a constant lacerating self abuse and public masturbators are doubled like faces in glare, flashing off the window facets or trailing dripping shadows in the undergarment district. I walked home through crowds of love-tortured souls, those who have seen their other halves riding the cable car to Roosevelt Island. We were the orphaned ones, the marooned Gnostics doomed to age and die on alien terrain, punished for our desire for embodiment, the reckless ambition that causes you to throw it all away on five minutes of physical being, to feel the world in all its separateness, the nauseating velocity of time shooting through dull eternity. What god wouldn’t gladly die to be flesh? They envy us, they love us, and they die to possess what we would throw away if we could.

The call I was waiting for came while I was at work. I got it off the machine, while washing down three slices of cold pizza with a warm, nearly flat bottle of Coke. There is something about the way these two items meld in the mouth that is almost as comforting as it is appalling. Desultory habits, low-grade vices no one cares about, but which fill one with dread and guilt nonetheless. What does the inexplicable compulsion to forget both the hot food and the cold drink, only finding them after they have reached the same unappealing temperature, mean? It is a small enactment of things to come. This is how the universe will end, reduced to doughy matter, and then dissolved by carbonation into rubbery strings sheathed in a slick of sweet tomato sauce and cheap oil.

The machine said, in Sally’s voice, “This message is for Alex Ploomis, from his Coy Mistress. Had we but world enough, and time/This coyness, Lady, were no crime….In three days, at ten p.m. we will tear through the iron gates of time…Be there.”

I remember every syllable with a peculiar sadness, at the endless extenuation, the excuses of history, and mistakes of memory. It doesn’t matter that feelings of belief cannot sustain themselves, much less me. And it was worth it after all, just to feel it once. But it is all like marks of light on water now.

The woman with the double wide was gone. Shadows covered the western half of First Avenue. A bus came and went.

************

The three days passed. It was like vomiting time up minute by minute. At ten o’clock on the appointed night I knocked on the door. My hair was properly jelled and I had smothered the flames of Eros in Black Cloth: canvas high tops, corduroys and a T-shirt. I had showered and scrubbed my skin raw; clipped and filed my nails smooth. To give time for the cuts to heal I had shaved the night before. In the lobby I rid myself of the bouquet of green tinted white carnations I had furtively purchased down the block. Their stems stuck up out of the garbage hole on the side of the ashtray. More and more I had convinced myself to be careful, that her message might not mean what it appeared to mean at all. In fact, somehow I twisted the whole thing around to mean the opposite of what it purported to mean, but I also decided to be ready to act in the event that I was wrong. I broke a sweat in two blocks.

For a long time I stood at the door. Finally Lydia answered it. “Lydia!” I said, ransacking the room behind her for evidence of Roy. Roy was the one person I didn’t need to see that night. It had been a long time and it wouldn’t have surprised me if he had shown up out of nowhere.

“Oh, hello Alex,” she said, stepping only slightly aside so I could enter. Half of her hair was shaved off and she was heavily made up, to look like she had been beaten up and was sleeping on the street. As I brushed by her she grabbed my butt with one hand and my crotch with the other. Then she said something so obscene I barely understood it.

“What?” I asked.

“Boudin Noir. Blood sausage.” She pronounced sausage with an English accent.

“Where?”

“Where the sun don’t shine, baby.” She took my coat. “You’ve got a hard ass. Have you been working out?”

“No.”

“And you’re sweating. Did you run all the way here?”

“Do I smell?”

“Like a spring day. Don’t worry. A woman likes to get her snout full of pheromones.”

“Where’s Roy?”

“It’s not like he’s my pal, Alex.”

“But he is,” I said.

Where the couches and coffee table were before was a giant table full of food. The recessed lights were covered with green and red and blue gels crudely taped with duct tape to the ceiling and they turned the spread into strange colors. It was a true bounty, the kind professional musicians look forward to. There were salamis, and a black sausage that could have been what Lydia was referring to, bowls of assorted olives and dips, and trays of crudités. Then there were the breads and cheeses, plenty of both. There was even a full bar. Eno’s Music for Airports droned through the speakers. Joseph was crouched by the stereo in a pair of wool trousers about ten sizes too large and a baggy white shirt with a narrow maroon tie. He was screwing a wire into a terminal and shouting, “Is that better?”

