Bullettime (21 page)

Dave’s attention shifts toward Washington Square Park and the NYU buildings that surround it. New York’s a populous city, NYU a large school, but there are patterns in all our lives, and the Village is still a neighbourhood. The rasta drug dealers and the Jesus Easel guy may as well clock in and out for all their regularity. Dave has a print-out of Anne B. in his pocket, and with every orbit of the park, past the dogs and the chess players and the skateboarders and the flocks of pigeons who roar up from the earth and then settle back down, Dave feels a sense of destiny. But Anne B. never walks through the park, or appears in the little public lounge on the first floor of the Bobst Library, or even comes into the student centre. Someone else hangs her flyers for her. He also hangs flyers for freelance term-paper writers, NYPIRG, and B’nai B’rith International, so Anne probably just paid a service.

When it snows, it’s actually warmer. The wind isn’t so frigid, the sidewalks are more welcoming. Dave finds a decent vent to sleep near for one, and has the night to himself without even a moment’s molestation by police, shopkeepers, or rival homeless. He’s glad he’s young, that he doesn’t have to shave too often to keep looking civilized. He can go to Forbidden Planet and skim the comics without being ejected, bring soda cans into the supermarket and get back a handful of nickels without being sent outside to get in line behind the bums and their filled-to-bursting shopping carts. He’s clean enough to occasionally turn to someone and ask for a quarter, or a dollar—and get it, and it doesn’t even seem like begging. Just borrowing. When he goes to shoplift, he hits the local mom and pop pharmacies for cough syrup and soap, because they’re less likely to have surveillance cameras and fascist mandatory prosecution policies. The soap is important. He can stay clean enough to pass by washing up in a sink—plenty of hipsters and street kids are a little rank. He has three shirts and two pairs of jeans. The clothes not on his back are carefully hidden in the Jefferson Library branch. If he can stay on the right side of the line, Dave can live an almost normal life out on the streets.

Most of all, Dave misses pasta, which you can’t buy from a cart and rarely find clean in a Dumpster. Brute survival, and his fan Anne B., push the red bloom of the security guard’s stomach out of his dreams. There’s one day when Dave doesn’t even think about Erin until almost four o’clock, when he walks by a school letting out. But Erin is always on my mind.

Dave still thinks of me as nothing but the voice of his own self-talk, but I smile when I see the club—it’s called Collective: Unconscious—and he smiles too. He just doesn’t know why. Dave was mistaken; it’s not a bar or the sort of club one needs ID to get into. No drinking, no Ticketmaster. The place is just an old storefront with the counters and cash registers torn out and some folding chairs put in. The woman at the door, a meaty girl with fire-engine-red hair and tattoo sleeves, wants seven dollars. Dave only has five, and he looks so skinny and pathetic and his stomach is growling audibly even as he negotiates. The woman takes the money and waves him in.

Dave expects to have to force his way to the front, but the place is practically empty. Most of the folding chairs are still neatly stacked against a far wall. A quick count—by me, not Dave—confirms that yes, there are twenty-three chairs positioned before what passes for a stage. Dave has his pick; he’s early, and the first one here. Collective: Unconscious smells vaguely of Chinese food, and so Dave’s stomach rumbles even more loudly. He can’t bring himself to sit in the front row, so chooses the second, but right in the middle.

Already he’s nervous. Burning up. Life outside changes a person. Any room smaller than a subway station feels claustrophobic, and the air smells old and sick—full of disease. Dave’s throat tickles, and though he had shoplifted some cough syrup the other day, he is afraid to pull it from the pocket of his soiled hoodie and take a swig. Even though he’s clearing his throat time and again, even though he might really be a little sick, and there’s nobody to challenge him.

The audience enters in twos and threes. Dave is very used to being alone. It’s how I’ve managed to get and stay so close to him. Forget that poor state worker who rarely had conversations with more than one person at a time, Dave hasn’t said more than ten words to anyone since Mr. Zevgolis, and that was months ago. But we can chat sometimes. Someone came in with a slice of pizza. Dave’s mouth fills with saliva. He’s dizzy with rage, ready to just grab the pizza, shove it in his mouth, and run. But the lights dim and he relaxes.

