Last Bender

6.4

There was no point in trying to sleep. It was like living in a bowling alley. I stumbled out of bed and barely looked at the few human remnants of the night before, coasting back and forth as I left. I looked around at the empty street, still deep in shadow and cold. Everything smelled bad. Out on Sixth Avenue the light was harsh and the traffic loud. Serious normal people were going places and doing things. I sputtered along against the current till I got to Greenwich and hit the Peacock Cafe for a double espresso and a San Pellegrino. The world came into focus but I was hungry and didn’t want to eat there. I wanted eggs and toast. That meant Veselka. So I hoofed it over to the east side, but didn’t like the people, so I headed, slightly delirious now, back uptown to the Gramercy. By the time I got there I was dehydrated and stupid. I sat in a booth by myself staring at the menu and tried to concentrate enough to read The Dream and the Underworld, which I must have picked up off the table as I walked out the door. But it wasn’t making sense; I couldn’t my page. I looked at the cover again and it was Suicide and the Soul. Someone had switched books. I gulped down water and crushed ice from an amber cup and ordered two fried eggs over-easy, bacon and home fries, rye toast, and a large OJ, cheeks and armpits clammy with coffee sweat.

I headed back downtown, determined this time to reach my apartment and bed before too much of the day was gone. Somewhere around the third floor I decided I wasn’t going to make it and only fear kept me at it till the door closed behind me and I was in my bed, the shades shut and heating up. A restless three hours later I awoke again, this time for good, and decided to spend the day reading.

When Sally awoke she called. “What are you doing?” she asked.

“Reading.”

“Did you sleep?”

“For a few hours.”

“Why did you leave?”

“I couldn’t sleep.” She didn’t say anything. I cracked the venetian blinds open with my fingers. It was still bright out and hot. “Well, I should go.”

“Why. What do you have to do.”

“I don’t know.”

“Can I come over? To read.”

“You don’t have to ask.”

“What if you wanted to be alone?”

“I don’t care if I’m alone or not.”

She said nothing

“What I mean is I don’t mind being alone, but I don’t mind company either.”

“I understand. I’ll be there in an hour.”

More out of courtesy and restlessness than genuine need I set up the mason jar with a filter and basket and put the kettle on to boil. I got out two mugs and spooned coffee into the filter so that I would be ready to go when she arrived. We brought it into the front room and opened the blinds halfway to let some light in.

Sometime late in the afternoon we decided to go to a movie. There was a double feature of Stardust Memories and Manhattan at Bleeker. It was bright enough to wear sunglasses on the line, in a strong wind that blew a gale of shadows before it. On the way home we stopped at Dojo’s and got dinner. Dean was working as a counterman there now.

 All the next day, Sunday, we stayed in bed reading, with but one trip out for bagels and cream cheese. She read out sections of Timon of Athens to get the sense of them. I read Bukowski’s Women and the Times. At 10 we turned out the lights and fucked like crazy. It was hard to come, it was even harder to fall asleep, so we kept at the sex till we both gave out in sweaty gasps, pounding the floor with our fists.

That’s how the summer went. It got hotter and hotter, but we stayed at my place most nights sleeping with the fan directly on us. The heat was making us horny. We were just sweaty fuckers, four days a week. The other three she was with her parents out on the Island. After the first few weekends I didn’t go. Somehow I always spent too much money out there. And I liked being alone in the city.

I was working at McGans. At first the ugliness and depravity had been innocuous, even unapparent. The evil either had not manifested itself yet or I was simply blind to it. One way or the other I got through the first few weeks feeling I had made the right decision.

In the six months of my employ I had already seen a bunch of clerks come and go. In just a year I had become the old guy. That’s a rapid attrition rate, until you take into account how bad they were. Then it becomes a question of, why did any of them stay? Why did anyone take the bait?

It’s a little like B. Traven’s Death Ship, the irresistible disaster, the travesty towards which the entire random badness of the world forces you. But Traven’s hapless puppet retained his cheer to the very end. I did not. I lost my zeal for suffering about six weeks in, and saw no way out. I suppose it was a noir trap for the little man. But I prefer to think of it in mythical terms, of archaic Greek monsters, Procrustes and Lycaon, or the Cyclops. I had wandered into the cave to escape the wrath of Behemoth and there’s old Saturn chewing the heads off of his own children. Hela howling away from Tiriel’s curse: “Let snakes rise from thy bedded locks & laugh among thy curls.”