Lydia walked over and poured beer on the wire. He shrieked. There was a loud buzzing noise. “It is now,” she said.

He dropped the screwdriver and stood, his face red. “You blew the fucking fuse, Lydia. Now everything’s fucked up.”

Sally came in with her blouse unbuttoned, fixing an earring. “Don’t anyone touch the food till guests are here,” she said in a fast, commanding voice.

I felt my face freeze into a vapid social grin. Lydia cracked up and said, “Company, Sal.”

Sally dropped her hands and her blouse spread open. “Alex.” She drew the syllables out and stared at me. I tried not to look at her red bra, at the cleavage of her breasts, or the shape of her waist, or belly button.

“I’m early. I thought I would be late.”

“That’s all right,” she said. Christopher followed her out. They were obviously coming from one of the two bedrooms at the other end of the loft, by the piano or the painting. “Christopher, look who’s here. Alex.”

He looked at his feet and mumbled, then made for the spread.

Sally finished fixing her earring and buttoned her blouse. She popped a grape in her mouth and walked away to answer the door. Why was she being so cold? I tried to follow her to the door but Lydia bumped my hip and asked how Roy was.

“That’s what I was asking you, I haven’t seen him in months. He’s down in the gulf I think. He called at my mom’s in the summer but he was breathing helium and we couldn’t understand him. It’s so fucking weird when he does that. I mean, he’s in this diving bell with another guy and his voice is all high and squeaky, like, eeeebee deebeee dibeedibbeedibbee.”

“How does that go again? E bee dee bee dee beee? Well, that’s not what I hear,” she sang, lighting a cigarette and throwing the match on the floor.

“What do you hear?”

“That he’s flying planes between Cawsta Rica and Misery, or some bone fuck place in the south, full of cocaine.” She arched her eyebrows and smiled. “You hear anything about that?” I said nothing. “I also hear he’s hanging out with movie stars, that he’s their connection.” She let that sink in. “Someone told me that she saw him at the Chelsea with Billy Idol and Keith Richards with something like five or six little girls from Lawchmont. Does that sound like Roy’s down in the Gulf? Not the Gulf of Mexico. Not the Mississippi Delta. Maybe the pubic delta.”

“What can I say? I’m sure if he were in town I’d know.” I looked around for Sally. It was hard to believe they were sisters. They looked nothing alike. Lydia’s hair, always a different color, was naturally thick and dark, and she had wide hips and a big ass. Her breasts were copious and maternal and she was not tall, or rather, not narrow. Where Sally and Joseph were restless, she was immobile in her person. There was something comforting in this. And Lydia’s malice was never malice, you were always meant to keep it going.

“Hawt for my sister Alex? Aren’t you glad Roy and I introduced you now? You blush like a girl, like a little Lawchmont girl. I’m not sure you’re man enough for her, with that faggy Christopher Gold fucking her pretty ass all of the time, pretending she’s a boy, playing Morrawcco in the closet. You don’t suck caulk like real men do, do you Al-ex?” I broke into a sweat. There was a tremendous feedback noise and then silence. Smoke started to drift through the green and red lights as more people arrived. There had to be a way to escape Lydia. Either words had no meaning at all to her, or she was performing in some show she had made up but failed to inform anyone else of. “I’ll let you go, manly little Alex from Largemount. But if my sweet, virginal little sister with the perforated rectum lets you down, I know a few tricks, a few romantic tricks they don’t teach up at cuh-LUM-biaahhh.”

I joined Christopher at the spread. He appeared to be paralyzed by the bounty.

“It’s hard to know where to start,” he said.

“I always start with the cheese,” I said, indicating the platters piled up with cheese and cold cuts.

