Last Bender

This is an excerpt from the beginning of Endangered Species. It begins with the sentence Eric maroney thought should be the first sentence of the book. I tried to make it that, I really did, but I couldn’t make the book work that way. It couldn’t start with Roy or Sally. It had to start with the man from Porloch. In any event, this is the original nut of the novel, the first first chapter before I revised it and it ended up as the last part of the first chapter. If I were any good at excerpting my novels this would be the one I would send out to journals I suppose.

Roy liked to laugh. When he hit town he liked to gather about him as many old friends as possible, regardless of the disparate ways in which he knew them. He would yoke opposites together with true Renaissance violence. Wherever he went he left behind one or two people with whom he had established an intense loyalty. But by the late seventies, these people were just hanging around New York waiting for something to happen that hadn’t already happened before. They didn’t know what to do next. Then Roy would hit town and for six, ten, twelve hours they would act as one, though the parts were in constant flux.

      Roy always included me in his plans because he was the kind of person who thought everyone else was having as good a time as he was. He didn’t want me to feel left out and thought I was too reclusive. If I begged off there was no abating his fury. It would erupt on the phone, but his method wasn’t straight intimidation. There was a sponge-like quality to Roy and he picked up tricks from our parents, our aunts and uncles, methods of guilt and coercion that the old possess and were hard to resist. Suddenly my supposed loneliness was causing him pain. “You don’t have to explain,” he’d say. “I understand, you have plans.” And the tone of his voice, the hurt and sadness, the ache, so false, so evidently false, would work on me. And behind that was the knowledge that for weeks, even months, every time we spoke he would refer back to the night of betrayal. “Of course, you were too busy to be there…”

      This time Sally was the carrot. Roy and Lydia had been trying to introduce us for some time, especially now that she was in college. But girls scared me. Not girls in general. A lot of my friends were girls, especially in high school. But as I got older, more and more removed from high school or the easy friendships struck up in college seminars, as I approached the need to ‘date’ (an alien concept), my own self-consciousness, my own awareness of my inexperience grew acute, and it became impossible. What would I do, how would I kiss someone? What if she rejected me? Just thinking about it made me so nervous that my cheeks grew clammy and my testicles felt like little dimpled peas. And yet, on the subway, or reading poetry in the evening at home, it was more than longing that overcame me, it was desire, and it didn’t overcome me at all, no, it obliterated me.

      “Look,” he said over the phone. “You two have so much in common.”

      Lydia broke in. “That’s right Alex. She saw you once and said you were really cute.”

      “You see? She likes you. She said so herself, to her sister. Brothers might lie but sisters don’t. Sisters stick together. Girls don’t lie.”

      “And she’s got a brain.”

      “A brain!” I said in mock surprise.

      “Yeah yeah, you don’t fuck brains. Neither do I. To know life, you must fuck death in the gall bladder,” he said in a German accent. They both laughed. “Lighten up dude. Sally’s hot, right Lydia?”

      “Definitely hawt,” she said, her voice cracking narcoticly. “And most definitely ready to, uh, trawt, as they say.” She giggled weakly. I heard a lighter click a few times and then her sucking and coughing. “Gawd, Roy, this is so fucked up.”

      I was not up for a night of enforced conviviality. The beer, the cocaine, the barrage of obscenities. “What’s the first location?” I asked, with the weary relief caving-in to the inevitable always brings.

      “Issa.”

      “Where’s that?”

      “East 52nd Street.”

      “Sounds expensive.”

      “Don’t sweat it dude, I’m paying.”

      “And location number two?”

      “What are you, some kind of an asshole?” Lydia asked. “Sally’s not gonna like it if he’s some kind of an asshole.”

      “Your problem Alex is you’re afraid of pleasure. That and you got no discipline.”

      I groaned. “Just what time should I be there?”

      “Relax. We’ll eat at nine and take a cab to Puffy’s. And don’t plan on spending more than ten bucks all night. See ya later buddy. Love ya.”

      The location I didn’t ask about was the third, the one that always ended in an ill-conceived adventure, or else song and tears, or both.

      Issa was not the kind of place I would expect Roy to pick out. It occupied the first and second floors of an incongruous brownstone, set like a brick in a glass box set in an array of other glasses boxes, of varying colors. At night the street was abandoned. The ten million people who enter Manhattan each day had all gone home, except for a few late diners and the tourists around Grand Central. Everyone else was at a Broadway show. The air smelled like steel grates pulled down over windows, and heaps of paper garbage.

