Nothing Is Terrible (11 page)

Wearing my new short haircut and a large square Mickey Mouse Band-Aid below my right eye, I went downtown one fine winter Monday to the place called Studio Joe. As I entered the low concrete building along the Hudson River, I could feel myself floating further adrift from the prescripted school-day life of a twelve-year-old.

Inside the building, thin, delicate people in extravagant outfits rushed about in thick heels on the gray cement floor looking desperately glamorous. They were exerting themselves toward some objective. They dressed in a certain way so as not to be nothing. You have to do everything you can to make yourself distinct from these white walls, their body shapes
and outfits and manners seemed to be saying; you have to be ready at all times for that moment when you meet the person who’ll carry you out of your life that is impoverished by the lack of that one intangible thing; ready to be carried into the other life that someone would carry you into if only you could meet him or her and be assured of saying or doing what you’re supposed to say or do and looking how you’re supposed to look, as you’ve always known you could, because secretly you’re sure it has been willed where that can be done which has been willed, maybe.

“Yes, young man?” someone behind a tall marble embankment said to me.

“I’m here to see Joe Samuels and Ruella Forecourt.”

“Of course you are.”

I looked up, and saw the black boy whose pot I had stolen in the park, and felt sick.

“I’m really sorry,” I said. “It was a dumb mistake.”

“I have no doubt that it was,” he said.

“Can you forgive me?”

“I cannot.”

“I’ll pay you the twenty dollars.”

“You could pay me the million dollars, boy, and that would not change a thing.”

I was now standing more or less directly below this person sitting behind the high marble embankment. I looked up into his face. He seemed to be trying to outwit his bulbous nose and pitted skin with lotions and overscrubbing, not yet having settled into the comfort of his ugliness. His hair was long and nappy like a partially unraveled sweater. I recognized the overall frame of the body and the effeminate gestures of the hands,
but the face seemed different. What had the face of the boy in the park looked like?

“I did meet you before in the park, right?” I asked.

“No doubt that is true, but right now let me put it to you this way: if you want to see Joe and Ruella, who is the person who needs to have been met, you or me, chicky?”

“Do you think I’m a boy or a girl?”

“Oh, I can’t say that I honestly care, but I might get somebody to throw your butt out of here if you don’t stop staring at me with those creepy little eyes.”

“I’m just trying to figure out if you’re the guy I sort of—you know, the guy who was going to sell me some pot in the park a few months ago.”

“Oh, I’m the guy.”

“Like I said, I’m sorry, and I’ll give you the money.”

“Like I said, up your butt with a broom handle.”

“Listen, jerk, who the hell are you anyway? Joe and Ruella told me to come here and say hi to them; so I want to see them now.”

“Yes, well, that’s refreshingly spirited and insouciant and naïve to be sure. Have a seat right over there, child.”

“Over where?”

“There.”

“There’s no place to sit down anywhere around here.”

“How observant. If you walk back through the front door and sit on the curb, someone will fetch you when the special moment arrives for you to say ‘Hi’ to Joe and Ruella.”

“Really?”

“Yes.”

I sat on the curb in the long, shabby black business coat
which the boy behind the counter had looked askance at, and which I had insisted on buying in a thrift shop despite Skip’s urgings. The sun was bright and the air was frosty. I looked at the seagulls hovering above the river and uttering their cold-weather survivalist cry on this Monday morning. I wondered if many children my age spent as much time as I did trying to imagine what they were supposed to be doing, how they were supposed to behave from one moment to the next in order to make themselves feel real.

A taxicab pulled up and several tall blond women got out and went into the building. Another cab pulled up and several short, dark, voluptuous Mediterranean women got out and went into the building. Another cab pulled up and two ugly Eastern European men in messy clothes who looked as if they had just crawled out of a Dumpster got out and went into the building with camera equipment. I stood up and vomited and went into the building.

The boy who may have been the boy in the park with the pot reclined at his station reading
The Village Voice
. This time he looked to me like Joseph Samuels, so basically I had no idea what the hell was going on.

“I’m back,” I said.

“Yes.”

“No one came to get me.”

“Yes.”

“You told me to wait outside and someone would come get me. That was forty minutes ago.”

