Kamikaze Lust (4 page)

Shade hurled a copy of
The City News
at him.

“This is getting sick,” Carrie said, wobbling up out of her seat. “Doesn’t it bother any of you that this morning two people were alive and because of some modern Joseph Mengele tonight they’re….” She shook her head back and forth.

“Aw, come on now, sit down,” Tony said. “We’re just goofing. If we started taking this shit too seriously we’d all be running for the cyanide.”

“I know, I know.” She took a deep breath and smoothed out her skirt as if she’d learned it in some dress-for-success seminar. Rule #9: Straight Clothing = Straight Thinking. “Look, it’s been a monster day, I’m calling it quits.” She picked up her briefcase and swung her blazer over her arm. “See you guys,” she said.

We said goodbye and then fell silent, as if Carrie’s disappearance might force us to address our presence at The Corral. I could hear Jim Morrison’s trippy baritone being eclipsed by the clanking bottles and background chatter.

“What’s up with Carrie?” Michael said.

“Gee, I don’t know,” I said.

“Don’t you start flipping out now,” Tony said.

“Give her a break,” Shade said. “She was following Kaminsky.”

“Poor Rachey,” Tony reached over and patted my head.

“I was just getting comfortable here,” I smiled and let him put his arm around me. “And this was so easy, a tailor-made, front-page extravaganza. Shit.”

“Yeah, missing out on the story of the century must suck holy rat cock,” Tony said.

“It’s bigger than a rat, Dibenedetto,” I took his arm from my shoulder and stood up.

“Oh nice, asshole, you scared her off, too,” Michael said.

“Mind your business, sound-bite boy,” Tony said. Then, running his thumb and forefinger against his mustache, he looked up at me. “Come on, I’m sorry, you can come back.”

“Relax, I’m just getting a soda.”

I had to break away from them, if only to drop the tough-girl act for a few minutes. At the bar, I ordered a diet Coke and bummed a cigarette from the bartender. Though I’d quit a few years ago, smoking was an ongoing battle. These days my resolve was to not buy them, but the way I felt when I took that first drag, as if the smoke going inside helped make sense of everything happening outside, was similar to Carrie smoothing down the wrinkles on her skirt. I took a deep drag, thinking, cancer sticks. Aunt Lorraine had never smoked a day in her life and she got it; genetics weren’t on my side.

I put out the cigarette after a few drags and on my way back to the table bumped into James. He was wearing his coat and, like me, seemed a bit awkward amid the streams of tequila shots and smoke and rock-and-roll.

“Strange day,” he said.

“It’s my birthday.”

“Thirty?”

“Plus one.”

“I don’t know what to tell you.”

“Nobody does. Leaving?”

“Yeah, I have to get back to Jersey, I want to put my kids to bed.” He pulled the belt of his tan raincoat and smiled. Shade was right about the Asian mensch thing. James was a good guy, and though only thirty-four himself, he seemed much older than the rest of us. Maybe it was the raincoat.

“Take care of yourself, okay?” he said.

“Yeah, you too.”

I watched him walk out, then scavenged another cigarette before returning to the table.

We stayed out late. Very late.

I didn’t know about anybody else, but I couldn’t face the thought of going home to my solitary crib. As people scattered away, Shade and I gravitated to a table full of bundlers who all seemed to be named Bill. She was drunk; I’d been faking it for the last couple of hours. I stayed quiet, turned down drinks when the Bills offered despite Shade’s exasperated stares. The feeling I’d experienced earlier with Tina Macadam returned, only now I was skeptical of Shade. For someone who’d just this afternoon joined the ranks of the newly celibate, she was acting quite flirtatious. All of the Bills wanted to take her home.

She was having none of that, however. I could tell by the way she clung to my arm as we finally left the bar and entered the cool, damp night. More than once here in New York I’d seen her work the persiflage, smiling wide-eyed for the boys, and then use me as her foil. She was more talk than action, but I was neither.

We took a taxi back to my jeep, and I drove Shade to her apartment. Before climbing out, she leaned closer to me and smiled. “You’re a good kid, Sliver-Twit,” she said, spinning a dipsomaniacal derivation of the name that was no longer my own.

