Four New Messages (10 page)

It was exactly as I’d imagined it, which is to say exactly as I hadn’t imagined it because I’d been imagining something imaginary to begin with—all down that sorry drain. Mopswishes, mopswishes on the floor, the fins of the mop, the mop’s knotted tentacles swish across the floor. A goldenarched pyramid—a sandwichboard—cautioning “Slippery When Wet,” and the sexual jokes that occasions, then that other phrase comes to mind, “on the clock,” and there’s a clock there, ticking shifts above the citations and mugshots: Employee of the Month wanted for armed robbery, nonsupport. Restroom coed but being cleaned, restroom coed but out of order.

Burger culled from asphalt, results in pothole. L(ettuce), t(omato), o(nion), mushroomcloud of sodafoam. I can make a noose with three straws, I can make a noose from two. A thirty minute seating limit, regularly enforced: a customer changing his seat every thirty minutes would take exactly how long to have occupied every seat (whatever’s in that booth doesn’t have to be homeless)?

Microphones foaming interjacent to the registers. Everything on the dollar menu costs a dollar. A dollar never includes tax. $1.08. $2.15. $3.23. $4.30 $5.38 $6.45. I was no longer so hungry, predictably. Thirst was more difficult. No soda would have been sufficiently large or sufficiently small. I had a medium thirst, a mediocre thirst. Only mediocrity would suffice and so becomes mediocre, preservative. A medium ensued. I sat, watched, listened. Big black and hispanic kids drinking blackcolored and hispaniccolored sodas. Fat old white man eating burger. The woman, his wife. Mashing pills into ketchup for fries. The climatized cold. The hard silence. A silence with edges. Open carton. Flip up top. Chew pen turning tongue graveyard dark. The old man drooled above his seconds. Wife still finishing her first. Big burgers for those bloodless bodies! Those big big big big burgers! (No more writing, nothing more intelligent than that.)

THE COLLEGE BOROUGH

I helped build the Flatiron Building,
though I’ve never been to New York—though Dem and I had never been before indulging our daughter Veri’s desire to visit New York University—on my one week off this year and Veri’s junior year springbreak—despite our hope that she, our only child, would choose to stay in-state.

The decision is hers—but we keep telling her, In-state was good enough for us.

After all, that’s where we met.

Dem and I had four classes together prior to applying to Professor Greener’s workshop—it was competitive certainly, but he accepted us both for what reasons we years ago came to terms with—this in the days when Dem was still doing poetry, not yet motherhood and the career of a freelance interior designer, the days when I was writing fiction as if literature were life.

And here was Veri, rebelling against our rebellion—she was bent on studying some profane concatenation of finance and psychology—she wanted to be employable, while all I wanted was to avoid the Flatiron.

And because I did, I insisted we do everything downtown: we’d sleep downtown at the Wall Street W (the hotel I’m writing from now, by midnight on W stationery with a W pen), we’d eat downtown (Dem an unreconstructed gastrophile when traveling, a compulsive cuisiniste who keeps files on restaurants, .docs and .xls spreadsheets of what dishes and deals can be had on what days where)—we’d tour and enjoy exclusively downtown: historic-districting around Trinity Church, the Exchange, the new Trade Center being built, going up slowly, slowly, after a decade of stagnancy, SoHo art galleries and Village bebop she’bam clubs (Dem had downloaded discount admissions), struggling improvisational comedy cellars (she’d scanned vouchers for three late sets free), and, Wednesday, if we can fit it in, one or two interactive museums.

Downtown’s also where the school is, or rather
the school is downtown,
having taken everything over. The streets are the classrooms not in some ridiculously wistful sense but legitimately, or rather illegitimately—privately owned, zoned for children only.

