Last Bender

4.2

I drank a glass of water and ran downstairs, startling Luis, the super’s cousin, who was about six-foot-four and weighed less than two hundred pounds. The angularity of his body reminded me of my father’s. He was smoking a joint with a guy and watching the crap game on the stoop next door. Luis was the Sentinel. I always felt safer when he was around. I blew by him and his scary looking pal and by the time I crossed Second Avenue I was out of breath. It was getting cold but the warmth of the day lingered on in puffs and pockets of warm air. Traffic was heavy and the swagger of the street, a bit jollier than usual at this time of year. The cab pulled up to the curb. The back door flew open and I squeezed in next to Sally.

“Hi Alex,” Lydia said.

He jerked into traffic and headed down Chrystie.

“So why’d you fall asleep?” Sally asked.

“Oh, I was wiped out.”

She turned towards me in her seat, so she could face me as she spoke. “What happened?”

I shifted around and we leaned back on the seats to talk. “I went to the park with Simon, and we got oak galls to make ink with and then we went to Tammy Markham’s. So when I got home I just passed out.” I wanted to tell her that I had quit my job. Actually I was burning to tell her, and yet I didn’t even think of it. All I could think about was her body. I kissed her and we settled in.

Lydia asked, “Are you two going to sit there making out? It’s very rude. And you’re taking up space. I got cramps the way it is.”

“So why’s Simon making this ink?” Sally asked. Lydia turned away in disgust and watched the traffic.

“That’s how he does things. He wants to fresco the ceiling and put down real plaster of Paris and make his own tempera paints. And he wants to build chaplets for each of the decans, astrological symbols he got out of The Corpus Hermeticum. I don’t have any idea of what he’s talking about half the time. He was fermenting lead in horseshit and boiling animal skins to make something called size with.”

The cab pulled up in front of a seventies building, orange brick and concrete, and we went into a minimall, or rather, it was a transitional form, something shy of a minimall but more than an arcade. At the rear was a small Cantonese restaurant with great steamed flounder. The walls were windows onto the interior corridor that had been curtained-off. And like Tammy, they decorated their curtained-off window with a plastic palm tree.

Roy got up holding a briefcase and hugged me stiffly with one arm. He was dressed in a sharp Italian suit, dark blue, and a perfectly knotted, maroon tie, with gold and periwinkle chevrons. A small hoop dangled from the lobe of his left ear. We sat down and he put the briefcase between his feet. There was a bottle of Johnny Walker Black on the table and an ice bucket. “I should just order?” he asked.

“I hate when you order,” Lydia said. “You get weird shit. Once I ate here with you, and all the next day it was coming out both ends.”

“Is it really necessary,” Sally asked, “to repeat that story every time we come here?” We had just been there for Christmas dinner with her parents, and the uncle from Haifa, a licentious old goat. I began to wonder how and when or even if I would announce that I had quit work. It was the kind of news that is good, but invites questions, and investigations. Roy would find something and go at it.

“Just make sure you order noodles for me. Chow Fun with pork, paawk.”

Roy smacked my arm and lifted his chin. “So how you been? Things workin’ out with the missus? Life looks a lot better from the other end of the gun, doesn’t it?” Before I could formulate a response the waiter came, a bored, gray-haired man with a gold jacket and wire-rimmed glasses. Roy said, “We’ll take the tea smoked duck, the steamed flounder, the Chinese broccoli, the crabs with black bean sauce–”

“Don’t forget I want noodles.”

Roy leaned across the table, into her face and said, “Don’t fucking remind me.” He sat back and looked at the waiter, who was scowling at his check pad.

“What kind of noodles you want?” the waiter asked Lydia.

“Pork Chow Fun. Paawk,” she whispered.

“And dumplings, one fried, one steamed.” The waiter was done and Roy poured a round of scotch, handing each of us a glass. “Here’s lookin’ up yer kilts, mates.” He drank his down and poured another. “So what else, what’s up, how’s that job going? What are you up to now, four-fifty an hour? Good thing you went to college. Don’t you wish you went college Lydia, like these two?”