      Issa was up a flight of steps, marked by a white paper lantern brushed with black words. Everyone was in a blue or charcoal suit. Sconces reflected dully off their greased quaffs. Half the diners were Japanese.

      There was a balcony at a crazy angle to the main dining room, which t was brightly lit. The black tables were set far apart, and it was quite spare, like a gallery without art. There was a loud rumble of conversation.          

      A woman in a kimono escorted me to the back, where there were two tatami rooms. Roy’s was the multi-limbed and faceted concoction of denim and leather. Sheepishly I took my black high tops off and added them to the line on the floor, beneath a rustic wooden bench, next to a pair of battered brown cowboy boots, Lydia’s sparkle pumps and a very plain pair of worn black shoes. Off to the side stood Roy’s white and copper snakeskin boots.

      It was 9:45. As I had hoped, they had ordered without me and were examining a plate containing some sort of appetizer. I squeezed in next to Lydia and a guy named Hen, who had a long tendril of dirty blond hair, a wispy, tangled beard and a leather eye patch that twitched when he blinked. He had lost the eye to an infection caused by Yak dung, while hiking in Nepal, and came home with a huge bandage across his face, stained yellow where the wound suppurated. The doctor who had removed the eye had done the best he could under the circumstances. By necessity it was a rough job and while Hen felt no pain during the actual operation, some of the suturing work was merely functional, and it took a year of antibiotics to finally rid the socket, now crookedly sewn shut, of pathogens.

      Hen and Roy were old friends from junior high and ran the rackets together for a number of years, dealing pills and scalping tickets. They roadied a couple of summers and only parted ways briefly, when Roy left for the Air Force Academy. Entering the Air Force in 1974 wasn’t a popular or even comprehensible thing to do. Our parents were more than alarmed; they had dedicated their lives to opposing Vietnam. In the 50’s they had marched for the Rosenbergs and carried signs that said Ban the Bomb. But they knew Roy, and talking him out of it was useless. To some, he was a war criminal by association, but not to Hen. Hen just made Roy prove, whenever he came home on leave, his loyalty by breaking the law. He fed him drugs and went skydiving or tuna fishing in New Jersey. Whatever it took not to let Roy forget who he was. I guess I didn’t see a divergence between Roy and the military mind, but Hen did. Hen had never manned the hatches.

      Next to Hen, who sat at the end of the table, and across from me, against the wall, was Roy; and next to Roy, across from Lydia, was Sally.

      The appetizer in question was causing a stir of protest. Lydia’s face was hidden behind a curtain of black hair as she bent over the stoneware plate, smelling a thick, brownish-yellow S, garnished with a shiso leaf and a nerve of daikon.

      “Alex!” Roy shouted.

      “You eat it first,” Lydia said, lifting her head. “Oh, look who’s here.” Lydia had on a white v-necked t-shirt, a black leather mini skirt and charcoal fishnets. Some kind of bra threw her breasts up at you. She had a wide mouth, often cocked in a humorous burst of sarcasm, dark eyes and the animated eyebrows of a jolly misanthrope. Silver bracelets slid up and down her arms and she toyed with the rings on her fingers when she spoke, which was with a slight, drug induced whine. Though Lydia grew up in Manhattan she had a Queens accent.

      “Lydia, Roy, Hen,” I said.

      Hen stood to shake my hand, putting his one blue eye on my face, patch quivering. “Good to see you,” he said, nodding, in a low, quiet voice.

      Roy punched my shoulder across the table.

      “So, what’s this?” I asked, pointing to the plate.

      Hen said, “Roy was in Tokyo hanging out with these Japanese dudes. He remembers something they ate–”

      Lydia shook her head. “Thinks he remembers. I mean, look at what he ordered.” She held the plate up to me. “It looks like a slug, Roy! Is that why you brought us here? To eat slugs?” More women in kimonos arrived to put down four orders of sashimi and seaweed, arranged on wooden blocks. They were like little landscapes of raw fish, bone white, blue-grey feathered with blood, and the dark red bricks of tuna. Dotted here and there were pale rose petals of ginger and pastel-green mounds of wasabi. She turned to me and said, “Have you met my sister Sally?”

      Sally looked nothing like Lydia. Her skin was pale; she had a high forehead and a long face. Her eyes were stretched in disbelief, looking as miserable as I felt. “No.”

