Kamikaze Lust (3 page)

“It’s Miami, not Chattanooga.”

“Not the place, the pattern. I can’t stand the thought of spending my life writing about other people who think they’re so damn fabulous.”

“So quit.”

But I knew she wouldn’t quit. She suffered from what she called “upper-middle-class paralysis,” which, in English, meant her parents had worked their butts off and then spoiled her silly with cars and clothes and cruises while not paying her the least bit of attention. To her family, value was the tangible: a salary, a byline, or, even better, a spot on the local TV news. As for myself, I was the product of an autodidactic electrician who worked sporadic construction jobs and a housewife who before marrying harbored dreams of starring in a Broadway musical, though she was utterly tone deaf. I never understood the tenets of this new-monied anxiety. It seemed to me that Shade, if anyone, could afford to quit her day job. She had rich parents, an IRA, a broker named Butch. A suspicion was borne in me, therefore, that there was more to her existential dilemma than a crisis of materialism.

Perhaps that’s why I felt nervous as she spoke about this gig with Tina Macadam, and there was something I didn’t like about that woman, an attitude I couldn’t quite verbalize, but if I told Shade she would accuse me of being judgmental. As if that were a bad thing.

I downshifted for a red light and found myself saying, “Just be careful.”

“Please.” She dropped a red, a blue, and a brown M&M into my palm and ate a few green ones. I had to laugh at the determination with which she isolated them, as if she were mining a pile of dirt for diamonds.

“Don’t think I didn’t see how you looked at her,” I said.

“Doesn’t matter. I’m through with women.”

“Oh you’re heterosexual now?”

“No, men too, I’m done with it all,” she laughed. I shifted into first as the light changed; then second; and third, moving around a bus with a billboard for men’s underwear, thinking how nice it was to be briefly insulated in a little bubble on the streets of Manhattan. If only we could bag the strike and drive around the city all day long eating candy.

Shade had her elbow up against the window, two fingers pressed against her temple in her thinking pose. “Maybe you’ll understand this better when you’re my age.” She raised her eyebrows and I sighed. “Dating is a business negotiation. Everything’s an Issue with a capital I, and nobody wants to have fun anymore. It’s pathetic, really. Where are the fucking snows of yesteryear?”

“The snows of yesteryear, haven’t you heard? They’re out on strike.”

She smiled. “So it’s welcome to the new celibacy.”

“Which for me is the same as the old celibacy.”

“I don’t understand, you’re such a catch.”

“It’s just not that important.”

“What?”

“You know, sex, love, whatever.”

“I don’t believe you.”

“It’s true,” I said, though the real truth was I wasn’t very good at any of it. I’d never been in love, moved from one hopelessly inappropriate relationship to the next, and couldn’t have an orgasm in the presence of anyone besides Freddy. Men often called me frigid. But how could I explain this to Shade, a woman far less rigid with sex than with her M&Ms?

“Give me a green one, come on,” I said.

“All right you can have one, but just one.” She turned sideways and leaned her arm over the stick shift. I was busy dodging traffic. “Open.”

I did and she dropped the smooth, green pellet on my tongue. I bit down with a loud crunch. “Remember, those things can be dynamite in the wrong hands,” she said.

“Who died and made you M&M boss?”

“I was born that way.”

“Elitist.”

I turned the corner on Forty-second Street, and we were immediately dead-locked in a honking maze of cars, buses, and trucks that even the cyclists and rollerbladers had difficulty cutting through. We sat; we listened to reports of the strike on public radio; we watched the cars pass in the other direction; we moved an inch. Slowly, the stagnating traffic throbbed its way into my brain. I felt as if my head would pop off. “Shit!” I said. “Shit! Shit! Shit!”

“Okay, calm down,” Shade said. She had plan B in mind. “Jut out a little bit to the left…that’s it, now keep pushing out until you can break into a U-ey.”

“Easy for you to say.”

“No, look, there’s a few feet of opening, go go go!”

“It’s a double yellow line—”

“Go!”

I went. Cars honked madly. My heart accelerated, my fingers sweat against the stick shift. Someone called me Jackass. But within a few minutes we were out of traffic. The tingling in my neck settled, though my heart kept its brisk pace. I’d never crossed a double yellow line before. I felt rebellious, nihilistic even. Shade and I couldn’t stop smiling, as we headed west toward the second parking garage of the day.

Only when we left the jeep and started walking toward the picket line did it hit me that this strike could get expensive. Very expensive, indeed.

Unlike the molluscan mass outside the courthouse, the crowd gathered in front of
The City News
formed an amorphous and angry blob swallowing anything in its wake. I stayed along the outskirts of the police barriers, while Shade adapted more quickly to the scene. Someone handed her a placard, and I lost her to the sea of black jackets, television cameras, and receding hairlines, until she returned and dragged me kicking and screaming to the center of the crowd where a few other reporters had staked out turf next to a hot dog stand.