She looked him in the eye and spoke sweetly. “No, I don’t wish that Roy. I prefer being what I am at ten-fifty an hour plus what people give me.” It was impossible to tell by the tone of her voice whether she meant it or not.

Sally said, “You can’t possibly believe it is better not to have a college degree?”

It seemed like as good a moment as any to announce the news. “I quit my job,” I said.

Everyone stopped and stared. Was it such a surprise to them that I would do it?

“Really,” Sally said.

“That was spontaneous,” Roy said. “You didn’t combust on the spot. Have you taken leave of your senses?”

“I have, sit down.”

Sally stared at me oddly and said, suddenly engaged, “Explain to Roy why it was you had to quit, long before this.” She touched my arm and looked at me as if to ask, why didn’t you tell me? But there was also great happiness for she had been urging me to quit, ever since the stockroom incident.

I dipped some fried noodles into duck sauce and mustard and munched it into a paste that I washed down with hot tea. There was a dull ache in my chest, spiritual emptiness stirred with hunger, or maybe just fear. I was unprepared for Roy’s interrogation. “I’m just saying that I quit, that’s all. That’s my news.”

Roy said, “Oh come on, how long have you worked there? Since high school?”

“College, you know that. Don’t be stupid.”

“Come on man, details, details. Tell it like a girl would.” They brought out the steamed dumplings. All four hands reached out at once and there were two left on the dish. Then came the fried. We fell upon them too, till they were vanquisht from the table.

I chewed on a dumpling dipped in mustard and sauce. “Well it started a long time ago but the most recent thing was that Leonard, the floor manager, was smoking with this cretin in the storage area behind the stock room so they couldn’t see that Simon and I were there. And they used the word ‘nigger’. It was nasty.”

He put down his chopsticks and stared at me like I was nuts. “What do you mean, you were listening in? Can’t two guys say what they want on the job without being pestered and spied on? Last I heard we had a first amendment in this country. And it doesn’t sound like they called him a fucking nigger.”

“No, but it’s insulting, they insult him every day, behind his back, to his face, in some way. They have weird ideas. It’s a constant thing he has to put up with, we all do, everybody there has to put up with it, constant vulgarity and bigotry. It’s gross.”

Roy pointed his finger and said, “The words. What were the words.”

“I don’t want to say.”

He poked the air again. “Say. Now.” He poured a shot and drank it down. “So?”

“They were talking in a very obscene way about some woman Leonard saw. Then the other guy said she was a nigger. Then Leonard said he was stupid, that girl was Puerto Rican. They talked about her having big breasts using words like tits and big. Then they started talking about uh, eating her pussy and cleaning out her asshole with their tongues, and they said nigger a few more times and came out and we were standing there. So they asked Simon if he eats pussy.”

“He doesn’t,” Roy said, waving the chopsticks in the air, then gobbling up a steamed dumpling.

“I don’t know how you could know that. It’s true he’s gay of course, but as Sally will tell you–”

“It’s just a thing. None of ‘em do. Everyone knows it.” He swallowed and rubbed his nose vigorously.

Sally looked like she was going to cry from the pressure building in her face. “This is unbearable now!” she gasped.

“I don’t know,” Lydia said, “All the black guys I ever fucked ate my pussy.”

“Statistics, fuh! That’s too small a sample! So what did you say to your boss?”

They put down the flounder, swimming in a sea of Shaoxing wine. There was a bloom of steam, redolent of ginger and scallions, hanging like a cloud above the two little eyes crammed together, puffy and white. The flesh pulled off the bone in large moist pieces.

“Oh, you know. It was like, we had a fight. And the way it ended was with fuck you. Or rather, it was, ‘Go fuck yourself.’ That was it. Before that I think what set it off was when he said ‘If you’re not happy here…’ right? So I say, ‘Happy? Is anyone in this place happy?’ I can’t think of a stupider question to ask a guy who makes what I make. I couldn’t do it anymore.”