“Now that sounds like a good strategy.” He busily forked a heap of Brie, Muenster, ermanthaler, Gouda, Colby and feta onto his plate. It was a veritable mountain of cheese. Pieces fell off the plate onto the floor.

“How’s the cheese?” I asked. Sally, spotting us, came over. She looked very happy that we were talking.

“I just love it,” he said.

“I was just asking Christopher how he liked the cheese,” I said to Sally.

“And I was just telling Alex how much I love it,” he said, merrily licking a piece of Brie rind off of his hand.

I don’t know what possessed me, but I said, “He doesn’t seem to mind it on the plate.” I meant to say it under my breath but there, I blurted it out. The three of us stared at the plate full of cheese. Sally became gelid.

“Is something wrong?” I asked weakly, hoping to get out of it but Christopher stomped off without a word. I thought of Time’s winged chariot and said, “The grave’s a fine and private place/ But none I think, do there embrace.” Without a word she ditched me to talk to a couple of cadaverous women dressed for a George Cukor movie, including hats and handbags.

I got a beer and sat on the floor by the stereo and flipped records. A maniacal musical intelligence was at work. I had never seen a more complete collection of records, or a more disorderly and mistreated one. Even then I had little tolerance for classification disorder. And the condition! The covers were torn and taped and cigarette scarred; records rolled out and flapped on the floor; they were shoved any which way into bent cardboard boxes and plastic milk crates, in order of most recent use. This was a case for accession numbers. There was an album of Bossa Nova hits, but he had everything just all spread out. Pere Ubu and The Dead Boys on top of Smithsonian Folkways recordings and Led Zeppelin. He guarded the stereo, looking around suspiciously, exposing the whites of his eyes. Then, he came over and squatted down beside me. “Anything you want to hear?” he asked, craning his head down and around so that he was looking up at me and I could stare into his mouth when he gaped.

“I didn’t notice the records before. Are these all yours?” I drank half the beer down and tried to figure out if talking to him would get me any closer to his sister.

“Yep.” He looked a little demented when he said it, but it was the self-conscious dementia shared by all collectors.

I looked at the records and picked up the first title I saw. “Teenage Jesus and the Jerks. This one.”

“Oh, it’s bloody Wordsworth!” Lou said, belching it out and waddling over in a blue satin Elvis jacket, make up and clip on earrings.

“Play what you want,” Joseph said. “But Lydia Lunch has a solo record out produced by the guy who wrote the theme to The Flintstones. Bradlee Field, James Chance and–”

“Wordsworth,” Lou repeated, holding out his hand.

“Is that you?” Joseph asked.

“That may be what he calls me.”

“How’s tricks, Wordsworth?”

“Leave him alone, Lou.”

“Oh, fak orf, sod. Just because he wants to fuck your sister. You fuck her yet?”

Joseph became suddenly voluble. “You think you can upset me like that, but I don’t care!”

Lou snickered and hissed merrily. They started to argue. I drifted to the kitchen. There, the poet of the ‘pataphysicisists, who had previously declared that everything is crap, was yelling at some guy about Marx. He was stooped, with long burgundy hair, painted fingernails and a nose like a hatchet. I didn’t know him, we had never been introduced, but he grabbed my shoulder and said, “Hey, Wordsworth guy, wanna get high?” He handed me a burning joint.

“Why not,” I said. My coherence wasn’t worth a fart. Everyone in the world either ranted, or cursed, or droned on in a gnomic language designed to free us of our understanding. The party boiled around me. The bony guy with the nose said to me, “I like rhyme ok but you know, you gotta blow shit up with yer poems. I write about pussy and the street. And my poems are sometimes evil.”

I inhaled and coughed and teared up and sucked in the smoke then someone handed me some cocaine. Why not. I sniffed some of that and drank some tequila and before I knew it, I was dancing with Lydia un-der-neath-the-strobe-lights.

