Cannibals in Love (10 page)

Strictly speaking, it was a book about men, and weather, and the death of animals, and the idea that a tree could be an important character in a serious novel. It was about a dairy farmer named August Caffrey, whose cows were suddenly causing him to suffer a mysterious illness. This psychosomatic seizure that began with his body's rejection of milk and ended up in a kind of nervous collapse. It was a book about loneliness. It was a book about fear. It was a book about disappointment and loss. It was a book about paranoia and obsession and death. It was a book about one man's failure to carry his family name forward.

But it was all making me very strange, too. I had to stop telling people the things that I was doing. I carried around books from the library about the genuses of American elm trees. I kept scrupulous notes and wrote Latin names in the margins, knowing I would never return these books. I took the Metro out to the end of the Orange Line, and rode my bike twenty-five miles into Virginia, just to look at different cows and farms. I spent hours on the Internet learning the smallest differences between Holsteins and Jerseys. I was googling local dairies and cold-calling them, inquiring about nonexistent internships. I knew nothing, and I was totally obsessed.

I finished the novel in the spring, in a manic burst, only to discover that I'd tanked my GPA and would have to hustle just to graduate. I started bringing the full manuscript along to office hours, where stunned professors begged off the threat that I might actually ask them to read it. We worked out all kinds of creative solutions to make up the work that way.

I'd be lying if I said I hadn't come to New York under the illusion that I might meet somebody important. I wanted to believe that I was a writer. I was going to bowl them all over, of course. Sadly, I didn't even know how to get a single person to read the thing, let alone publish it. I spent two months working on a pathetically earnest query letter that ended up in the trash cans of prominent secretaries all over Manhattan. What connections did I have?

*   *   *

Sitting alone in the back of the ambulance was unnerving. The padded benches; the strange lights; the quiet equipment: all these important metals and plastics. The EMTs had not checked me out, or run tests, or done anything at all, really. They helped me into the back and closed the doors, and that was that. I was left there watching the city go by in a buzzy blur. They told me they were taking me to Bellevue. It was literally ten blocks: five minutes maybe, at this time of the morning. Still, I knew exactly how expensive it was going to be. They should have just called me a goddamn taxi.

And, all at once, I was struck by the feeling that I'd played it wrong. I should've let the cops arrest me. I should've called their bluff and gone with my bike. Jail, the drunk tank, whatever. I could've sobered up; dealt with the paperwork; paid the fine; and left on my bicycle. It made me nauseous to think about it this way now.

I lowered my head between my knees, and saw the note for the first time. Tucked into the front pocket of my shirt and folded in a square:
Mikey. You are in Manhattan. Your bike is at the 13
th
Precinct. Take the 4, 6 train to 23 & Lex. We'll hold onto it there.

Well,
Je-sus Christ
, I just about cracked myself up. Relieved is one way to put it, but really I was touched. This unexpected kindness from my friends in law enforcement was too much. And after I had been such an asshole and everything. I almost wanted to cry. The big cop had written a great note. And funny, too.

When I looked up again, the ambulance was stopped. The back door opened and the EMT helped me down, taking me under the arm as we walked into the ER. The Bellevue emergency room at 5:00 a.m. is a sight to see if you ever find yourself living in New York City. Wall-to-wall hard-luck misfits, myself included. Junkies and old men and a Puerto Rican kid with a bone sticking out of his shin.

“Why isn't anyone helping that kid?” I said in a loud voice to no one as we passed him. I was staring back at his leg and it was making me dizzy.

I looked up to find that the EMT had left me at the desk with a stern lady nurse, who was already holding my driver's license and writing everything down. It cannot be stressed enough that this woman was not amused with me. Not at all. She handed the license back, barely willing to look at me. I smiled and played my only ace, producing the note from the big cop. I explained that I was expected urgently at the Number Thirteen Precinct, where there were pressing matters involving the retrieval of my bicycle. I told her thank you very much, but I would have to be going.

“No.” The lady nurse scowled, pushing the note back unread. “You smell horrible like vomit, and I need you to sit down and stop talking until the doctor can see you. Do you understand me?”