“I’m having a vague recollection that leaves me indifferent.”

“I’m here to see—”

“I know.”

“Are you related to Joe Samuels?”

“What can I do to persuade you to go away?”

“I’m related to Skip Hartman. Do you know who she is? Joe and Ruella came to our house for dinner.”

“Oh, so you are September Hartman’s little—yes, well, that’s a whore of a different color. Oh, did I say
whore
? I meant horse.”

“You’re as funny as breast cancer.”

Something like glee entered the rough field of the face of this boy or man who resembled Joe Samuels, except inasmuch as he was black where Joe was white, and who resembled the boy in the park, except inasmuch as he had a rough, wide face where the boy in the park had had just a face, as far as I could remember.

He put on an ear-and-mouthpiece headset and appeared to be pressing numbers on a console. “Joey,” he said into the mouthpiece, “that little, ah”—he looked down at me questioningly, I made a certain unequivocal gesture, and he said—“girl is here to see you. The one—uh, residing at September Hartman’s pied-à-terre.”

Moments later, fat Joe Samuels burst through a pair of swinging high-chrome doors to our right. “This is fantastic,” he said to me. “You’re here just in time to see what’s going on inside now. Your timing is fantastic.”

The thinner, darker, younger, supercilious version of Joe looked at me now with something that was neither quite arrogance nor jealousy.

I said, “Joe Junior here made me sit out on the sidewalk for an hour.”

“Oh, Joe Junior, as you call him, likes to play. Let him have his fun. He’s a sweet kid,” Joe Senior said.

“My name is not by any means Joe Junior. My name is Stephen Samuels,” Joe Junior said haughtily.

Joe said, “Great things are afoot. Come right this way, sugar.”

“My name is not by any means sugar. My name is Mary White,” sugar said haughtily, and was taken by the wrist and swept further into her own life.

I remember kind of falling down a hallway and entering a white room that was filled with commotion and bright lights and silken limbs and large personalities and sophisticated camera equipment. The effect was dizzying—more than a small, traumatized, and nauseated child should be expected to understand or retain. People were taking pictures of other people against white walls and under bright lights shaded by gray umbrellas facing the wrong way. In fact, on the whole, plain people were taking pictures of pretty people, and I believe I’ll stop just short of developing a theory about what sort of person stands on which side of a fashion camera, for theories are a boy’s pastime. No theories here, Jim. Just plain old observation, and pretty goddamn sloppy observation at that. You know what I’m saying?

Joe let go of my wrist and one of the blond women from the taxicab approached me, yelling, “Ruella thinks you’re very special!” She was standing practically on top of me and had linked her arm in mine but had to yell to be heard over the terrifyingly impersonal dance music. “Have you read
Beyond Good and Evil
yet?” the woman, an American, yelled.

“No, but I’ve lived it!” I yelled.

“Ruella turned me on to Nietzsche! It’s like I read Nietzsche and I go, ‘This is what I’ve always thought about everything? But he’s actually saying it?’ I read it and it’s like, ‘Oh my
God
I
know
what you
mean
!’ You
have
to read it, it’s
so
amazing and
Ruella
totally
loves you. Listen I’ll buy you a copy of
Beyond Good and Evil
and have it messengered, what’s your address?” I told her my address, which she must have memorized because I didn’t especially see her writing it down.

Joe entered my field of vision and yelled, “Mary White, this is Cindy Chenille! Ruella’s training Cindy to be a model as well as an
Übermensch
!”

“Is Ruella a model or a photographer?” I asked.

“Oh, no, no, no, no, no!” Cindy Chenille said. “Ruella is very spiritual and also very sensual! It’s like this: it’s like she is beautiful and she is sitting in that chair in this room and the photographers take our picture in the room and the picture comes out beautiful! Do you understand?”

“No!”

Cindy Chenille strode off into a crowd of those glamorous people who were either having their pictures taken or dancing or both.