Beat, footsore, inadequately caffeinated, Dem and I stood with our daughter at the front of the tour group led by a girl named like a corruption of a Dutch cheese—Goudla? Dougla? this cheerfully chubby checker of any survey’s Pacific Islander box, majoring in—I wasn’t paying attention—let’s say postcolonial beading or basketry as therapy. She was very kind to Veri, very patient and always touching—Dem and even me, with a bit to the cuticle fingernail graze of my elbow, a hennaed palm to my shoulder, tender but then she’d think nothing of reaching out with a surprisingly firm grip and turning Veri’s head to direct her attention: there the library, there the center for university life, here the freshman dorms (where you’ll be living next year—what a presumptuous girl) …

I told Dem I wasn’t impressed and she shushed me but I could tell from the side of her smile, she agreed. I’m saying the physical plant wasn’t much. Prefab. Incapacitated by its overcapacity. Smogged. Now I know no city can contain all the amenities you’d find at a place like our alma mater. A city university just doesn’t have the space, no matter how big the endowment, no matter what sums of R&D cash are banking around—Manhattan Island is only so large and it’s telling that about half of its lower half is landfill. Back home we have more chlorinated pools, more recreation facilities with more stationary bikes and stairmasters, treadmills and the latest in weight machinery—hell, we even have the Flatiron, if you want to forgo the elevators and walk up it—the Fauxiron, Professor Greener once called it, whose roof I laid about twenty years ago, with Veri turning 18 this September.

I did a fine job on that building, finer workmanship than anything we saw on our tour save for a few of the older buildings—I’m talking the stolid stuff actually of the 1900s, those tiles and carvings from when we still cared about craft, those noble columns and colonnades and ornamental gutters—all the fineries I learned to duplicate, the techniques that usurped my writing to give me a destiny with salary and benefits.

You want Peterson’s Roofing to do up your house, but first you want to looksee our standard? Go down to auxiliary field #3—incongruous, isn’t it? insane, perhaps? jutting from amidst sports pitch and prairie, a skyscraper visible from the Mississippi, as the meeker, more Mormon guides claim when you take the tour of that campus. That slight wedge of trouble that has us wedged south of City Hall, that was Dem, that was me—clients call impressed, I do well for myself. Veri would thrive, twenty floors below that turbid eclipsing—1,750 miles away from 175 Fifth Avenue.

Professor Maury Greener was invited out to our flyover square state to be Writer in Residence for the 1992–1993 academic year on the merit of his recently published and only book, a novel about its author’s formative years so searing, so bridgeandtunnelburning and explicitly realistic that we couldn’t resist ravishing it for autobiographical fact (an interpretive approach that Greener both practiced and abhorred). So art reconstitutes biography—or better, biography like iron can make art like steel, but then the art can be heated again and the iron reseparated, the biography flowing molten all on its own—what a significant simile! such a suitable image! He—like his hero who shared his initials, height, weight, eye and hair color, wardrobe preference for wry denims, and predilection for deli—was born on the Brooklyn-Queens border, at the conjunction of those two potent, across-the-water boroughs so fetishized for having provided the nativity of so much authentic, impactful culture of the century past: Irish, Italian, Jewish, and he was the lattermost, he wouldn’t let you forget it. Greener was the first Jew I ever met. Now I was a student of literature, not a student of the study of literature but of the making of literature (already there was the vocational calling: the desire to be trained to task,
to do,
to make
), and though I was a voracious reader of the right writers—the lustier ethnics, the WASP authoritarians—practically speaking, my experience was nil. Jews were in the Bible, they were of the Bible. They weren’t on my TV or in the movies I borrowed, but they made the TV and movies. I didn’t expect him to have horns or anything—it was Dem’s family (typically exasperating inlaws, but also bison ranchers) who’d passed along that stereotype and when Dem mentioned it to me after reading up on Greener before he arrived, I immediately imagined a man with airhorns, or megaphones, grown out of his head—and it wasn’t like I was expecting a version of Shylock or Fagin, but I was not prepared for the irony, that fuck you and fuck your mother cynicism. This was because—memoir, self-writing again—he was raised without a father and had to toughen up fast. He had to learn—he taught himself, as his protagonist, M. Groonik, had taught himself—how to fight, how to stand up for what was his. What was his was Stuyvesant, followed by climbing the Ivy, uptown—rungs above the college Veri and Dem and I were touring, eons—humanities educationwise—beyond our own peonic undergraduate and graduate careers. And of course he had his book, which followed this titular Groonik, “amateur erector
cum
semiprofessional ventilation inspector,” through myriad ménages à trois and quatre in downtown New York of the mid-1980s. What that book earned him: low advance on low sales, hysterical acclaim, and, once remaindered, once out of print, this sinecure stint in the provinces teaching us hicks
to rite good.