In the end the one thing I hated most was their body odor. And it’s not like they stank. It was subtler than that at first. But after a while, I didn’t want to stand near them. And when it was busy, if there were no boys in the store to help, one of them would squeeze in next to me and start ringing people out on the other register. It was this low-grade smell of garbage. It was their skin and their secretions. It was like living in close quarters with an animal. And they were vicious. There was between them an unending back and forth of angry, uninteresting observation, with little contests, long-term games and flare-ups of temper. And there was an audience. Both the regulars and the drop-ins, some of whom were celebrities. And because of the neighborhood they were extremely rich, famous or not. The Klingons fussed over them, especially Jackie Onassis and Anthony Quinn.

They used to send me on deliveries around the neighborhood. They sent me to Mrs. Foote’s. Mrs. Foote handed me a paper shopping bag full of shoes and said, “I called Jeffrey. Please, the store’s on your way, will you drop them off?” She handed me two bucks at the door. “Tell him I wrote it all down on a note in the bag.”

When I got back to the shop, I complained to Jeffrey, “She made me bring her shoes!”

“Who?” Jeremy asked, writing down figures and titles and ISBN’s in a loose-leaf binder.

“Mrs. Foote.”

“Hey dad, dad!” the second dad had a very stern ring to it.

“Can’t chew szchee I’m weeding?” he licked three fingers and turned the page of a catalog. The corner he touched was wet. All the corners of the catalog were a little warped. It was twice as thick as a new one, all from his licking his fingers and turning the pages. My mother has for many years now had a mangy terrier mutt with OCD that can’t stop licking its balls and ass, and spreads secretions from its anal glands all over its fur, and the furniture. Old man Klingonstein was a little thick for a terrier but his breath was as bad.

“Mrs. Foote made him take her shoes to the store.”

“Oh yeah, ha ha, Mrs. Foote gave him shoes. It’s like Awnold Schwarzenegger. You know, Schvartze negger? Nigger Nigger, Foote Foot.”

“But dad, a shoe’s not a foot!”

In the end it was money that made it awful. They just were never going to pay me enough to take it day after day; it wasn’t even enough to live on, cheap rent and all. And I was running the place! I did the inventory, trained new employees, managed all the correspondence for returns, handled the UPS and the shipping. I put sections in order and schmoozed customers.

Throughout the summer it was O.K. It was hot and beautiful and I had Sally to myself, largely. We argued, we fumed in silence but we were bound unbreakably by the hedonism of August. Mussels and tomatoes, fresh pesto on pasta, cold beer and an open window, movies, long walks, and sex. Half asleep, in the middle of the night, groping. In the morning, in the afternoon sprawled in the sun, disheveled, happy and knowing it.

Then the leaves started to turn to the color of her hair. Sally was back at school; we again were every night at the loft. In the morning she’d turn left and I’d turn right out the door.

One day Matthew, Tammy’s friend from Larchmont, walked into the store and pretended to browse the display books, some sort of hardcover novel in a cardboard case. I completed a sale to Mrs. Hand. There was much merriment whenever Mrs. Foote and Mrs. Hand were in the store at the same time, almost as much of a stir as for Jackie O. The man presented himself to me at the register and said, in an adenoidal voice, “Hi Alex. You remember me?”

“Yeah.”

He wore a black London Fog trench coat over a sweater, a button down shirt with the collar out and tan corduroys. He wore hornrims and had pink skin and red hair. “Tammy said I should come in and ask you about work.”

“Oh,” I had to think about it. I didn’t know him very well. The only things about Matthew I really knew were that we once made jokes about a picture of John Wayne Gacey, the killer clown, and we saw the Mumps in a crowd together three or four times and ate burgers at big tables at Phebe’s. Other than that we had never really spoken. “Jeremy?” I called. He was eating a tuna sandwich on pumpernickel in the back.

“Yeah?”

“Are we looking for a clerk?”

“Uh, yeah. It’s been busy in the afternoon.” He went back to his lunch.

“Fill out this application. Have you ever worked in a bookstore?” I asked.

He made a face. “Yes. Gaylords.”

“Oh yeah, I worked at the main store for years.”

“I was at the midtown express store. It was so grosss.”

“Tell me about it. Well, the Klingons, er, Klingonsteins will be impressed with Gaylords. They’ll hire you.”