“Thanks,” I said. I didn’t know what else to say and the way she looked at me sometimes, the way she was looking at me now, made any words at all seem redundant. She leaned over and kissed me on the cheek. The next thing I knew the passenger door slammed shut. I watched her climb the steps of her brownstone and disappear behind two sets of glass doors.

ORIFICE POLITICS

I ended the first week of the strike at the dentist’s office. Camille the dental assistant propped open my mouth and slipped the slurpy, suckling tube beneath my tongue. Water laced with mouthwash showered into the plastic cup. The hairs on my arms stood in collective shiver as Camille hummed to “Top of the World” by the Carpenters.

“She’ll be in in a minute,” Camille said, trying her best at comfort before Dr. Janis started her drilling. I sat back and wondered why I’d kept this appointment, how my first trip outside since the strike began had me choking the metal beads of the spit-bib.

The last few days had been a fog of frozen pizza and six packs of diet root beer, monotonous words springing from my television set. Only when armed with the channel clicker was I safe from the mocking jeers of my laptop and microcassette, the ridicule of my barren reporter’s notebooks. The tools of my trade had given me structure, now all I had was television. And I gave over willingly, letting in the call-in shows and sci-fi sitcoms, the Spanish Harlem hit parade, microorganism hour,
Le Soufflé.
Shows blended into each other; like a pure-bred zombie, I formulated interactive character plots, tracked stray Cheerios from channel to channel. I forgot to feed Freddy until she dug her nails into my arm and drew blood. We started smelling like the litter box.

Then there was the onslaught of phone calls from Aunt Lorraine beginning on the morning after the double suicide, waking me at seven when I’d been out so late the night before. “So that’s your Doctor Kaminsky?” she asked. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

“He’s not my doctor,” I assured her. Though I was tired, the way she said
your
kept me alert. It was the tone she used when Mom was badgering her, and I would have to interfere, because like it or not, Mom was
mine.
Just as she was Aunt Lorraine’s sister-in-law. But I had no such claim on the suicide doctor. I couldn’t even speak of him and Aunt Lorraine in the same breath, let alone imagine bringing them together for a cup of coffee.

Besides, how bad could her cancer be if she was calling me a few times a day. There was such verve in her voice. “I just want to talk to him,” she said.

“You have plenty of people to talk to.”

“Who, your mother? Rowdy? You tell me, who? Everyone’s so tip-toe, hush-hush, and get out. Nobody says anything.”

“What do you want from them?”

“I don’t know, I just need to talk to somebody…somebody who understands. I’m dying, you know.”

“No you’re not.”

“Say it if it makes you feel better, but you have no idea.” I don’t know if saying it made me feel any better, but it did help to dull the impact of her words. At least until the next phone call. The problem was we had such easy access to the phone; each of us confined to bed with everything around us grinding to a halt. By the time Camille called reminding me of my appointment with warnings about not filling cavities at this stage—the adult mouth being a bottomless pit of foreign matter, its lacunae home to more toxic garbage than a Staten Island dump—I could hardly refuse an opportunity to shower, dress, and leave my apartment.

Camille, still singing to the Carpenters
(not a cloud in the sky, got the sun in my eye),
clicked her heels against the floor in time. I was so focused on her routine I didn’t notice Dr. Janis coming in until she was standing over me, rapacious blond mane swallowing the shoulders of her freshly pressed lab coat. She smelled like she’d just come in from the street. In her hand was the shiny, silver Novocain gun.

“You don’t really need it,” she said.

“Oh, yech, I do.”

The needle bit into my outer gum area no worse than Freddy would do. I cringed, turned my head slightly, and saw Dr. Janis’s shoes—cherry combat boots. I trusted her.

Within a few minutes my throat felt numb. Dr. Janis snapped a rubber glove over each of her hands, and I thought of this reporter I used to work with who mangled clichés. She once told me the problem with men—and this goes back to the mid-eighties—was they were becoming too sensitive. “It’s like you have to treat them with rubber gloves,” she said. At the time I found her stupidity hilarious, although now, I wondered whether she might have been on to something about handling life with latex.