There’s no introduction, no plea for funds, no welcome. Anne B. appears from a door that once led to a storeroom and steps onto the stage. She’s attractive, a little older than her publicity photo or website pics. He can see her crow’s feet, the bulge of her underarms atop the black leather corset she’s wearing. The white nurse stockings don’t match. She opens her mouth and screeches.
So this is performance art, Mr. Holbrook,
Dave thinks. He drinks his cough syrup. Nobody’s paying attention to him.

Collective: Unconscious doesn’t have a complex lighting rig, but it’s enough for the show. Anne B.’s on-stage authority is cut to ribbons by streaks of light over shadow. She starts chanting in a language Dave does not know. Her palms are up, then vanish into the dark. She turns her head, and from a speaker hidden somewhere in the room a distant-seeming horn sounds.

Dave looks around, trying to catch the eye of the other audience members, but they’re all rapt and peering up at the stage. The lights shift again, to red and blue. Anne B. starts telling a story about a time her boyfriend convinced her to wear a buttplug. Not just at home, in bed, but out and about. They went to Kings Plaza, in Brooklyn, and ate at the food court.

“‘Get it yet, slut?’ he said,” she says.

“‘I do, Sir,’ I said, not caring who might hear me call him Sir.”

“‘Oh yah? What do you get?’” she says, modulating her voice. Then back to her normal voice: “‘I can’t stop thinking about it,’ I tell him. ‘Whenever I see someone sitting down a little tenderly, or working behind a counter, or walking slowly, I . . .’”

Anne B. waits a moment, and in the affected voice of the boyfriend of the story, says, “‘Go on.’”

“‘I just think of them all wearing plugs. Everyone’s a dirty little whore wearing an assplug for their masters. The whole town is sex. I lick my lips at the thought of how wonderfully hard I’m going to get fucked tonight,’” she says. In the back of the room, someone starts applauding, but then quickly stops.

Something both sweet and sour rises up in Dave’s gullet. He thinks of his mother, what she would say if she were here now. Probably something like,
Yup, that’s performance art for you. It’s always the same. I used to
. . .
and then like the thought itself, she would trail off. It’s getting hotter in the room—Dave drank his cough syrup too quickly, and he can’t keep it down.

“Let’s you and I,” Anne B. says as she takes a step forward into a new light with a weird multicoloured gel, “form a secret society. Just the twenty-three of us.” There’s a man in the far corner with an old-fashioned overhead projector fresh from a high school somewhere, and some coloured liquid to draw bloblike shapes all over her limbs and face. “Tell no one.”

Dave opens his mouth and the cough syrup comes pouring out. The second spasm of vomit is even louder. Nobody’s clapping now, but indeed nobody is responding. Is this just all part of the show? Anne B. doesn’t miss a beat. “That’s right! Let it all out, baby!” she says, and Dave vomits again.

“No, you don’t understand!” Dave shouts. “This is real! I’m homeless! I don’t have access to a washer and dryer. I have two fucking outfits. I need help! I—” There’s more, but there’s also still more cough syrup in Dave’s gullet, and it comes up.

“C’mon, get him out of here,” someone says, and the house lights go on, but with a stomp of her foot and a bellowed “
Don’t you
dare
!” from Anne B. the house lights go back off and the phantasmagorical spotlight on. Anne B. produces a ukulele and starts strumming. Dave has nothing to lose. He wishes he had his Uzi—that would let him teach this asinine crowd some lessons. He rushes the stage. Anne screams and tries to ward him off with her ukulele. Then he’s rushed by the large woman who was at the door, who wraps her arms around him.

“This isn’t part of the show!” she yells. “Call 911!”

“Don’t,” Dave says. His clothing is slick enough from his own puke that he snakes out of the woman’s grasp. He stumbles to the lip of the low stage, hits his shin and splays across it. Anne B. plants a foot on the small of Dave’s back and finishes her song. Only on the last verse does he realize that the song is actually about him. He gives up, as does the woman who tried to restrain him, and just waits under Anne B.’s heel. The show goes on for a little bit longer, and Anne is careful to make sure that one foot always stays on Dave’s back as she moves about the tiny stage. I have a sense that some latent choreography is being carried out—that the performance would have been more physically intense if not for Anne B.’s quick integration of Dave into the show. But the stage was quite small—a couple of pallets placed side by side and covered in black felt.