I didn’t have the heart to tell him he didn’t know from grosss.

Having Matthew there sometimes helped. He was very droll, and once he had sussed out that I hated the old man and Jeremy we began to laugh at them silently throughout the day. Sometimes, if Sally was studying late, I’d go downtown with Matthew and meet Tammy at Dojo’s for chicken cutlet sandwiches with orange dressing. One night Sally met us and we went to Marat Sade at Theater 80, then hung out at Tammy’s watching TV.

The Klingons didn’t like Matthew, even though he showed up on time and dressed nicely. They were always suspicious of him. When he would go out to lunch the old man would say, “I don’t know if I twuszcht that boy.” The murk would move around in his eyes.

“He’s your friend, Alex,” Jeremy said.

“We’re not friends.”

“You know what I mean.” He made a friendly come on expression. Was he trying to say we were gay?

“Matthew is honest. You’re too suspicious.”

The old man wagged his finger at me. “When you’ve been in buszschnesche for fawty yeearszche, you can tell me I’m too suspiszchiszsch.”

Jeremy picked up the paper and looked at it. He headed towards the bathroom and said, “Keep an eye on the store.”

One evening, when the old man had gone home early, Jeremy said to me, “You probably think my father’s a real bigot.”

Probably? “Well,” I stuttered.

“You don’t know what they did to my mother.”

It was the Christmas season. Matthew and I were working both registers. As fast as we could stock the best sellers they went out. Cookbooks, coffee table books, novels, diets, self help, it didn’t matter. I was restocking the cookbooks and Matthew yelled out from the register, “Who wrote Ivanhoe?”

A voice directly behind me said, “Walter Scott,” somewhat impatiently. I stood and looked at the woman who said it and it was Jacqueline Onassis, with an armful of cookbooks. “Would you wrap these up for me and send them over please?” She looked at my nametag and blinked a few times. “Are you Izzie Ploomis’s son?”

“Yes.”

“Oh,” she smiled. “It’s been years. Please say hello to your father.” She shook my hand and walked out of the store.

“What was that about?” Jeremy asked.

“Nothing. She wants us to wrap these up and send them over.”

“Gift wrap?”

“I forgot to ask.”

He laughed. “It’s weird standing next to her, right?”

The next day was even busier. During a lull in the rush, around 3 in the afternoon, Matthew and I were opening boxes of a diet book and the old man was messing around with the register. Suddenly he roared, “I knew it. That boy iszch szchtealing!” I rubbed my face and thought sadly of Matthew going. I had come to enjoy his company, especially now that Simon was gone.

The old man, in a cold rage, gripped an X tape in his hand and hiszched. “You, all along, you. I thought it was that new boy, but it was you!” he pointed at me.

“Me?”

“Dad!” Jeremy said.

“Don’t shay dad to me thiszch time! He’szche fired! Go on, get out of my szchtore!”

“Dad!”

“No Jeremy, if this fucking stupid senile old man wants to fire me, that’s just fine. I hate your fucking guts, and I always have. You’re a racist creep and I don’t even give a fuck if you give me a final paycheck, cause I’m just glad to be getting the fuck out of here.” I walked out and kept walking till I got to 116th and Broadway. It was still too early to meet Sally at the West End, so I walked down a few blocks. There was a new cafe on Broadway called Pain et Poisson. I went in. The walls were all of smoked glass and the inside was painted black. There were a few tables in the window and a coffee bar. I sat down at the counter and ordered an espresso and a chocolate croissant and read the Times, and started in on the crossword. The waitress was not terribly good with the cappuccino machine. She looked at one of the clues and said, “Euclid.” There was a Christmas tree pin in her lapel. She was very tall, with long blond hair held back behind her ears with bobby pins. She had wide hips and a beautiful face, high cheekbones and blue eyes. She wore cat glasses. I had this strange feeling that I knew her, but I couldn’t say from where or when. Euclid was right.

“Do you mind my asking your name?” I asked.

“No. Dorothy.”

A customer arrived. She started to make his espresso and someone else came in, for a cappuccino. Someone else came in looking for donuts. It was crowded. She was panicked, frantic. The milk boiled over the sides of the pitcher and espresso cups were running over.

Sally came in and got on line. I called to her.

“I was going to meet you,” she said. Her cheeks and lips were cold and she smelled like wind.

“I don’t think now’s a good time to order.”

