Last Bender

9.2

Busted. I blushed. I stammered. Douglas Eakens saved me when he walked in blinking behind his thick lenses, wisps of hair floating over the imperfectly bald top of his head. He was breathing loudly and he rubbed his hands together. “What time do you leave, Alex?”

“Eleven, tonight.”

“What a shame. I’m just now going out with Allan Bejtelmann. We were hoping you’d join us at The West End for a pint.”

“I could stop by at 11.”

He laughed and shook his head. “At 11 I’ll be in bed asleep. We’ll come in and have a cup of tea and then go out for beer.”

Professor Bejtelmann was a formidable presence as well, at least when I think of what a learned man he was, a Medievalist who knew eight languages. He was the author of a five-volume study of the Albigensian Crusade, a book I bought for the psychiatrist as a birthday present the year he died. Eva gave it back to me and I have it in the glass display case in the front of the store, to the left as you come in. It’s not for sale, but I want people to be able to browse it if they want.

Bejtelmann I knew a little from having tea with in the employee lunchroom. After seeing me a few times he invited me to join him. He was seated, stooped over a china tea set, the pot in a cozy. There was no lemon but he had milk and sugar. I took mine black. He was white haired, slight of build, with a biggish head and papery skin, quite frail, but his blue eyes were vigorous and could emphasize his raspy, weak monotone. He was a Gnostic and a socialist.

They sat down and I got them each a cup of black tea.

“We were just discussing the White Goddess,” Bejtelmann said.

“I don’t think Graves is as insane as you say. And it wasn’t Provence that made Pound mad. Madness was just a court defense, whether ‘twas Hitler or Eleanor of Aquitaine.”

His hands rattled a bit as he brought the teacup to his lips. He sipped some in and put it down. “I think this Reagan fellow might be a Golem, under the control of an Alexandrian wizard.”

“Alexandria, Virginia you mean,” Douglas said.

“Hee-hee-heh…” Bejtelmann laughed. “I have this argument going now through letters to a journal about a scene in Comus, when the young lady is portrayed as being stuck to her seat by gums. And this fellow wrote an article claiming gums to be vaginal fluids. Comus has succeeded in making a virgin wet her panties. It’s preposterous and I said so.” He laughed some more. “Oh it’s hopeless. What can you expect. Librarians like professors have to publish or perish. Imagine comparing professional failure to death. I failed everything I tried except for books. All I could do was learn languages. There seemed to be but one place to go. Bloody librarians.”

“A murderous lot,” Douglas confirmed.

“And a dismal view of death, I should say. The Elizabethans compared an orgasm to death. Death should not be so denigrated as to invite comparison to professional neglect.”

“I look forward to total extinction with relief,” Eakens said.

“I thought you were a Catholic.”

“Pah, on Tuesdays, Thursdays and Sundays. On all others a bloody atheist. And in your eye with it.”

“Life is pain. It wears out the soul.”

“The soul worries itself to death.”

“Oh yes, and the body makes its demands, exhausting the soul as the soul pursues itself in desire. Long before the body is done the soul is a wreck. And this is an anagram for the soul’s mortality. Because an immortal soul would not be worn out by forty years of beastly existence.”

I said, “Doesn’t sometimes a very demanding soul wear out a body first? So hungry for sensation and adventure, so reckless in the pursuit of knowledge and pleasure, it drives its body into an early death?”

“Hmm. Destroyed by mutual dependency, and destroyed by isolation,” Eakens said.

“Well, we’d best go to the bar. I think we’ve probably taken up enough of his time. Good night. We’ll try again.” They strolled out. I started to do my side work so I could get out right at 11.

“Who were they?” Antonia and Dean asked.

“Librarians, a medievalist and a preservationist. The preservationist, Douglas Eakens, I met here.”

“Ohhhh, so that’s how–” Dean said.

“Yeah. I thought you knew.”

“Maybe I did. Who knows what I know? It’s all in one ear.”

Antonia stood. She hadn’t taken her leather jacket off. She put a scarlet bowling ball bag up on the counter and said, pulling her wallet out from within, “We have to go. Can we have the check, Alex?”

I looked around to see if Dorothy was still there but she was in back. “No charge,” I said. She fixed me with her cat glasses and her lip twitched. Then she smiled. “Thank you, Alex.” Dean laid a five on the counter and they left.

I wiped down the counter, put their mugs in the dishwasher and washed their glasses. It was 10 o’clock. The side work was done. Except for the odd Columbia student or a bus driver on his way home from work, I didn’t expect much action. I watched the police cars and fire engines whoop whoop and yowl by, the bonk bonk of ambulances carting the dead and wounded away. Homeless men stopped sometimes to stare into the window. One walked in; I rushed out from behind the counter, put a dollar in his hand and gently urged him out the door. He smelled like piss and garbage.

 There were a few borderline functional people who sometimes used the bathrooms during the day and always bought a cup of coffee. A speed freak with no teeth spent a long time in there washing up. She never drank her glass of grapefruit juice but she always tipped a quarter on it. Another woman who talked to herself went in to the bathroom to weep. You could hear the muffled sobs through the door. There was a guy who brushed his teeth and shaved. The floor was always wet when he left.