Roy sucked his teeth and nodded. “So Sally, did you put a pair of balls on him or what? Man, Alex, dinner’s on me. Keep up the good works.” They put down a platter of soft shell crabs in black bean sauce and bowls of rice. We dove in. “Should’ve gotten the snails,” he said.

“Ew. Snails smell like low tide, and they look like it too,” Lydia said.
The crabs crunched between my teeth; I was eating a crustacean, and it felt like I had mandibles.

The waiter brought the Chinese broccoli, fluorescent green and covered in oyster sauce, and squeezed it into the collection of platters and plates we now had. Roy wasn’t eating anymore, he was staring off and smoking a cigarette, then he poured himself a shot and drank it slowly down, without ice. I watched his Adam’s apple go up and down every time he swallowed. His neck was raw from hasty shaving. Roy’s face without a tan looked pale and the skin was sensitive. I pulled a stalk from the platter with my chopsticks and bit the soft top of the leaves off, soaked in the sauce.

A while later, when we were on to the tea-smoked duck, Roy asked, “What will you do for books?”

The tea duck was on a bed of shredded iceberg lettuce, chopped. The smoky fat melted in my mouth. I looked at Sally. She was examining a piece of duck with a quizzical look on her face. She put it down, and picked it up.

“What’s wrong?” I asked.

“It has red in the joint.” She pointed at a red spot on the bone.

“Are you afraid to eat raw duck?”

“Aren’t you?”

I nodded. “It isn’t raw, that’s just the cartilage attaching the tendon to the bone. The chef chopped through where they touch and it still has a little red in it.”

“Hello,” Roy said. “You two there, I asked, what will you do for books?”

She picked up a different piece from the platter and examined it too.

“Bucks?”

“No, BOOKS. You do read them a lot, right?”

“I don’t know. I haven’t thought of anything yet.”

The pit in my stomach grew acute. The discussion of my future was upon me. As long as things remain fixed people leave you alone; but introduce flux into the mix and then they will begin to redesign your life. The waiter brought the chow fun and Lydia filled her plate with noodles.

Roy shook out a cigarette from a pack of Luckies but he didn’t light it. “So, what about the liberry?”

“Brary,” I said. “Li-brer-ee.”

“Fucking snob. Go fuck yourself. Be happy. With that big dick of yours now you can stick it up your own ass no problem. But what I’m trying to say here is, libraries must need liberrians.”

“That’s what I say,” said Lydia. “LIE-BARE-EE, lieBAREiyan. But what would a guy who gets nose bleeds want with a job touching smelly old books all day?”

Sally put down the duck and said, “Whose sister are you?”

“You don’t have to be a fucking bitch.”

“Louder,” Roy said.

Lydia stood. “You shut up too! It was your dumb idear.”

Roy laughed and made calming gestures with his hands. “Oh come on, sit down, I’ll buy you a beer. Waiter?”

“Like I’m gonna stay here just to drink a beer? I have beer at home. I’m not a beerless person. I’m not a fucking loser. But I’ll take some of that pure Columbian coke you got whenever you’re ready.”

“Say it a little louder why don’t you?” His jaw pulsed in and out and his skin reddened. He put down the cigarette and dished food onto his plate and we all ate in silence for a while.

“How was the gulf?” I asked.

“Why not a liberian? Just go to school for it.”

Now the bone was in his mouth. He had found a career for me. I had far less ambitious plans for my future. Sexual hedonism. Decadent learning merely for its own sake. A vow of poverty.

Sally looked at Roy and then at me and said, “I think he’s right.” A betrayal I should have recognized but didn’t.

Lydia was still standing but things had moved beyond her and she was trying to reintegrate. “I don’t know,” I said. “I don’t even want a job for at least two weeks. I’m going to stop shaving.”