      Sally regarded her plate critically and picked up a piece of tuna with the chopsticks. She had a peculiar way of holding them, fingers curled.

      “Sally, this is Alex, Roy’s brother.”

      She nodded curtly and ate.

      “You’re telling the story all wrong,” Roy said. “I met those guys on the plane.”

      “Oh my god, what is it, three times now?” Lydia asked, holding her forehead in her fingers.

      “Pass the soy sauce,” Hen said softly.

      “C’mon, the plane was the best part. How often do you get bumped up to first class on an international flight? That was pure, dumb luck. Now, I always travel in a nice suit. But I figured, since I was going to Japan, I should dress up like Texas, you know? So I got on my Brook’s Brothers suit, and a bolo tie and one of them Texas ten-gallon hats, and my snakeskin boots. I was feelin’ pretty you know–” and he lifted his pale eyebrows knowingly. “What I’m saying is, the ticket was an accident, but everything after that was skill. There’s these two Japanese guys getting drunk on the plane, right? Pretty soon, I’m knocking back the sake with them. One guy, Yoshio, speaks English, a little bit. The other guy, forget about it, he’s so drunk he’s singing folk songs. Eventually it gets around to what I do. So, I take out my roll like this–” he reached into his pocket and pulled out a roll of bills three inches thick, “–and say, ‘Ahm in awl,’ meaning to explain how it is that I’m a welder. But he looked at my boots and hat and after that, I’m the Texas AWRman and they’re showing me off to all their friends. We did the town, drank for days in the coolest bars I have ever been to. They got these machines, psychedelic pinball, and the women, not just fucking whores, who by the way will do anything, and it’s not nasty Bangkok, but get this, they still have Geisha ladies there. Talk about sophisticated. I mean, a geisha ain’t the same thing as a whore, right?” He addressed this last part to Sally, who stared resolutely at her plate, chewing quickly.

      “Not a fucking whore, no,” Lydia said, “but like Sally says, they’re cortisones.”

      Sally raised an eyebrow at Lydia and mumbled, “Courtesans.”

      “Well, they both reduce swelling in a man,” Lydia said.

      Roy shifted around on the chair and stared at me with clear blue eyes. He looked absurdly healthy, with ruddy skin, thick, light brown hair trimmed close on the side and mussed up on top. He wore a faded black Harley-Davidson T shirt, tight in the chest, and his arms bulged out of the sleeves. “Sometime we’ll have to get the fugu here,” he said.

      Hen looked at him and laughed. “You can’t get fugu here, it’s illegal.”

      “Why the fuck you think so many Japanese business guys eat here? For the tuna?”

      “Maybe because it’s midtown. Fugu is illegal. Why take a chance on a law suit?”

      “It’s illegal to fuck a chicken but you can do it fifteen blocks away and no one’s gonna sue.”

      “God, shut up already, no one cares,” Lydia said. “So what was I telling you? Oh yeah, so she came and got me but I was asleep. God, two in the afternoon and the bitch is literally banging down my door. I go to call the cops and notice not only is my phone gone, but he took the fucking t.v. Can you believe it? It’s not worth twenty bucks, but that fucking little no dick junky stole my t.v. So no, I didn’t see General Hospital today. I didn’t see anything. If it ever happens again I won’t get up till the next day. I’ll take a ‘lude and go back to sleep. So where’s the sushi? I can’t eat raw fish without the rice. It’s like eating dead pussy.” I looked at Sally across the table. She was holding a piece of raw tuna up to her lips. The soy sauce and wasabi ran down the side of the fish and made a fat drop on the plate. She popped the piece into her mouth. I did the same. As the wasabi gusted into my nose and spread across my tongue I felt a warmth suffuse my forehead. I inhaled and looked up. Our eyes met. We smiled. We ate.

      Roy insisted on hailing a passing limousine to Puffy’s. It was at Puffy’s that Sally and I were thrown together, literally. The youngest and weakest of the herd. Compared to that band of Grand Guignol rogues Roy had gathered to his manic Picaro, we were studied and tame, with her neat little worn black shoes and my high tops, her clean white blouse and my striped Oxford shirt tucked into black corduroys. My hair was carefully jelled into little spikes.

      We were thrown together by Hen, when he shoved Roy into Lydia, who knocked Sally into my lap. Her drink, a blackberry sour (or was it amaretto?) spilled across the table and onto my leg. This really cracked them up. They writhed about, making animal noises for a second or two. Then Lydia pushed Roy into Hen, who fell onto the next table over. Around this table were seated a bunch of Soho art snobs, who stood and glared at us, while a particularly ghoulish member of their party complained at the bar.