Soon enough it’s over, but Anne B. doesn’t retreat from the stage. There is no applause, just the sound of people getting their coats. The ticket-taker, who had managed only to smear Dave’s puke all over her dress in an attempt to clean it off, stands in front of the stage and reads from the calendar of forthcoming events to the backs of the audience as they file out. Then she whips her head around and says, “Annie, I’m going to call the fucking cops on you, if you ever pull that shit again! Clean him up and get him out.” She walks off, as though on cue in a theatrical performance that exists only in her head.

Dave looks up at Anne B. as best he can from his position on the stage, and says, “Do you know who I am?”

“Oh, honey,” Anne B. says, “don’t you know never to pull any of that ‘do you know who I am’ crap downtown? We’ll eat you alive. I will, anyway.” Then she says, “Come on, Mr. Holbrook. You stink.”

She leads him to a small apartment on Rivington Street, the kind with a bathtub in the living room/kitchen. Behind the tub is a small space for a futon and beyond that is a tiny water closet. Dave’s not very tall, but when he sits on the commode his knees touch the bottom of the sink. Anne hands him a pair of plastic shopping bags from the Food Lion and tells him to put his clothes in there.

“Get in the bath,” she says. “You smell terrible. I had to open the window, and it’s January. I have some pasta.”

“Uhm . . .”

“What? There’s a shower curtain.”

“You’ll still be able to see me,” he says. “My shadow.”

Anne smiles a tight little smile. “You’re a poet. I promise I’ll turn around and just slave away over the hot stove like your mother used to. Or you can just go back to wherever you came from, Mr. Homeless.”

Dave frowns and takes the bags and steps into the bath fully clothed. It’s a small tub, like everything else in the tiny studio apartment, so Dave awkwardly peels out of his clothes, shoves them into the bags, and drops them beyond the flimsy curtain. He can see Anne B.’s silhouette puttering around by the oven and the few shelves above that make up her pantry and is sure that she can see him, so he covers his genitals with one boney forearm and crouches as he turns on the faucet. He glances up—Anne is looking at him. She’s sautéing onions and peering right at him instead of the saucepan. His stomach turns again, but he manages to suppress it.

Anne B. has a boy T-shirt for him, and a pair of boxer shorts, and some guy’s abandoned jeans that are too big for him.
How does someone manage to walk out of a girl’s apartment and leave his jeans behind
, Dave wonders. But he does not ask. Anne B. had even wiped down Dave’s shoes, but threw out the socks, which were beyond saving.

They eat in silence, sitting opposite one another on a thin rug on the floor, for the most part. Laps full of food. It’s hard for Dave not to just grab the noodles and shove them into his mouth. If only Anne B. had some butter—his mom used to make it with butter, not oil and onion and lentils. Only then does Dave realize that this woman and his mother share a name, that “Anne B.” even sounds like a replacement model or second-generation derivative of the original Ann.

“I suppose you’re waiting for me to ask something like, ‘What’s it like to kill a man,’ and then maybe offer to suck your cock?” Anne B. says. Dave shudders so severely just from being spoken to that Anne says, “Or not! Christ, nevermind. Geez, eat.” She reaches over to the mini-fridge, opens it, and hands him a can of Pabst Blue Ribbon. “Here. It’s all I have. You’re underage, but you’re already leading a life of crime. As am I now, just for having you here.”

“Is there a reward for me?” Dave says.

“Five grand.”

Dave has nothing to say to that.

“It’s pretty small, as far as these rewards go, really. I guess they don’t have a big tax pool in Jersey. And it’s not like your parents had much to say. That’s why I got interested in you. You were like a media fucking darling for two seconds, but your parents just up and disappeared.”

“Well, their marriage was . . .”

Anne B. raises an eyebrow. “Their son brought a machine gun to school for no reason. I’m sure their marriage was . . .”

“It wasn’t like that.”

“It’s amazing you’re alive,” Anne says. “They reported all the injuries you had in the weeks leading up to the shooting attempt. Any of them could have gone septic out in the streets.”

“Just lucky, I guess,” Dave says. He laughs before Anne B. can. The beer isn’t good, exactly, and it reminds him more of the street than anything else, but he drinks deeply from it. “It wasn’t about my parents, not really. It was about a girl . . .”

Dave, in fits and starts, in between bites of pasta—he’s bypassed his empty plate now and is eating right out of the pot in the middle of the floor—tells what he thinks the story is. I’m left out entirely, as are all the rest of us, all the wanderers on the roads not taken. Not that he’d know a thing about us, except for a glimpse in a hydrocodone haze.