On the rare occasions when the owner was there she would kick them out and reiterate her policy of no bums. But no bums wasn’t working. They used to just be drunks but now there were people living in their cars or breaking into other people’s cars to sleep. Down around 1st Street it looked like a necropolis. Where old men played bocce ball between Houston and First, near the F stop, there was a permanent encampment of dirty, grizzled, hopeless men. They kept a fire going all night long, a grim vigil for nothing. Over by the Bowery on Second Street they lined up on the street and napped and drank on the stoops looking for a bed for the night. They tumbled out of the flophouse hotels or slept along the street wrapped up in filthy blankets or newspapers on cardboard. They picked through garbage cans and hung around with the rats in the backs of restaurants. We threw our stale pastry out and it was gone in seconds. Patty wanted to make it inedible but we wouldn’t do that. Finally she stopped us from throwing it out altogether and instead took whatever she could downtown to Park Place to make crumble and crust for the next day’s tarts. Park Place was the cafe on 7th between First and A Patty owned (Pain et Poisson was a place she owned with a silent partner); it had a large kitchen which she used for baking everything sold uptown.

I had seen the psychiatrist with Roy for dinner in May. Sally was unable to attend and was furious. The psychiatrist took us to Joseph Glancey’s, a fancy fish place downtown. He lived mostly in LA with his new wife and baby. My hand disappeared within his as he greeted me on the street outside the restaurant. It was a good meal but it was also my first encounter with medium rare swordfish, not quite sushi, not quite anything at all, though the squiggle of grapefruit béarnaise was delicious. He spent the whole meal attacking Ronald Reagan. Roy was fried and maintained an inauspicious silence. There was just not much there. The psychiatrist was normally sensitive to such things and might at a certain time have been worried, but he was totally preoccupied with the loss of his beloved walk-in clinics. “It could not have been verse. Ve conwince them to release people from brutal, stupid insane asylums, and they cut all of their benefits, and shut down the very outpatient clinics ve created to serf them. Unbelievable. It’s a mental health disaster. This isn’t a civilization anymore. It’s fascism with a happy face brand. I don’t approof of wiolence, but I testified at John Hinckley’s trial. The man is insane, OK. So are the gun lows that allow him to buy a pistol and if you vant my opinion, he shoot haf bought a 44 magnum, like Dirty Harry, and finished the job.” He poked at his salad with a fork and drank Riesling.

Ronald Reagan was a hated man indeed.

I was reading In the Belly of the Beast, and The Executioner’s Song, and Ada and Earthly Powers, which put me on a Burgess kick, reading everything I could find.

Abbot was overbearing and sociopathic, but his case was compelling, that of a man who had lived most of his life in reform schools and prisons, and who had been drugged forcibly for years.

The door swung open. I looked up from my book, startled, but ready to make a fresh pot of coffee if that’s what they wanted. It was Tammy.

“Hey. What brings you in?” I asked.

“Chinatown at the Thalia. What are you reading?” I showed her. “Oh that. Matthew and I read it. So when are you off?”

“I can walk out the door at 11.”

She checked her watch and said, “I’ll wait. Are you riding downtown?”

“Yeah.”

“You want to go out?”

“Sure. Dojo’s?”

“I was thinking Romna.”

“Are they open that late?”

“I don’t know. We can see.”

“I thought you liked Royal now.”

“Yeah, but I thought for a change.”

“Simon likes Romna better. I don’t care. It all tastes the same to me.”

“It’s the head waiter I hate.”

“But you were drunk that one time he was mean.”

“Well we’re always drunk by the time we go there. It was late. What does he expect? If I were mean to every drunk customer I had I’d be fired. And it’s not like we don’t tip well. Fucking christ. You could live a year in Pakistan on what I leave.” I closed up, counted out the drawer and said good-bye to Dorothy. We walked down to 96th and took the express to Times Square and changed for the RR to 8th Street and Broadway. There was a fight on the platform and the conductor of the N train that was pulling out of the station stopped the train and actually leaned out of his window to watch. No cops came. Everyone was afraid to look and no one moved, except to back away from the two men. When one was lying dazed on the ground, the other left and everyone went over to stare. He was alive. His back arched and he looked like he was going to puke. As one the crowd backed off. The R arrived and we all got on, leaving the man in a puddle of blood behind.

The walk to 6th Street was short. There were students out and about. We bought beer on Second Avenue. “I told Matthew to meet us there,” she said. Romna was open. We stepped down into the vestibule and then into the dark green, narrow restaurant. The lighting was amber and subdued. It smelled like curry and chappatis and tandoori chicken. With a stately gait waiters delivered sizzling onions and chicken on iron griddles to couples at deuces. Matthew was at a four top in back.

“Hi Alex,” he greeted me. There was another man next to him, ten years older, in his mid-thirties, with very short hair, a heavy build and an elegant manner. There was a fifth chair at the head of the table with a leather coat hung on its back. We sat down.

“Hi,” the man said. “I’m Buddy.”

“Alex.” We shook hands.