Needless to say, her authority was absolute. I nodded meekly, feeling embarrassed for myself. The lady nurse left me in a chair looking out over the big open room: the swirling chaos of it all. As I folded my driver's license back inside the note, it hit me again: the cops; the ambulance; the doctors. I didn't have any insurance! How many times did I have to explain this tonight? I couldn't just sit here and wait for a doctor to come. What was a doctor going to do for me anyway?

As the lady nurse walked away to catalog the next catastrophe, I stood up. Trying to affect casualness, I walked across the length of the waiting room, past her empty desk. Past the Puerto Rican kid with the leg. Out the automatic doors. Gone.

Outside, the air had prickers in it. This last chill right before the sun comes shooting up. I was buoyed by my escape. I could feel how drunk I was,
even now
, as I passed into a kind of giddiness. I had no idea where I was going, just that I must keep moving away from the hospital doors. I was consumed by this childlike fear that the lady nurse could come rushing out onto the sidewalk at any moment, pointing:
Hey! There he is! Get him!

It was a kindly old bum who finally told me where the stairs to the 6 train were. And from there it was pretty much clear sailing. Taking a seat and riding the empty train at the cusp of rush hour. I watched the car slowly fill as we trundled back downtown.

It was daylight when I came up out of the subway, and I shielded my eyes against it. I was thrilled to have pulled off this little trick: finding the Thirteenth Precinct on the Island of Manhattan. Never once did I consider that it might be a trap. Some kind of dirty civic tangle where they get you paying at the hospital and the jail, both. The fact of the matter was I was still sort of shitfaced at 6:00 a.m., stinking horribly, and walking into a police station of my own volition.

But inside all I found was another overtaxed waiting room. The smell of burnt coffee and the pulse of bureaucracy. It was not so far off from the OTB, save for the missing bay of televisions. I looked around warily for my friends the big cops, but I didn't see them anywhere. I walked up to the desk and passed over my handwritten instructions, like this counter was some sort of coat check.

The desk cop read my note with a blank face, seeming to miss the humor in it. He told me to have a seat as he passed it backward to a second cop, who also read it, before turning away and disappearing through a door. I busied myself watching the room, thinking it strange that I didn't see anything like the wheels of justice in motion here. Nobody looked particularly criminal, at least. No one seemed worried about much of anything.

And then, without further ado, a different door opened, and a third cop came wheeling out into the waiting room with my bike, calling,
LeMond
.

“LeMond? Guy LeMond?” They had written down the brand name off the side of the bicycle. “Ho, listen up, which one a youse is LeMond?”

I jumped up, waving at him. I couldn't believe my own stupid luck. “I'm LeMond. Me. Greg LeMond. It's
Greg
LeMond.” I couldn't wipe the smile off my face as the cop handed back my bike, totally indifferent.

“All right, there ya go, Greg.”

I hurried the bike up the stairs and out onto the street, and I suddenly felt incredible. My whole body was buzzing, almost vibrating. I wasn't even tired anymore. Gliding out into the morning traffic, weaving through the cars, some part of me just wanted to keep on riding. I thought about going straight in to work, just the way I was, but decided to sleep and quit instead. They liked me enough at the temp agency to find me something else.

I rode across the Brooklyn Bridge, taking this long route home. Past the joggers, and the dog-walkers, and the women pushing strollers. I was happy to be young, happy to be alive on this morning. Happy, even, to be living in New York City. I laughed out loud. There was no fucking way I was paying for that ambulance ride. Let them come after me now. I was set free.

 

YOKO

It all began with a robbery. This bizarro crime, executed in broad daylight, and reeking of junkie panic and ingenuity. This was the first time I met Lane Tworek. He knocked on my door to ask if I'd seen anyone breaking into his house. The way Lane described it, there was a thirty-foot ladder in his roommate's bedroom, while his own bed was out in the backyard.

“I'm sorry. What?” I tried to ask.

Lane figured some junkie had found the ladder lying out and carried it up the block, looking for an open window. After climbing into Lane's house, he pulled it up after him, so as not to draw undue suspicion. Then the guy just ransacked the place a little; taking CDs, and DVDs, and even Lane's PlayStation. All of which would've been a bummer on its own, except that he ended up finding the only thing in the whole house worth stealing: an envelope full of cash. This, Lane explained, was the rent money.