A couple of people walked out.

The next day, I went back to Pain et Poisson and there was a help wanted sign in the door. Dorothy was doing a crossword.

“You need someone to work here?” I asked. “When is the manager in? Can I fill out an application?”

She looked at me as if she were trying to place me. “Do I know you from somewhere?”

“I was here yesterday.”

“Yeah, but–maybe that’s it. I am the manager. You’re hired. Can you begin today?”

“I guess, but you have to show me how it all works.”

“I thought you said you had experience.” She looked at me over her shoulder as I followed her into the tiny kitchen behind the counter and smiled. “Have you ever worked in a cafe?”

“Dunkin’ Donuts.”

“That works. So,” she opened a cabinet and handed me an apron and a checkbook and said, “Keep it washed.”

She showed me around the equipment. I twisted the handle of the espresso machine and the nozzle pissed a little before hissing out steam. There was a dishwasher under the counter for coffee cups and plates and silverware and a small three sink set up for glasses. They had basins of ice, a soda gun, a Bunn drip coffeemaker and pots of hot water for tea. There was a pastry case full of croissants, brioche, cookies, fruit tartlets and cakes and pies. We also had bagels and cream cheese and soups. She ran down the abbreviations. Then she explained the register, and the x and z tapes, which I had learned at McGans.

“Well, here comes your first customer then.” She took off her apron and disappeared into the kitchen, yelling as the door closed behind her, “Shout if you need a hand.”

Ten minutes later I shouted, and when that didn’t work I cried, “Help!” There were ten angry people piled up behind the register, totally silent, all having already lost their dignity and given-in to yelling abuse at the new guy. There was milk spilled all over the floor. I couldn’t cut the cake evenly. I held the silverware by the end not the handle. “I want a decaf cappuccino,” got a caffeinated cafe au lait and the double espresso got a mug of Columbian. I nearly slipped and fell on the wet floor and dropped a mug of hot chocolate with the whipped cream I had spent five minutes looking for, while the drink got cold.

Well, it was a job. And it was there that I met Douglas Eakens, the great antiquarian bookman.

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

Saul King and I were done with our pizza. It was late afternoon. There was still bright sun, but it didn’t make it down on to the avenue. From the basement windows people were walking through shadow.

“I suppose I should close up soon,” I said.

“What for? You haven’t made many sales today. It’s Saturday, June. There’ll be lots of people in the evening.”

“You could run the store for a few hours. You could even close.”

“Not today, got things to do.”

“I’m just very agitated and would like to go upstairs for a while.”

“So you can sit alone?”

“When I’m fretful that’s the only thing for it. She’s moving back and it’s absolutely driving me nuts. Did you see that movie with Martin Landau, Charles Vermont.”

“Bela Lugosi, man.”

“He always looks like he’s going to throw up.”

“I see what you mean.”

“Charles Vermont. A POW returns from Vietnam looking for a small, idyllic town called Charles, Vermont, but Charles, Vermont does not exist. What would you do?” I asked.

“If what?”

“If the old girl friend you never wanted to see again called out of the blue to say she’s moving back. Of course, an old girlfriend for you would be like, what, 6 months? I suppose getting laid is easier now.”

“Than when, 1972?” He laughed. “Well, it would all depend on what she wanted. I mean, have you been hoping this would happen for years, so you can reject her?”

“I don’t know if it’s more or less baroque than that. I don’t even know what’s actually happening.”

“So maybe you really want her back but you’re worried you’re misreading her signals and she will make you feel like a fool again.”

“It’s unsettling. I’ve had this city to myself for decades. If I knew what to expect or what I wanted.”

“How did it end then?” he asked. “How long were you together?”

“Badly. With blood on the floor. It was a number of years I suppose.”

“But like, 25, 30 years ago?”

“Yeah, something like that.”

“So the half life is long over.”

“Oh god yes, the half life came and went long ago. That was the year I went to Indonesia and Thailand.”

 “Nice. Maybe I’ll do that some day. I gotta go. Stay open. She’ll call later, and you’ll find out.” He hopped up. “Thanks for the pizza.” I watched him unlock his bike through the window and ride off south. Maybe he was meeting friends at a bistro down on Ludlow Street.

There seemed no point in staying open, but he was right. I might make a few sales, and after all, closing early is a bad habit. It’s a Rubicon of sorts. The world of retail is the world of fate.