Lust & Wonder (7 page)

Which was when I realized I hadn't seen him for a year. We'd called each other regularly, but I never imagined he could change physically.

I said, “Wow. Your hair. It looks great.”

He turned his head to the side so the wind would blow his hair smooth against the side of his face. “I don't know,” he said uncomfortably.

“No, it's good,” I lied, because it looked absolutely horrible.

He wasn't sure. “I either want to grow it longer or cut it short again. You really like it?”

“Not really,” I said.

“I'm gonna chop it all off as soon as I get home,” he said.

I knew he meant this literally. I was used to seeing him standing in front of the mirror and hacking away at his hair with a pair of kitchen scissors. When he was done, he'd grin goofily and say, “See, looks like I paid three hundred bucks for it.”

We walked east along Fourteenth Street so we could cut south on University.

He said, “What's bad about my hair? It's not girly, is it?”

Mitch was very circular in his thinking and once on a subject would not let go of it unless you could manage to throw a bone in the other direction.

I asked, “So, have you been working on your book?”

“Well, um. Ah. Sort of,” he said.

Mitch had a new science fiction novel coming out the following year, but he was certain it would be a failure.

At least once a week, he talked dramatically about killing himself. He'd say, “I'm really gonna do it.” He had said the exact same thing to me when we were boyfriends. He might detail a new method he'd discovered or invented. His latest was to wait for winter, take sleeping pills, and then go to the roof of his apartment building and lie down naked next to the boxwood planters and freeze to death. He said it would be painless.

“Yeah,” I said, “and your dick will shrink up, and everybody will assume it was always small.” That actually gave him pause.

Over the past year that we'd become e-mail pen pals if not exactly friends, I was mystified that I ever dated him in the first place. I liked him much more than I did when I was in love with him. But it was also obvious that the lack of sexual chemistry on my part was my sanity desperately trying to reach me.

“So, working on a new book?” I asked.

We walked past Newsbar.

Mitch said, “I'm not going to fall for one of your tricks. I know you. You're just trying to make me stop talking about the hair thing. But I'm not going to until you tell me why it's bad.”

“It's just, you know. It makes you look a little like a strung-out lesbian park ranger who drinks too much in her trailer.”

He stopped. “That is a much more horrible thing for you to say than all your affairs and
Fatal Attraction
stalking ever was.” But he peered at his reflection in the window of the liquor store where he stood. “Maybe,” he said, “you're a little bit right.”

I walked him back to his place, and along the way, he told me that Famous Author Friend was dating a Prada model whose parents called him and told him to stay away from their son.

“You guys hanging out tonight?” I asked.

He said no. Prada Model was in town doing a shoot for a billboard on Times Square. Then he said, “I have no life. I don't even know why I bother with anything.”

“So, what about tonight? Are you going out trolling?”

“I don't go out trolling,” he said, running his fingers back through his lesbian park ranger hair.

Except he did go out trolling, because he called me from the bars all the time. “Stop lying. You go to all those seedy places—Dick's, Dicks and Ass, Dick and Ass and Pecs. You make out with your drug dealer in the bathroom at Boiler Room. You called me from a stall,” I reminded him.

“I did that once!” he cried, genuinely annoyed and defensive.

I rolled my eyes. “Once that you've admitted. Last week, you let some redheaded stand-up comic rub your crotch at Dick's. You sent me a picture of him, remember?”

“It wasn't Dick's, it was Splash, and that was three weeks ago, and it was just about sex. And he didn't rub my crotch. We just fooled around a little. Kissed is all.”

“Yeah, right,” I said.

“I don't want to talk to you anymore.”

We arrived at his front door.

“Fine,” I said. “Go eat your Chickenator.”

Mitch was very finicky with his dinner if he was ordering in. He only ordered the Chickenator sandwich from Boots and Saddle, the parmesan hero from the pizza place around the corner, chicken burrito from the filthy Mexican dive, or a cheeseburger with fries, of which he would only eat three.

I am exactly as limited in the foods I eat, except I eat all the fries.

He hugged me good-bye, and it was a surprisingly deep, fast hug.

I headed home but then decided that I wanted to walk. So I passed my building and went farther south, beyond Astor Place and into the Bowery. Here, I landed on the most curious crescent of a street that hugged a park where there was a columned space set with benches. Old Chinese men were playing cards and smoking, and there were several dogs, all with fur that had been petted smooth over many years. I had arrived at a place I'd never seen before, where every detail was entirely unfamiliar.

I stopped walking and watched the old men play cards. I had the feeling I would never be able to find this spot again no matter how tirelessly I tried.

At home, I received the call I had known would arrive. George had died. I had expected to feel relief, but instead I felt,
That's impossible. I require him.

 

II

 

When George died, I could not conjure an image of my life, next week, without him. So I lay on my bed, and I stayed there, waiting to die. I only got up to buy scotch, two bottles at a time.

I can say this with authority: a queen-sized mattress can hold a year's worth of urine and still be perfectly serviceable.

When I drunkenly opened my eyes at half past four in the afternoon one day, I realized I had entered the week following his death. That life I could not imagine was here, and I was in it, alive. What had been an impossible future was me, now, sluggishly, heavily awakening and squinting without my glasses to see if I could gauge how much scotch remained in my second bottle on the counter next to the stove.

It was an act of willpower to swing my legs over and stand. In six clumsy steps, I was across the room and beside the stove; such was the beauty of a minuscule Manhattan studio apartment. The bottle of scotch had less than two inches at the bottom. And I hated myself for not being a better planner and buying them four at a time or even six.

I was always so fucking obsessed with what other people thought. Carrying two bottles up to the cashier said, “I'm on my way to a party.” Carrying four said, “I'm on my way down.”