The loft was packed with fifties retreads in skinny ties, flat top buzz cuts and clunky black framed glasses. There were the slash and burn guys, punks in torn sneakers and T-shirts. The women in Siouxie and the Banshees vampirella or His Girl Friday suits. They stirred drinks with their fingers and laughed and huddled in circles while Lydia jumped up and down, slammed and banged me about. As the song ended I felt an extreme gasp open in my gut. A swirling desire descended upon me, an ecstasy so great it drove me from Lydia’s arms and out into the party, in search of Sally. I remember all of this perfectly.

Sally was in the kitchen politely listening to a tallish blond woman with pale skin say, “I really like it, I do. You’ll probably say I’m superficial, but I think advertising is great.”

Sally looked feverish. She shook her head and said, “No no. My mother just retired. She had her own agency. I grew up on advertising. I was weaned on advertising.”

I stood there long enough for her to finish, smile and introduce us. Then, to my dismay and desolation, she left. She didn’t even look at me. I was not weaned on advertising. I did not find it interesting. I excused myself and caught up to her where people were dancing. There I trapped her. “Sally. Stop running away. I’m sorry for what I said before. It was a joke.”

“Not a very funny one. You hurt his feelings and betrayed my trust.”

“Is that why you’re avoiding me?”

“I’m not,” she snapped.

“But you are.” I touched her. She stiffened.

“It’s my party. I have to mingle. I can’t spend the night baby sitting you.”

“Please talk to me. That’s why I came. Please Sally.” I tried to put my arm around her. She pulled away. “Is it Christopher? Are you still upset about breaking up?”

“Why do we always discuss my relationships? Let’s talk about yours.”

Before I could think I said, “Because I haven’t had any.” I might as well have pulled the plug on the stereo and turned on all the lights. She looked at me oddly, blinked a few times, and mechanically stepped backward away. Undone by my own devices!

Audibly moaning, I shuffled off into the kitchen, staring at my feet. I looked up, and there was Sally, making out with Christopher. That was it. My head exploded. I walked up to them, clenched my fists and shook in my shoes. Hot tears poured down my face. I turned away and sought out the poet with the drugs. I started to drink. I asked everyone for cocaine. It was such a novel approach almost everyone who had some obliged me. Soon I was interrupting people to tell them that the fragmented stroboscopic subject was by acclimation of the Parlement of the Fooles, funified, ffast and gnoable. I stomped and danced and as the coke wore off I felt deeply, incurably, drunk. Joseph and I lunged about sunk in conversation, pausing only to sing.

I joined a group of unacknowledged legislators of the world, and disputed in what I recall to be the most elegant terms their insistence on derailing thought. If I could recapture the content of that defense, I’m sure I could publish it, and what would be the limit then? Alas, it was my last night on earth and the gods spoke through me, but to an audience that found me both obscure and irrelevant.

Things started to collapse. I was on a see saw of spotty lights and a strong desire to copulate, dabbed on by a ragged brush, and the I, whose job it is to chart this vale of tears, left me to the storm alone. I does not remember passing out. I does not remember being carried; I does not remember talking to Sally, or anything else I said or did.

I awoke in a pitch-black place, in a bed not his own. I smelled things first. An ashtray. Slowly I realized he was curled up partly on a blood splattered pillow, and partly on an arm not I’s own. Sally grunted and turned over on her side. For the first time I saw her back. For the first time I smelled her sleeping body. For the first time I lay along the length of her skin. She awoke and mumbled my name. She took my hand without turning over and placed it on her belly, where I freely rested, between her breasts and hair.

We slept till noon. After a long day of sucking Windex and coffee, we ate our first Japanese meal together on her mother’s credit card. Back at the loft Joseph and Jayda lay paralyzed by the TV. Sally took me in her room, which lay at the other end of the loft, by the upright piano. It was just big enough for a double futon, a dresser and a milk crate. But there was a toilet and sink attached and a reading lamp on a plank shelf she had built on the wall above the bed. She lit a candle and put on the clock radio. Facing me then, she let her dress fall down and caught me in her arms and softly asked, “How like you this?”