      We probably weren’t what they had in mind for company that night. Well, Sally and I might have been, but Hen had killed a man once (in self defense), and looked it when he wanted to. When Hen got up to take a leak, Roy said, loudly, so the neighboring table could hear, “You shoulda seen him, peering out with that one eye at them bastards. He don’t give a shit, but when that retard off the prawn boat called him a faggot he busted that cue right across his head. That was the shit right there. Key West. They was cussin’ and kickin’ and all I saw was blood hit the light bulb. Next thing I know we’re headed back to that dude’s sailboat and one of them good ole boys follows us. Now he got a big motherfuckin’ knife in his hand. But man, Hen, that one eye of his can freeze the shit right out of you. I’m standin’ there thinkin’ that’s one ugly knife when Hen kicks him right in the face and starts beatin’ on him till he flops over board just like a big dead fish, flop! Into the black water. I didn’t stick around to find out what happened next. I haven’t been back since.”

      The art table stood and stalked off in a huff. Roy slipped the bartender a twenty. There were no hard feelings. Not between them anyway. But between me and Sally, I could feel things heading that way. Already the stirrings had come, unbeckoned, perhaps as soon as we had shared the bite of tuna in the restaurant.

       As Roy told his story, I watched her. She followed the conversation from an Olympian coign, her face still with disdain. Certain words, ‘faggot’ and such, pained her visibly, but it was hard to say in what way exactly. Certainly it was a display of everything she would purge from humanity. The hubris of this desire to perfect things appealed to me, even if I rejected out of hand the possibility of success. But I think mostly it was having an ally for the first time at such a gathering that drew me to her. And there had been so many like it. But with Sally, who was just a foot away, with her own distant odor wafting into me, and her features coming into focus, becoming already familiar, I felt like I had a purpose. I stole my looks and was caught a hundred times in that one minute.

      People arrived. Strangers packed in around the bar, friends pulled up chairs and squeezed three on a side in the booth. Hen came back and sat down next to me, boxing us in. Our group sat deployed around two sloshing pitchers of Heineken. Sally said, “Ow, fuck,” and again our eyes met. Hers were soft and round and a little sad. She sipped at her drink and touched her short blond hair.

      “You go to Columbia?” I asked.

      “Freshman,” she said.

      “I work at Gaylords, the textbook store?”

      “Oh yeah,” she nodded. The din of obscenity and laughter nearly drowned our conversation out. Whenever I think of that moment I always hear Cheap Trick singing, Momma’s all right, Daddy’s all right, They just seem a little bit weird…She made a gagging noise and said, “I have to say, I hate this music.”

      “Why?”

      “Because I just do. I like classical music.”

      Classical music was my guilty pleasure, my immersion in time made sensual. “Oh, you know, I love it too. I never knew a thing about it when I was kid. My parents listened to show tunes and folk music. The Weavers, Bob Dylan, Phil Ochs. But my first stepfather, the psychiatrist, has a huge collection of records, and loves music.”

      “Your stepfather is a psychiatrist?” Her face became suddenly animated. “Is he a Freudian? Does he make you talk about your dreams?”

      “No, we played records. Beethoven, Bach, Haydn. Chopin’s Nocturnes got me out of high school. Satie gets me to work. And we went to bookstores, all these old places on Fourth Avenue.”

      “I love Satie. He makes my hair stand on end.”

      “That’s Houseman’s definition of poetry.”

      “Or how Donne tells an angel from and evil sprite. I’m thirsty for some wine.” She craned her neck to look out past me and Hen, past Lydia whose breasts were pressed against the table, and into the smoky din for a barmaid. Lydia threw her head back and shrieked with laughter. Roy erupted and spit out beer. “Haw haw!” he said. Sally shouted out her order to a harried woman with a tray. Then she turned to me and said, “O for a beaker full of the warm south, Full of the blushful Hippocrene, with beaded bubbles winking at the brim, and purple stained mouth….”

      And I answered her like a nightingale, that peevish bird, “That I might drink, and leave the world unseen, And with thee fade into the forest dim….”

      For a moment we were both contained by the words, by the fact that we both knew them, as if no two other people ever knew the words by heart. There was just the bond of that time when all things stopped and, if we had known to look, all things would have been visible, trembling in the first light. I wouldn’t have turned from her to look at god himself, nor listened to his voice, if it meant losing the echoes of our words.