Joe led me to the director’s chair in which Ruella was seated monumentally He pressed a button on a small neat pile of black metal boxes and the music abruptly stopped. All conversation in the room stopped a moment later, as if conversation were not worthwhile without the struggle to be heard over the music. Joe pressed a skimpy black headset to the side of his large multitextured face and said, “Okay, people.” His voice sounded over the speakers that had been amplifying the music. “Take a lunch break.” All who had been dancing or shooting photos or meditating or carrying a bracelet left the room. Ruella and Joe and I remained alone in the enormous white room.

Joe picked up a thermos off the floor, removed the cap,
poured a pale brown liquid into a red plastic cup, and handed the cup to Ruella. “I prefer Gatorade but she likes this herbal stuff,” he said.

“Several years ago I went on a spirit journey and spoke with some of the local plant life of southern New York State,” Ruella said.

“The plant life’ll talk to Ruella,” Joe said. “Plant life clams up around me.”

“You don’t let the plant life get a word in edgewise, darling,” Ruella said. “I asked the plants permission to harvest them for the good of myself and the people I love.”

“She asked them what would be a nice drink for her to reenergize during her work, which is strenuous.”

“What’s your work, exactly?” I said.

“Darling, you are an intrusive little munchkin and I like you.”

“Is that guy related to you?” I asked Joe.

“What guy?”

“The one who made me sit on the sidewalk.”

“Oh, Stevie? He’s my bastard son. He’s filling in for the real receptionist, who got in a motorcycle accident, who I hope he gets back here soon skull fracture or no, because Stevie’s a riot and a brilliant kid and everything, but he sort of sits out there in reception and offends the wrong people every second of every day. Kid’s a bright ne’er-do-well and I blame myself.”

“Who’s his mother?”

“I’m not involved with the mother at this time, is the nature of these things. She’s on the Coast with an upstart fragrance company. I somewhat left the two of them eighteen years ago, and six years ago the kid shows up in my living room with his whole patrimony concept that he was very convincing about, a
real bright kid. I like having him around but I just don’t know what to do with him, but I have a few ideas.”

Skip Hartman entered the room, in brown leather. Cindy Chenille was pretty and Ruella Forecourt was magnificent, but Skip Hartman approaching with her long bare arms and leather vest and her level stride and a straw picnic basket with silver hasps overwhelmed me with scary delight. Ruella jumped up out of her chair to her full height and Joe bobbed his head vigorously. We were all happy to see Skip Hartman!

“There’s no getting around the fantastic spinal carriage on you, Hartman,” Joe said.

“In Skip Hartman I sense a quietude animated by a powerful life force,” Ruella said.

“Skippy!” I said.

“Wary Mary!” Skip said, and bent at the waist and offered me her hair to mess up.

“She was once a model herself, you know,” Joe said to me.

“Is that where all your money comes from?” I asked.

“No,” she said. “All my money comes from my father, a physician who struck it rich with a medical invention.”

“What did he invent?”

“A sort of crude proto-IUD. I have since aggrandized his holdings through prudent investment.”

“And teaching,” I said.

“No one aggrandizes through teaching,” she said.

“She is so forthright,” Ruella said.

“She ain’t
that
forthright,” I said, and while there may have been some truth to my remark, it sprang from a deep irrational mistrust of all who came close to me. What I would say now is that it’s better to trust someone who is untrustworthy than not to trust anyone at all.

“Did you see my fine young man Stevie out there?” Joe asked Skip.

“I did not.”

“He wasn’t at the desk?”

“I saw a great many youths frolicking in the style of the age,” she said, “but I did not see Stephen, and I quite think I would know him if I saw him.”

Joe said, “So in essence any lunatic—I’m not impugning you here, Hartman—could walk in off the street with no one to stop him and stab Ruella in the heart.”

“Joseph, you are so violent,” Ruella said.

Skip put her basket down and retrieved a folding table from across the room. She put her basket on the table and removed the baguette sandwiches and the modular plastic champagne glasses and the cold bottle of champagne with the fancy orange label.

“What am I gonna do with that kid?” Joe said.

“I believe it is up to him to do something with himself,” Skip said, joining the stem of a champagne glass to its vessel.

“Which brings up an interesting point,” Joe said. “Namely, my Stevie’s gifted at math and science, and since you’re having trouble teaching the gamine here you should have my kid over every day to tutor her.”