His face reddened again. He was flashing like a slow lighthouse. “I wonder what it costs.” It was a sort of pronouncement, the way he said it, and we fell to eating once more.

Lydia lit up a cigarette and blew it at Sally’s hair. “Do you mind?” Sally asked.

“It’s a free country, still.”

“Alex is allergic.”

“So now Alex is the only guy that counts, is that it? Nobody else? Not me, not Roy, not even you, just Alex? Cause I don’t know about you but I smoke, and so do most people around here.”

I glanced quickly around the room and found this to be true.

“But we’re still eating. He gets nosebleeds. Do you want to see him hemorrhage from his nose, right here on the Bowery? Is that what you want?”

Roy said, “Will you two shut up? I’m trying to think here.”

There was something wrong with his accent. It was no longer southern but sort of Brooklyn, with all the others mixed in. “What happened to your accent Roy? You know, that down-home twang business.”

“What?” He pointed at his chest. “Dis is how I always talk.”

“No, you sound like you’ve got some generic mob guy accent. What are you now, a mook?”

“What’s a mook?” We laughed. “So you’re going to library school or what?”

“Man, Jesus! How many times now, no. I said I would think about it.”

“And? Did you?”

“But that was like ten seconds.”

“You could collect bottles and cans, or sell it in the library bathroom, a lot of short careers end there. Hey Lydia, put that fucking cigarette out, it’s getting in my eyes.”

“Now it’s unanimous!” Sally shrieked. “We all want you to put it out. It gives him nose bleeds!”

She tossed it in Sally’s water. “O.K.”

Roy picked up the platter of crabs and spooned a few pieces onto his rice and said, “Everyone just shuts up and eats.”

“I’m leaving,” Sally said. “I’ve had it.”

Lydia sat down and ate some chow fun. “I thought I ordered lo mein. This is chow fun. How come they gave me chow fun?”

“Please don’t,” I said to Sally, and pulled gently on her arm, tugging her to me. Roy threw down the serving spoon. It made a loud dinging noise and bounced onto the table.

“These crabs aren’t fresh. In Nollins, they’d throw this to the fucking alley cats. Where’s the waiter?’

Lydia slapped her knees, “Oh christ Roy, a break from the gourmet agita already. Do you see me sending back the noodles? I eat what they give me. ‘Cause this isn’t Nollins, it’s Chinatown, in New Yorrrrk, which some people have to pay a lot of money to come see, and we get to see for free, every day. Do you ever think about that? You’re living where everyone wants to be. You don’t know what you have here with these craaabs. Ee-ee, Ee-ee,” she said, making little arthritic claws with her fingers, “In the Midwest they don’t have these. It’s an East Coast thing.”

It wasn’t like Roy to want to live in the city. His shoulders were like hangers, his teeth were clenched, and his eyes roved the room as we ate the rest of dinner in silence until the end, when they were packing up the leftovers and Lydia said, “I just got my period. Excuse me.” I broke open my fortune cookie and ate a wedge of orange and exited with Sally, while Roy paid the bill and Lydia went to the bathroom.

It was still warm so we wandered down Bowery to Chatham Square. We turned up Mott and the signs began to loom out and crowd the air above the sidewalk. Restaurants one floor down and two floors up. Roy and I walked ahead of Sally and Lydia to Canal on sidewalks jammed with people. It smelled like roasted duck, chickens simmered in stock, fried fish and car exhaust. People stopped to stare at food in windows, at a man chopping roast pork on a thick old block of wood and whole fowl hanging from hooks, eyes lacquered shut, bills pointed down, necks bent like umbrella handles.

“So where’d you get all this money?” I asked.

“Business. I relocated to Miami and hooked up with some oil company people, working as a bush pilot. Between jobs I’d hang out at the Howard Johnson’s bar near the airport. I met this guy there and got a job flying for him. He’s a private contractor. I fly in and out of Peru, Columbia, Venezuela, El Salvador, Honduras, Costa Rica. I’m all over the place. Some flights where you don’t go through customs on the way back, it’s unnecessary.”