Dr. Janis pulled down my lower lip with a rubber-coated pinkie. As she reached for the drill, I felt the muscles in my stomach contract.

“Relax,” she said. “It won’t be that bad.”

I raised my eyebrows.

“Remember your abscess?” Dr. Janis leaned forward. I could hear the piercing whir of the drill. “You thought you were going to die, remember?”

“Ich was…grosch.”

“But you lived to tell.”

I nodded affirmatively. I lived. Aunt Lorraine was dying. I imagined her sitting in a chair like this, only instead of Novocain the gun pumped liquefied Seconal, Nembutal, or whatever hemlock of the moment. Dying should not be like going to the dentist. It would have to be less stressful.

“You’re so jittery today,” Dr. Janis said. “It’s just a couple of cavities.”

“I told you, she’s on strike,” Camille interjected.

“Oh, right, right. So what do you do now?”

I shrugged.

“Hey, we have that guy, maybe she can write for him,” Camille said, her short, Betty Boop curls bouncing into my peripheral view. “You know, Phillip, the one who does those farm magazines.”

“The
Weekly Cow.
”

“No, it’s
Cow Week.
”

“And what’s the other one? My favorite.”

“He’s got like tons.”

“
Suburban Hog,
that’s the one I’m thinking of,” Dr. Janis said, nursing a subtle sparkle in her eyes. “They’re big in Texas.”

“Huge in Texas,” Camille said. She and Dr. Janis smiled at each other.

“I don’t think Rachel wants to write about farm animals,” Dr. Janis said. “You don’t, right?”

I gave as much of a grimace as I could manage given that my mouth was propped open by Dr. Janis’ hand. I could smell my saliva on her gloves and was feeling too much pressure from the drill against my jaw. Lest my tongue lunge to stop it, I pointed to my mouth and said what surfaced as: “
Uh-gunkkah.
”

“More Novocain?”

I nodded, and she slipped the metal gun between her thumb and forefinger. This time I couldn’t feel the needle.

Lying back supine, legs propped up in the rigor mortis of the moment with Dr. Janis drilling deep into the estuaries of my enamel, I couldn’t escape the carnality of modern dentistry. I wondered how Dr. Janis dealt with it. I once asked my ex-fiancé Sam, the gynecologist-in-training, how he could look inside vaginas every day and divorce himself from the notion of sex. “Oh grow up, Rachel,” he sneered. Some pussy doctor he turned out to be. But by then sex had become our Issue with a capital I, as Shade would say, and we’d made it into counseling, a dehumanizing experience if ever there was one. I hated the therapist, the way she prodded and probed, with Sam sitting there oafishly, convinced she could shed light on our “problem”: my inability to achieve orgasm with him. With anyone.

Because I could come alone, if I concentrated hard enough, masturbation had always seemed a miscarriage of the act itself. Like the now-taunting gaze of my impotent microcassette and laptop, my solitary orgasms reminded me of what I could not otherwise do. Echoed the psychological peanut gallery (in accents of dreary German no less):
But are you sexually frrrrus-tra-ted?
Of course I was sexually frustrated, but I didn’t normally have time to think about it, just as I didn’t normally have time to deal with cavities.

“You’re getting a little mushy above the bicuspid area,” Dr. Janis said after she’d finished drilling. She suggested I use a soft-bristle brush as we walked together to the front desk. “Take a couple of Advils if you feel any pounding,” she said.

I nodded, my jaw liquid as a Salvador Dali clock. Camille ran my American Express card through the computer.

“And call us if you want to talk to Phillip,” she said.

I looked up. “Phillip?”

“The cow guy.”

“Oh sure, thanks,” I nodded, thinking, over my unemployed body.
Cow Week?
I’d rather stay in bed all day eating frozen pizza straight from the box.

Camille handed me my credit card, and I was then let loose onto the crowded streets of midtown Manhattan on this too-sunny October day. Off to the picket line with the residue of Novocain palsying a side of my face.