      “Where did you learn that?” I asked.

      She passed a ten up for the wine but Roy, without even looking at her, blocked her hand and said, “Put it on my tab.” She rolled her eyes. “The Keats? I’ve known that one for years. I’ve always had a head for poetry. My mother used to read to me from this little nineteenth century anthology. Then I went through a kick where every week I’d memorize a poem. I drove them all crazy with that, repeating all my poems out loud.”

      “That’s unbelievable. My mother is an actress, sort of, or she was when she was young. She used to recite Shakespeare, Shelley, Keats and Tennyson, sometimes belting them out at dinner, if she were drunk.”

      “What would the psychiatrist say?”

      “He has a thick accent and looks like Mr. Clean. He vould say, ‘You must learn to be fwee.’”

      The night ground on around us like hideous ungreased gears. It was all a prelude to the real debauch, which they were plotting. Lydia shouted, “Mud Club. Don’t go to Studio 54. Nobody does anymore. If you wanna go up town, I can get us into Hurrah. And there’s an after hours club called the Pink Hearse. It’s real sixties, but most nights it’s full of pimps.”

      Hen snickered. “Who’s got the coke, that’s what I want to know.”

      I nursed a beer and watched the clock buried under the bartender’s stuff. It hit midnight and I felt the sashimi give up the ghost. It was a mental, not alimental lightening. Two beers had streamlined the edges.

      “So what do you study at Columbia?”

      “Englische,” she said, staring right into me. Her slightly sad hazel eyes came alive, awash in tears. They were like strange places in the rain, where the streaks of light are in colors I had never known. No fog ever lay as light upon me, or left such suggestive halos on the lamps. I felt myself go around in slow circles, spinning in towards them. It was the tidal pull of something besides memory. I was compelled to enter a place I had never seen and didn’t know how to leave and somewhere, beyond the excitement, lay a fear, a protest. Am I imagining this, I thought. And then, certainly not. I thought, as she said Englische, and unleashed her hazel whirlpools, she’s in love with me.

      “Comparative Literature, actually. I already have French, but I’ll need a second language in grad school, so I’m trying to decide between German and Russian. And it’s complex really because on the one hand, my family is Russian, and they hate Germany, and on the other hand, German theory is more interesting than Russian.”

      “Can’t you read translations?”

      “You can’t translate Derrida.”

      Somehow a fourth person had found a slight purchase on our side of the booth and Sally and I were now touching, shoulder-to-shoulder, thigh-to-thigh. To look at her required an intimacy we had not yet achieved. A beam of erotic energy passed between us. The wine swelled her lips off of her teeth. I could smell her breath. And then, cold. Nothing but a cold web spread to catch the nerves and breath. The first knots of gas pains formed. It must have been the Derrida.

      It was hard not to think about my limited sexual experience, some messing around in high school and some more in college. I was a technical virgin. Three years before, a friend of Roy’s seduced me. I consented out of lust and terror. She was not beautiful, but she had compelling hips and a smoky laugh. Her name was Carla Baducci. Carla Baducci took charge. And in 1976 an eighteen year old sexual novice, unshrived, other than what one confesses to oneself in the throws of self-increase, was an oddity to behold and pity. To a thirty-year-old barmaid with a twelve-year-old son and tattoos on her bottom and biceps I was pitiful indeed. And Carla was what it took. With girls my own age, my hand died in mid air. I couldn’t manage the fear.

      Every grade growing up I had some girl confidant I was in love with. I was a serial Platonic monogamist. So when they washed up in their bedrooms, when they dumped their boyfriends or their boyfriends dumped them; when the father came in raging and the mother was drunk; they told it to me. I was a promiscuous friend, a reticent male. It took a horny, angry, speed-crazed mother to perform a by no means inevitable act.

      Carla was from the Bronx. She belted out, in her inimitable brogue, “He’s what?” She pushed me down on the bed. “I won’t mess with fucking you,” she said, “I’ll just blow you.” To which act I gave eager consent. I don’t remember an erection like that before or since. For five minutes on that bed, and many weeks after, I was massively in love with Carla Baducci. To have that just once in a while I would have married her and moved to the Bronx to work in her father’s grocery. What she did with her tongue ought to be studied by neurophysicists and tantric mystics alike. They say the universe is one organism, a seamless web with all parts touching. In Carla’s mouth I discovered these words to be true. I also discovered them to be true only once. Carla Baducci never again stirred me to insane heights of ecstasy with her tongue.