“Would you like some wine? I brought a fabulous pinot grigio.”

Tammy put the six pack of Rolling Rock on the table.”

 “I’ll take a Rolling Rock,” I said.

I sensed a feeling of anticipation, muffled by a practiced casualness that didn’t seem quite right. Just as I was putting it together, my half-formed premonitions were confirmed by Simon’s grand entrance from the bathroom. “You’re back!”

“I sent you a postcard.”

“But you said early summer. You didn’t say June!”

 We hugged and I sat down feeling so happy. He looked like a model, with his hair cut on the sides and tall and angular and flat on top. He was relaxed, glowing in the dark. “It’s so good to be back in the center of the world. Italy is totally cool, I love it, but it just always felt like last year there. Now I’m in the future again.”

“The future as past,” I said.

Tammy never showed extreme emotion, except for very occasionally, but her happiness to have Simon back was palpable.

“This is my friend Buddy,” he said. “Buddy was subletting my place.”

“What happened to the guy–”

“That’s me,” Buddy said.

He didn’t look ill at all. “I see.”

“Is there anything that’s not totally gross?” Matthew asked. He was turning the menu over on his plate. In the dark he looked pale and juvenile. He hadn’t taken his leather coat off. He drank a soda with a straw. “I just want chicken with NO bones.”

“That’s chicken tikka,” Tammy said. “And you’d like pakora and the breads. Or biryani, that’s just rice.”

“What’s that they keep bringing out on the hot plates?” he asked.

“That’s the chicken tikka,” Buddy said. He poured a glass of wine and lit a cigarette. Simon took out a bidi and lit it. The waiter looked at him strangely and smiled. He spoke rapidly in Bengali to one of the other waiters, who nodded and retired behind the curtains that led to the kitchen doors.

“The tikka is better at Royal,” Tammy said. “That’s where I usually go now.”

“It’s all the same kitchen, isn’t it?” I asked.

“God, the things that change in a year,” Simon said. “So where’s Sally?”

“You didn’t tell him?” I asked Tammy.

“We haven’t talked really. You called,” she said to Simon. “You left a message but we didn’t actually talk much and then they told me to go uptown and get you and pretend I had seen a movie, as a surprise, like a birthday party.”

“Sally’s in Rome.”

Simon laughed. “I should have stayed.”

“Well I’m still here.”

“You didn’t–”

“Break up? No. We’re together.”

“Good.”

“I thought you didn’t like her,” I said. “So what were you doing? Where were you last?”

“Rome. Didn’t I send you a postcard?”

“I’ve got mine on the refrigerator,” Tammy said. “The Coliseum.”

“Mine was the Protestant Cemetery.”

“I read The Witch of Atlas and Lamia there.”

“Oh!” I cried, “Here lies one whose name was writ in water.”

“Let’s order, I say,” Buddy said.

We ordered the food.

“I’m starving,” Simon said.

“When did you get in?”

“Just a few hours ago.”

“More than that,” Buddy said.

Simon said, “Well whatever. I don’t even know what time it is. I keep cursing in Italian.”

We ate a bunch of poori and an appetizer platter. “Milano was just work but Rome was so cool. I met these guys, anarchist artists, who were doing what I was doing, the classical style, really hard light on objects. Marble busts. And I got a scooter, and almost fucking died. Giuseppe, and Tonio, and Marco and Lance, this English guy, and Lucia, Anouk, Clarissa. I worked at their radio station. At the end of a dingy alleyway you went through this door and upstairs to a makeshift studio.  We’d sit drinking absinthe, playing Captain Beefheart, and Loft mixes I brought on tape, freeform jazz, Jimi Hendrix, Ornette Coleman and Sun Ra and Henry Cow and all this weird shit all night long. I didn’t understand half of what they were saying. I should have stayed. When I got off that plane at Kennedy I felt like Caliban waking up from a dream.”

We decimated the mixed tandoori platter. Matthew glumly dissected his red chicken chunks, bending close to examine connective tissue. Once he had trimmed the meat of any extraneous inedible matter he cut off pieces and labouriously consumed them.

“So where are we going after?” Tammy said.

“Not Danceteria,” Matthew said.

“Don’t worry,” Buddy said. His face was punky in a 1930’s way. He looked like a grown up Dead End kid.

“Where then?”

“Don’t look at me,” Simon said. “I’ve been gone.”

“Let’s just go to Pyramid then,” Tammy said.

On the way down to Avenue A I walked with Simon. “Where are you living?”

“Right now we’re on Ludlow but Buddy found an apartment on 12^th Street. I’m going to move in there with him and keep my old place as a studio. I think I’ll turn the whole thing into the chapel. You’ve got to come over, his place is small but it has a nice little kitchen. You gotta taste my Italian now.”

“I’m off all summer. We can have dueling kitchens.”

“How about tomorrow?”

“Except tomorrow, tomorrow I have to go with Roy to my Father’s.”

“The Fourth?” I nodded and then he nodded. “Whatever. The day after.”

“I’ll call.”

“You’re not coming then?”

“No, I have to go to sleep. Good night all,” I said and turned for home.