It seems that the ’80s—the decade of my adolescence spent lurching dazed between milking and collecting eggs at my parents’ dairy farm and videogaming after homework—was the last tolerable decade in New York, despite the city going broke, despite the crime: it was Greener, who had eight years on me, who taught me to qualify. For him it was the decade of punk rock, hip hop, rap, graffiti as art, heroin and coke, a scene where everyone became millionaires at their mixed media before dying of AIDS or, as Greener wrote, “wrote excessive books about excess that were never excessively read” (though, he once recommended, the hardcovers’ dustjackets were useful for cutting up lines)—the last decade before the encroachment of the rest of the country, before the suburbs moved into the urbis. All that pseudoculture that Greener hated: the chainstores, the megamalls, the ATMized shopfronts unmanned but anyway lit and heated and airconditioned 24/7/365—he hadn’t been around any of that before it began coming to New York (downtown definitely has all the familiar logos by now), and just when it came he decamped to its source. He came to our state, our city, our cow college town—the world capital of bad depressing homogenous capital. We had—we still have, unupdated, unredone—an airport, then a strip of consumer options, then, up the hill, the College on the Hill and, when he first arrived, his second night with us—arrived unaccompanied at 35, balding and fattened like a species of livestock new to us who knew our livestock, but still recognizable as ready for slaughter—he invited Dem and me out to dinner along with a half dozen fellow students, but not because he wanted to bond.

He said, Don’t think I want to bond, it’s just that your girlfriend’s too pretty, which for him passed for a compliment.

He stood us a round of dollar margaritas.

I didn’t have the heart to tell him,
my fiancée
(that character still sounded too foreign).

All throughout dinner we were introduced to that hilariously raw style of metro complaint, the perpetual bitching of the provincial Manhattanite: could the food be any worse? could the service be any worse? could the fluorescents be more industrially fierce? which were cornier, the corn tortillas or the restaurant’s muzak and decor (the decorations were stapled sombreros and hefty husks of lacquered maize, a burro mural in dishwater pastels below dishsized speakers blatting juvescent pop top-40)? could the conversation at the surrounding tables be any stupider? could the people tabled around him be any stupider? He was caustic. Could he get a new knife? He’d drunkenly clunked his last to the floor.

The food was nominally Mexican (his request)—did we take him to Taco John’s or Casa Agave? I’m not sure which chains we had then—pre-Chi-Chi’s, ante-Chipotle—Chili’s?

About as Mexican as Hitler, he said, As Mexican as spätzle, he said, then, after the flan, wiped his mouth with the zarape that served as tablecloth and said:

Here’s your first assignment.

And then took a shot of tequila and said, Margarine-flavored tequila.

For our virgin workshop in this burg, I want you to write a story about our dinner tonight, but make me out to be the biggest asshole possible—I want to be fictionalized, hyperfictionalized, let your imagination graze free on the range—have me robbing this joint, have me taking a shit in the rice and beans, out me as this pretentious pinko kikeabilly snob, though still deigning to rape your wives, he looked at Dem then looked at me, winked.

Hand that in, he said, or else.

Or else?

(It was like the entire waitstaff asked that too.)

Bring me anything you want.

Staggering out of the restaurant he was slurring, But I’ll only read a story if it’s finished.

The first story I brought Greener was my own original creation I barely remember save that it involved a young man who went away to war—which war? did I specify which or even have a certain war in mind? who came home with medals bandaging his wounds to find some things different, not drastically different, just slightly different, like his wife has a name that sounds like her old name or what he thought her old name was, or his daughter’s just as beautiful as he’d remembered but instead of having green eyes and blond hair she has blue eyes and brown hair and this destabilizes him, this youthful veteran, who begins behaving differently himself, indulging in violent outbursts he and everyone around him regard as wholly uncharacteristic (unable to give this unrecognizable family affection or hold down a job, he blots his days trying to throttle a motorbike engine)—the reader has to wonder how sane he is and, if he’s not sane, how that loss of sanity will end: with murdering his family? with murdering himself (the vet was based partially on my grandfather, WWII, partially on my father, Vietnam—I’ve never served and that and the double models for the protag were probably why I kept the exact date and location of the conflict vague, though current events conspired to turn a few references Arab)?