      So I was not terribly well prepared for the electrochemical storm seizing entire regions of my brain. Nor for its concentration in an erotic ray my imagination circulated between us at an ever-increasing rate. It was beginning to feel like tachycardia. The air around her, her aura if you will, smelled like peppermint, a cool cloud of peppermint in the lager foetor. But her breath was warm and cough syrupy, homely Zephyr of Sally’s gut. And then, cutting through the balmy breezes, slicing through our shared auricle and the soundings in between came the flame and noise and fume of controversy, Roy’s noisome political discharge.

      “Oh no,” someone said, “You’re not serious!”

      Astonished, Roy sat upright and questioned everyone with his eyes. He spread his hands and emphatically announced, “Yeah, I’m gonna vote for Reagan in 1980.”

      Hen started to pound the table with his bony fist and snicker between his teeth. Lydia snorted. “Why are you even going to vote at all?”

      “What do you mean, why? I’m a goddamn citizen. It’s my right, and I vote all the time. I’d fucking vote for everything if I could.”

      “Why Reagan, let’s hear it,” Hen said.

      A large woman in army fatigues with a buzz cut interrupted. “So the Moral fucking Majority can take over the country. Go get an abortion after that.”

      “Yeah,” Lydia said. “Or drugs.”

      “Drugs,” Roy announced, “are totally Republican. The idea is, you don’t have a big government telling you what to do. Whether it’s like abortions, or heroin. You see? And with Reagan, there won’t be this fucking around with every little asshole communist who wants to take a country over. You think there’d be an Ayafuckintollah, if Reagan was president?”

      “Remember when he was on Laugh In?” Hen said.

      Lydia shouted, “He has been govunuh of Californier and he was a fucking lunatic. It’ll be like atom bombs and germ warfare and people gettin’ shot all over the place just cause they put that moron in the White House.”

      Roy shook his head and lit up a cigarette, preparing to lecture. “Who cares about that, you think guys like Roosevelt were smart? They just knew how talk to people, that’s all that matters. All over the world they hate us, it’s pathetic. World’s greatest superpower, and they spit at us, and think we’re shit. Carter’s weak. Reagan’s strong.” As he was finished saying this, the conversation boiled over into loud, chaotic controversy. Two lighting designers I recognized from the Emelin Theater in Mamaroneck, a wide woman, not terribly tall, but serious business, in a red plaid shirt and baggy overalls, with a large, nondescript dog at her side, on a short leash, and a tall, thin man with long hair, going bald in front, with a face like a goat, were screaming at the same time at the woman in the army fatigues. Hen coughed loudly, pounding the table. Lydia shook her head and cursed in a stream at Roy who was nodding his head and saying, “Oh, yeah,” in a voice that grew gradually louder till it overmatched those of his opponents. This clash of cymbals and tympanous thunder threatened mine and Sally’s budding passion. It hardly had a chance to emerge, it was so green, barely starting in the branch, like the red, swollen tips of March, consumed by the great conflagration, and the rays zeroed out.

      It was time to go. That was abundantly clear when a tray full of shot glasses sloshing over the rims arrived.

      Roy raised a glass and shouted, “Drink up!” He pushed into the person next to him, a biker type with black gloves and a handle bar mustache and handed me a shot glass from across the table.

      “Jack Daniels, your favorite.”

      “I can’t Roy, not tonight. Some other time.”

      Sally shook her head no. He grabbed my left ear and twisted. “Ow!”

      He laughed and said, “But it is you favorite.”

      “Ow! Let go.”

      “No problem, just do the shot.”

      “Fine, anything, just let go!” My head was burning.

      He growled into my cheek, “Drink, or you’re a pussy.”

      “Oh, I really am mortified of being a pussy,” I said, trying to bite down on his hand. If I could get a bite out of him he’d let go. “Look, I said I would drink it. Let go.”

      “All right. I won’t let you bite me like a girl.”

      “I’ll bite you Roy, if that’s what you want,” the biker said.

      Roy was so committed to being like this. One day he’s out on a boat, fishing, and the next he’s kicking down some junkie’s door. He sometimes read a book.

      He addressed us all. “I get to my city just once in a while and I’m gonna have a good goddamn time! They don’t have Puffy’s in Nollins or Miami.” He handed round the shot glasses.

      I turned to Sally and again the others faded from sight. “Roy’s been doing that to me since I was born.”