“You’re totally fucking crazy.”

We crossed Canal and headed towards Mulberry. The air smelled like firecrackers. It was much darker north of Canal. He tried to shake a bug out of his ear and said, “Maybe so, maybe so, but it’s a lot of fun. And, if I thought it would get me somewhere, I’d jump without a chute. Right? I’m staying at the Chelsea. Come on, we’ll go hang out. Play some cards.”

“I don’t play cards.”

Lydia and Sally caught up with us. I said to him, “Not tonight. I promised Sally I would stay at her place.”

“I see. So she puts them on and takes them off. Then how about some coffee and an espresso ice at Roma.” We were at the corner of Mulberry and Canal; Italian pasta joints and cafes went all the way north to Spring. Trucks squeaked and honked by, coming off or heading to the bridge. I looked for a cab. It wasn’t a promising corner.

“What are you doing?” Lydia asked Roy.

“I want to go to Roma, and get some coffee and an espresso ice. Then I wanna hang out at my place. You know? The night is young. Let’s go there and plot the next move.”

“Not tonight,” Sally said. A cab was stopped at the light. She reached her hand out and waved it a few frantic times. Then she tried to make eye contact with the driver, which was impossible at that distance, but I guess it was her will that we not go for the coffee. When the light turned green she stepped out onto Canal and flagged it down. We climbed in. The driver turned to look at us and we both blurted out our different home addresses.

“I thought we were staying at the loft,” she said.

“Oh yeah, but I forgot my things.”

The cab pulled away and I saw Roy in the rearview mirror, still standing there, arguing with nobody, and Lydia faced in the opposite direction, impatiently smoking.

So we drove to First and 1st, sitting close together on my side, free finally of other people. “That was unpleasant,” she said.

I sighed. “Yes. But at least you didn’t have to walk with him. I wish now that I hadn’t.”

“What did he say?”

“That he’s a drug smuggler. That’s why he’s so rich. It’s not welding anymore.”

“Oy vey.”

“I can’t believe it.”

“Well he could be lying. He’s certainly a self-aggrandizing megalomaniac, it wouldn’t surprise me if he were a pathological liar as well, and I think a closet case probably, crypto-fascist boy punishing type, aeternal adolescent.”

We snuggled up on the black seat and watched the buildings slide by.

When we got out a cold wind was whipping around. We ran for the door and up the stairs. I had left the windows open, and she went to shut them. The lights were off and I put my coat and the bag of leftovers down on the kitchen table and watched her crawl on her hands and knees from the end of the bed to the head so she could shut that window. Then I sat down beside her. Her coat was on. She put her hands behind her head, lay back and smiled. “Are you going to collect your things?”

“Yes.” But I didn’t move. It could not have taken long for us to feel the tang in the air. It was dark, only the backlight filled the room, and together we watched all the reflections from below gather and pass on the ceiling. I untied her ankle high leather shoes and pulled them off.

“What are you doing?” she asked.

“No shoes on the bed.”

“I see. And what of socks?”

“No,” I said, and pulled each one off.

“It’s getting a little warm.”

“Because you’re wearing a jacket.”

“Coat. My coat. Aren’t you going to pack?”

“Not till you take your coat off.”

She pulled out of the coat and lay back on her hands again. “Are you happy you quit?”

“Yes. It was liberating in some way.” I unbuttoned her blouse and the skin on her stomach tensed in the cold air.

“What about your shoes? I’m at a disadvantage here.”

I took them off a little too quickly and stretched. I pulled off the shirt and said, “Now we’re almost even. Let’s have the bra.” Her breasts bobbled out of the bra and I could stand our game no more. I fell on her and she laughed out loud.

Do I call it dew on the rose?
Or muskrat in the pipe?
What do I call this thing,
This love at its height?