I would have to brush my teeth and put on clothes and leave my fetid, debris-engorged apartment and then walk across Ninth Street to the liquor store on University Place. (The one near Astor Place was closer, but I'd gone there last night.) Once I accomplished this, I would be able to return to my stomach-contents of a home and be alone again with whatever vapors remained of George. Maybe drunk, I could find a way to be with him again, even if only through the rereading of his e-mails.

It was like being famished and knowing that only the box from the frozen dinner remained, the picture of the meal and not the meal itself. I could lick the glossy cardboard.

So I dressed myself in never-washed jeans and a T-shirt, and on the way to the liquor store, I recognized somebody on the sidewalk that I knew from the Perry Street AA meetings.

I turned away from her because this made me invisible.

I got my two bottles of scotch and returned home.

Nothing happened except I drank the liquor and pissed in the bed, and then I did this 547 more times.

*   *   *

Downing bottle after bottle of scotch was not my only addict behavior during that time. I also consumed enormous quantities of QVC, television's number-one home shopping network. I had witnessed home shopping before. Late at night in that last, desperate attempt to find something watchable among the two hundred channels before going to sleep, I'd paused and gawked in bemused disbelief as an electric egg scrambler was offered forth like a holy grail. But one night, I was just about to scroll past it during prime time when I was stopped by a close-up of a sparkly ring on a small turntable, throwing off color and dazzling brightness as the studio lights hit the facets. I've loved shiny things since childhood, so I watched hungrily as a blond hostess displayed a ruler for the camera and measured the diameter of a ring. Then she measured the profile. I unmuted the sound. “We're talking nearly three carats of Diamonique. And that's a lot of stone presence.”

Hours passed, and new hosts appeared looking fresh and knowledgeable. Days passed, and still they offered bangle bracelets and Crock-Pots, plug-in rodent repellents, and cotton wick-crotch panties. Once, I watched for two days straight during a Joan Rivers Classic Collection marathon. But ultimately, the products—even the jewels—were not why I continued to watch it obsessively. I was hooked because it was live television. And they took calls.

People phoned in and spoke to the hosts on air. They talked about how long they had been looking for a green plastic revolving earring tree
just like that one
. And how much weight they had lost using the George Foreman Lean Mean Grilling Machine. Sometimes they called instead of cutting their wrists. Once while I was watching, the cheerful host told a despondent caller, “Please stay on the line. Our producer will give you the name of an outreach program in your area.”

I got goose bumps.

Another time, I was watching while they were presenting a fountain pen. An attractive model was wearing a nightgown and sitting at a desk. She wore a pleasant expression, as if writing the words “forever … dreamily … longingly…” to a distant lover. But when they cut to a shot looking over the model's shoulder, I saw that she had actually written, “By the time you read this note, I'll be gone. Don't come searching for me…”

When they cut back to the host, he was repressing a smile. He'd seen the studio monitor.
Those models
, he might have thought.
Always up to some hijinks.

That's what was so fascinating about home shopping channels. When a sitcom actress slipped and fell on her bony ass, she was landing on an
X
of masking tape that a gaffer placed on the floor of the set. But when one of the hosts dropped her newborn and the baby started to howl, I knew
it was really happening
.

I got a certain rush from QVC. At that pre-Twitter moment in time, it was the purest form of distilled American culture available. It was intravenous marketing. No memorable jingles, no catchy slogans, no playful typography on the screen. Just the pharmaceutical-grade cocaine equivalent of sales, and I was stunned by its purity. Of course, like any drug, it made me do things I would not normally do.

The night before, I hazily recalled, I had purchased $300 worth of gigantic nonskid rug pads … despite the fact that my studio apartment was minuscule and already had its own rug of filth. I had been so swept up in the drama of the presentation that I was unable to contain myself, like someone who is admiring the pretty fish swimming near the coral reef and then gets swept away in an undertow. I called the number on the screen and ordered.

“What size?” the operator asked.

“What size do you have?” I was almost shaking with anticipation.

“We have three sizes, sir. Five by seven, six by—”

“Send me all three,” I slurred.

*   *   *

The next morning, I woke up and padded across the mashed-flat food container–carpeted floor to sit at my computer, where, without planning to, I opened a blank document and wrote, “You exposed your penis on national television, Max. What am I supposed to do?”

As I wrote these words, I could see in my mind a blond shopping channel host sitting uncomfortably across from his executive producer. There was one of those golf-putting gizmos on the floor, the kind from the in-flight magazine ads. I knew the show host had been wearing a bathrobe on the air, because it was a Slumber Sunday segment. I also knew he was not wearing any underwear, because somebody had spilled coffee on his lap in the makeup room.

All of this knowledge was instantly contained within that single line, and it was just too much for fourteen words to hold, so I had to keep typing, or my mind would explode.

In my life, I had swallowed countless drinks and lit enough cigarettes to burn down the world; I had fallen in love and, once inside of it, spun around with my arms outstretched and shattered everything; I had lost many things; I made mistakes; I made a single pot roast, and still my wrist held on to the scar. But one thing I had not done was this, whatever this was.

I was an advertising copywriter, though advertising wasn't writing so much as puzzle solving. I wrote in a diary as a kid, but my childhood felt impossibly distant. When I came home from rehab, I wrote, but that felt as messy as life. I had never seen a true and breathing world blocking my view of the computer screen. I had never experienced the draining of all I saw through my hands as I smashed down on the keys.

I did not stop writing until I could not operate my fingers any longer. Then I drank.

But I didn't reach the room, the place, the mind-set, the zone. Drinking failed me.

The next morning, which arrived much sooner than other mornings had, I sat back down at my computer in an uncomfortable chair, and I wrote again for as long as I could.

I drank that evening, but less.

The day after that, I wrote much later into the night and drank only what was in the neck of a fresh bottle of scotch.