      “I don’t know if there’s a Cain complex. I suppose it’s competition for the Phallus.”

      “I’m sorry?”

      The noise again grew acute. She was shouting into my ear about Lacan and Freud, trying to explain the difference, which I stand as much chance of repeating here as I do of singing The Ring Cycle. The voices were like saws in a lumberyard.

      “So, drink up boys!” Roy shouted. I turned my head to look at her and our lips were almost touching. We stayed that way for a second. A prolonged shudder ran up and down my spine. It was too much, even for a second. We pulled our heads back in mutual, tentative regard, and then like the early sun, her smile dispelled the chill. I noticed her teeth. They were beautiful teeth. She had beautiful ears and armpits. Her feet I’m sure were as beautiful and graceful as two descending swans.

      Her smile shoveled in the coal at a furious pace, and I was convinced I was stoking a similarly fevered brain stem, and smiled. Oh, but I found out, some years later, that she didn’t remember how she felt. Courtship is a time of crossed identities. We mimic to impress, and are sophistic and coolly utilitarian by turns. Only time will separate truth from lies. And the only way in courtship to gain time is to delay. And one delays by forgetting, and not knowing.

      “Shall we?” she asked, lifting a shot glass.

      “Why not,” I said, and we tossed down the Jack Daniels, eyeball to eyeball, like George C. Scott and the Russian general in Patton, sending untold numbers of esophagus cells to their destruction. Sweat beaded up on her high forehead. I even noticed a faint Eau de Bete Neige emanating from her armpit. This pheromone-loaded fragrance blinded me completely and I started to wheeze. I knew at once what was up. The smoke and all the tension had combined to provoke an attack of nerves. I would survive, but not without losing a few ounces of blood through the nose.

      It took but the slightest whiff of her body, the entrancing OpArt of her hazel eyes, the intense liquor and our constant contact to impair my physical equilibrium and pitch me into panic. I looked about wildly, feeling suddenly enclosed. People tell me I always look calm. They cannot imagine I am tense. I don’t get tense along the usual nerveways. Anxiety makes my nose bleed.

      “Oh my god, are you all right?” Sally asked, as the blood began to pour out. All of this happened rather quickly: the smile, the shot, the nosebleed. My eyes started to run. Her gentle face seized up, she stuttered a moment and reached down to her bag, which was between her feet, and began yanking things out till she found a couple of napkins and a tampon which she slapped on the table. Then she forced our way out of the booth. Roy hollered after us as we headed out the door, but I don’t know what he said.

      Out on the street I leaned up against the cool bricks, dropped the bloody tissues and pressed the tampon hard against my nostrils. Her white blouse was splattered with blood. She fretted back and forth, hand balled up in a fist, round eyes narrowed with concern. It was like she was trying to help but had no idea how.

      The air, freshened by a light rain, helped me to relax. Well, I was hoping to get a little mileage out of the nosebleed. Instead I picked up the bloody tissues and threw them with the tampon into an open dumpster, apologizing for the shirt. When I offered to buy her another, she laughed. “I’m just glad you’re all right. Do you want to go to the emergency room?”

      “No, I don’t think so. Just home is fine.”

      Away from the bar it was dark. There was no one on the street. The sidewalks were like paths, sloping through the night, at the edge of glistening cobblestones. We walked north beneath the blacked out buildings passing through streetlight.

      “So where do you live?” she asked.

      “On First Avenue. You know the apartment. Lydia lived there with Roy for a while.”

      “My parents wouldn’t let me visit Lydia anywhere.”

      “I guess Roy and I went through it all together.”

      “And you live alone.”

      “Yes.”

      “Don’t you get lonely?”

      “No. I like my four walls. We moved a lot when I was a kid. There was Stuy Town with my father and then some Village sublets, and then Larchmont with the psychiatrist.”

      She touched my arm and raised her eyebrows, speeding up a bit to talk to my face but keep going. “Who is this psychiatrist?”

      “I told you, my first stepfather.”

      Sally made a face. “You know what I mean. Who is he? What’s his name.”

      “Bela Szep. He’s famous now. My mother always says her husbands wait till after they divorce her to get rich. Bela Szep lived in this big old house in Larchmont. His daughter stayed there on weekends. After those little apartments that big house scared the hell out of me. And he had this Nosferatu look about him, at least in a bad mood, with that bald head. The psychiatrist was all right though. He treated me well. It was Roy who made no sense to him.”