“You pay your rent in cash?” I asked incredulously.

“I pay everything in cash, dude.”

Lane, I would come to learn, was more or less officially in arrears: barred from the world of credit cards and checking accounts. But the story wasn't done yet. Lane figured the junkie just about shit himself when he found the rent money. It's a wonder he even bothered taking the Butthole Surfers tapes, but the poor guy was probably in shock. It was time to get out of there, to go. Quick. Now.

Except that when he went downstairs he found out he was locked inside the house. We were all living in these beautiful, shambling rowhouses in a gentrifying Columbia Heights, where all the doors and windows had bars on them. Sure, he could've put the ladder back out the front window, but frankly, that would've been stupid. And, yeah, he could've dragged it to the back of the house and tried his luck there, but Lane figured all that money was making him light in the head. Either that or he'd lost his nerve for heights, which seemed unlikely given the fact of where Lane found his mattress in the backyard.

“You mean he threw your bed off the top porch and jumped?”

“That's exactly what he did. That motherfucker.” Lane shook his head. “You really didn't see any of this?”

“Unh-uh.” I smiled. “I wish.”

*   *   *

Lane and I pulled back the fence between our yards, and I helped him carry his bed back up the stairs. We leaned over the balcony and marveled at the fact that a man with a thousand dollars in his pocket had jumped two stories, and no one even saw it.

“Should we try it?” I asked.

Lane nodded solemnly. “We have to.”

We pulled the mattress back onto the porch and hucked it over the railing, watching it bounce and settle in the bare yard. I got excited then, right on the verge of losing my nerve. But Lane wasn't one to wait around and think about these things.

“Well…” He put his leg over the railing and threw himself off. Bang! Lane hit the mattress hard, right on his ass. He shot back into the air and nearly landed it, before crashing into the dirt. Lane got up wincing and smiling as he rubbed his tailbone.

“Case-fucking-closed, man!” he hollered up at me. “Go ahead.”

Lane was shielding his eyes against the sun and grinning up at me expectantly. Obviously I didn't have a great feeling about this jump, but not jumping now was impossible. So I took a breath and I just did it. Windmilling my arms, I reached back underneath me and almost missed the thing. The impact of the mattress was jarring, and I smashed my arm into the ground underneath me as I sprang back up, nearly drop-kicking Lane. We got up laughing too hard to speak, and I shook out my wrist, which was already throbbing and vibrating heat.

This was the way that Lane and I baptized our friendship in danger.

*   *   *

I had been going through a pretty good run of invincibility. For all I knew, I was indestructible. And besides, I was having real fun again. I was surprised how little my wrist actually bothered me. It puffed up and went back down, and eventually it was just a dull ache. If anything, it was a reason to go twice as hard.

Lane convinced me to take the next week off from work to help him build a nine-hole miniature golf course in his backyard. As Lane explained it, each hole would represent a different cataclysm of recent American history: 9/11; Waco; Oklahoma City; Exxon Valdez; the
Challenger
explosion; Ruby Ridge; Mount St. Helens; Columbine; and Super Bowl XXV (this last one was my own). Lane was enrolled in art school, and the whole thing was presented loosely as his thesis project. He'd even received a grant, which he promptly spent on Astroturf, lumber, and marijuana. Somehow he'd managed to get the rent paid out of this as well.

I was surprised to find that Lane was a competent builder. Not only that, but he ended up having all kinds of practical knowledge: carpentry; electricity; plumbing; cooking. I made a point of trying to soak up as much of this as I could, because it was all completely foreign to me. If something broke in my father's house, he called a guy to fix it. I'd always thought that was smart.

Each morning, Lane and I would drag the power tools out of the basement. We'd take our shirts off and smoke pot out of an apple, and go to work. Unfortunately, we only really managed to finish three holes before giving over to the greater desire to play the course. We were getting good, too, and began tossing around the idea of playing for money. But this was right when Lane's landlady found out what was going on, and threatened to have us arrested. She came roaring into the backyard one day, in her high heels and sunglasses, screaming at me about tearing the thing down. I didn't even know who she was. I was so high I could hardly keep myself from giggling. Covered in dirt and paint, I just stood there, holding my putter, letting her yell.