I was uncomfortable with the spectacle of these hereto-fore mild-mannered, Clark Kent and Lois Lane reporters morphing seamlessly into fiery Bolsheviks. There were James, the Asian mensch as Shade called him, raising his fist in the air, and Carrie, the twitchy City Hall reporter who always wore business suits, wielding a placard that said: Union Rights = Human Rights. They had to know how ridiculous they looked. The whole scene was as absurd as a song and dance number from the Broadway musicals my mother revered. Even Shade was screaming loud enough that her voice became Lauren Bacall husky. Slowly, however, amid all of the shouting and sloganeering, a strange energy overwhelmed me, and I wondered whether I was the one who appeared ridiculous among the frenzied ralliers. Testing myself, I took a step forward, raised my fist and shouted: “Back off union busters!” My cheeks flushed, but nobody seemed to notice. I was just another voice in the crowd. A few more chants and I felt invigorated, unraveled, as if my life had a discernible purpose, if only temporarily. Soon, I was cheering along as strikers threw bottles at armored delivery trucks and chided any mutt who crossed the line. I became indignant when reporters from the other dailies, gathering material for tomorrow’s papers, descended upon us. Was frozen as photographers snapped our pictures.

Later, other unions joined a solidarity rally. Thousands of people gathered around us, the nucleus, chanting, carrying signs, even hurling a few cans or old newspapers. The smell of sauerkraut stained the air.

At once, we’d become part of history, descendants of the Boston Tea Party, brothers and sisters to the Pullman Strikers, United Auto Workers, and Air Traffic Controllers. We were the working-class darlings of the moment, which, after a while, made me nervous. For we in the media should know better than anyone how quickly the moment comes and goes. Tomorrow, as the fringes of this angry mob reported for work, we would remain in the streets alone.

I broke from the cacophony and leaned back against a grimy, brick office building. Looking westward I spotted the sky, a magical cast of blue peeping in between the buildings as if the atmosphere itself had been artificially manufactured, pink and blue as far as my eye could see. This was the sky I’d imagined in those junior high science classes when I first tripped the magic of acids and bases, the sky I’d even earlier taken it upon myself to draw with a rainbow of Crayolas.

“Moron girl!” Rowdy had said. “There ain’t no pink clouds.”

“There are,” I tried to explain, recalling something Dad had read to me from the encyclopedia about the sun’s rays being refracted, which I’d heard as reefer-acted, like the reefer Rowdy and Neil smoked. There was smoke and there was light and it all came from the sun.

“When the sun moves,” I said, “it paints the clouds different colors, it makes them pink.”

“Pink like your cunt,” Neil said, barreling into the living room with his tongue wiggling around his lips. “Pink to red and then you’re a bloody-cunted bitch for the rest of your life.” He put his face close to mine and whispered, “Blood cunt, blood cunt.…”

I ran upstairs to my bedroom, locked the door behind me and waited for the pounding to stop. When I got my period a few years later, I knew that Neil had foretold it. By then he’d started his watching, too. I couldn’t insert a tampon or take a shit in the house without feeling his eyes on me. Even though Neil was gone now, living in Las Vegas, he was probably still drilling holes in some wall or door to scope out other unsuspecting women. I was as certain of this as I was then of those pink clouds in Brooklyn.

We congregated across the street at The Corral to see the strike unfold as the rest of the world would see it, but soon found the top spot on every six o’clock broadcast devoted to Kaminsky and his dead protégés. Our fifteen minutes arrived after the Kaminsky story. Tony ordered pitchers of margaritas and tequila shots for everyone.

“Look look, there I am!” Michael said, pointing to his face on the three television screens behind the bar.

“You look like a longshoreman,” Tony said. “That’s why they used you.”

It was true. Some of us may dress like lawyers or talk like street-corner philosophers or eat in trendy restaurants, but when the line is drawn, reporters fall on the side of labor. Working class was the look the TV cameras were going for.

“Turn it up, I want to hear my sound bite,” Michael said.

The curmudgeonly bartender obliged. He’d been working at The Corral long enough to know that a strike meant increased business.

“Oh man they cut it,” Michael said. “They cut the part where I said seeing all of you run out to the picket line was like watching people march to the gallows.”

“That was too literary, too dramatic,” I said.

“Just you wait. Try Channel Seven, let’s see if superstar Kim Mathews gets all weepy.”

“There was some survey recently,” Shade said, “I don’t remember where, but eight out of ten Americans said they would rather have dinner with Kim Mathews than the President.”

“Seems reasonable,” Tony said and nobody argued.

The bartender surfed the channels, but kept coming up with the same old story told through the same somber eyes of our TV brethren. There were the management spokesmodels spouting about generations of padded wage and benefit contracts that had made the paper a money pit; the union leaders swearing they would cripple the paper and force the Aussies out of town; and a few comments from strikers, mostly reporters, and, within that subgroup, mostly Michael. Who knew he was such a publicity whore?

As stories of the strike tapered off, the bartender turned down the sound on the TV sets in favor of classic rock: The Doors. A table opened up, and we grabbed it. Tony ordered more shots. “What should we drink to?” he said.

“Let’s drink to the dead couple,” Michael said. “What were their names?”

“Ida and Marvin Salinger,” I said.

“Here’s to Ida and Marvin.”

“Cheers.”

Etcetera. Etcetera. Etcetera.

Everyone drank again—except for me. I’d already had two shots and couldn’t risk another. I hated getting drunk, though I’d learned not to make a big deal about it. If I had to I could quickly dump a shot on the floor, cover the glass with my whole hand and pop it back against my mouth while pretending to swallow. It worked every time.

“We need more margaritas,” Tony said.

“Don’t they come in any other color?” Shade asked, and the next time they came back blue. She grimaced. Eyeing each other across the table, I remembered the blue M&Ms. I’d never known anybody so affected by primary colors.

The drinks kept coming, but we were tired of drinking to Ida and Marvin. “Anybody got a paper?” Michael said. “Get the obits. We’ll drink to every goddamn dead person in there.”