      Sally bustled along side. I slowed a bit and she pulled back on the reins to meet me. “Didn’t make sense to him how?”

      “Well, the psychiatrist grew up in Vienna in the twenties and thirties. He was always fighting with Nazis, so the meaning of a kid who sought out trouble and didn’t seem to care about anything eluded him. I believe he was genuinely puzzled. The one thing about Bela Szep you could predict was that he would want to make sense of any given situation. It is a passionate belief of his that things should either make sense or be made sense of. I think he thinks that the highest human calling is to try to understand the unthinkably awful things that happen in the world. On the other hand, Roy’s anarchic sense of humour amused him to no end. Roy could really make him laugh.”

      We crossed Canal, with its endless storefronts and crooked signs, delivery trucks and cabs honking along. “So, you live in the dorms?” I asked.

      “No, in my parent’s loft on 15th street.” She blushed. “But they don’t live there. My brother Joseph and Lydia are sort of in and out. Even when Joseph doesn’t sleep there, he hangs out with his friends recording music and drinking and watching t.v. It’s annoying when I have to get up for class. He’s also a slob. The only thing I can say for Joseph is he’s good company compared to Lydia. Lydia can be funny, but when she’s at home it feels like something bad is going to happen.”

      There was no plausible way of sharing a cab then. “I was going to say we could share a cab.”

      “Oh, that won’t work at all. You’re on the east side and I’m on the west. I was just going to walk.”

      “No, not alone.”    

      “Oh come on, I’m not afraid of walking home.”

      “It’s a nice night. I’ll walk you.”

      We wandered up Sixth Avenue, through the crowds and the loud pizza joints and cut over to Fifth, where it was quieter. Waves of drizzle washed over us. We bumped together accidentally as we walked along.

      “So was Bela Szep in the war then?”

      “Yeah. US army medical corps. He managed to get here a year after the Aunschluss. He was halfway through his medical studies and had to work in a nut house in Connecticut. Back home in Vienna he knew the Freuds. His family was Hungarian Jews, and he was born on the Lower Danube, in Bulgaria. His father was a leftist and when Horthy overthrew Bela Kun they moved to Vienna. Only he survived the war. I keep telling him to write a book about it. He’s written lots of books, but he says there would be no point. Lots of people suffered. He’s brilliant. It’s really amazing when you put it together. But it’s not something he talks about.”

      At the corner of 15th and Fifth she fished around for her keys. The strap of her bag pushed her breasts together. Our steps slowed as we neared the one lit doorway on the block, her building. There was no vestibule or lobby, just a solid black door and a row of broken buzzers. The doorway light was intense and very white. It lit up the sidewalk to the street. 

      “So you grew up here?” I asked.

      The light gave her skin a uniform pallor. It is that pinkish orange murk diffused through the Manhattan air, the permanent color of midnight. Here and there a window was lit up, but most of the buildings were businesses, or converted lofts. A newspaper truck snorted by and loose papers floated in the air. It always changes. Where the lights are, what the business is, who is living there. I lose track of what’s been where, when. But the smell of diesel fuel on the night air and the touch of wet brick don’t change. The hiss of airbrakes is the same. Steam rising from a grate, cut by legs and briefcases, remains. Sally faced me, bumping back against the black door. The bloodstains were dark brown. She spoke slowly. “No, I grew up on West End and 89th. We didn’t move down here till Joseph graduated high school, when we got the house out on the Island, where my parents live now. My mom retired last year.”

      “Well,” I said. A cab slowed down and sped up. My chest broiled. I had never wanted to kiss someone so badly. She was radiant. Next to her the world seemed stricken and sad. I felt myself grow tall beneath her golden rays. Tall, but not strong, like a leggy flower too used to the shade. Although only ten inches away, she might as well have been on t.v. I could not overcome the gulf. I could not even ask what it was her mother did, if she had a father. I felt a huge lump forming in my throat. Something inside of me was pressed as hard as was possible against the flesh of my face and chest, busting to get out and kiss and hold her. Her mouth was slightly open and she looked at the ground and then up at me. Her light blond hair was misted over. It hung down in her eyes when she stared at her feet.

      I breathed deeply and reached forward a little and said, “I have to go. Good night.” I think now that her face fell.

      I left her at the door with a polite nod and walked home. The four walls were not a comfort that night. They were too tall, too stark, and cocked into menacing angles. They had eyes that fired sleeplessly into my heart and skull.