Slaves of New York (34 page)

I wasn't sure if I necessarily believed all of this, but thinking about it did pass the time. After a while I started to feel angry at Wilfredo for not calling. I remembered making a vow to myself, years ago, that I would never sit around waiting for some man to call the way my girlfriends did; it was bad enough to be at the mercy of this person, but even worse to have broken a promise to myself.

It was almost like having a physical illness. I walked around my apartment as if I had been punched in the stomach, and three times I called the telephone company to see if my line was out of order. After a few more days I didn't feel any better, and I called my mother. She said I should call up her friend who lives in Oklahoma for advice. Her friend was an expert at

getting men to fall in love with her, and really understood them. I phoned her and told her the whole story. And my mother's friend said, "Well, it sounds like things speeded up too fast. You should never talk about your own needs—at least not in the short run. This may sound devious, but that's the way it is. You should be affectionate, but not intense. Now, here's my plan. If you haven't heard from him within three more days, you can try calling him again. Be light—say you're calling to say hello. But don't be too available. Seem aloof."

"It's hard for me to pretend to be aloof when he's not paying any attention in the first place," I said. The whole business was so painful. I had seen those
National Geographic
wildlife specials on TV, and it didn't seem right that animals met each other, performed some little courting dance, and mated for life. They knew exactly what to do; they relied on instinctive behavior that had not given their parents and grandparents any problems either. Maybe my mother had taken something during my prenatal months that interfered with my evolutionary, collective knowledge.

"Are you sure this guy isn't gay?" my mother's friend said.

"It's strange you mentioned that," I said. "What do I know?" Then I thanked her for her time, and said I had to go because it was long distance.

After I hung up I went to the closet and put on my studded leather wrist band and black leather motorcycle belt with the spikes protruding that Stash had given me for my birthday a couple of years back. Thus prepared, I sat down on the couch with my Tao Fire Healer. This was a piece of plastic I had received in the mail (my girlfriend had ordered it for me) which I had to hold twice a day for fifteen minutes—it was supposed to burn off my bad karma, leaving me with just the positive aspects of my psyche. The bad part, from what I could figure out, was my poor taste in men. I had to face it, this wasn't the first time I had fallen for a man who wasn't interested in me. But even people with ugly living room furniture could, through years of interior decoration therapy, learn to move up a notch

on the esthetic scale. I had always thought of myself as superior to such people. Now I knew I was—on some level—no different from them. I had all the regular human qualities—an unlimited capacity for suffering, and spending money.

The instructions that came with my Tao Fire Healer said my life would be straightened out in no time, as long as I used my device. The piece of plastic was green and pink, and there were small white dots attached to it. After I held it for fifteen minutes, the white dots got black—probably from absorbing my bad energy. I sneered at myself for being so vulnerable: I felt as if I had been conned, just like elderly women I had read about who fell for a con routine in front of their banks. Someone would approach them with an envelope of money, which they claimed to have found and wanted to share with the woman, provided that she put up her own money in trust, so to speak. The con artist would take her envelope of money and hand over the "found" money, which invariably would turn out to be a bunch of blank paper.

But in my case, I couldn't figure out what the con was; maybe I had really been conning myself. Why would someone bother to pretend to care for me? It was difficult to sit still for fifteen minutes when I kept thinking thoughts such as these, and all I really wanted was for the phone to ring and for it to be Wilfredo.

By Friday evening I was so nervous from sitting around waiting that I didn't know what to do with myself. I had no map, no guidelines, no role models for how I was supposed to behave in the modern world. I didn't know why I couldn't achieve some kind of peace just from being alone. Then I found the little card in my pocket that Agnes, the psychic up the block, had given me, and I decided to call her. I was sort of embarrassed to speak to her, but I wrote down a few questions that I had about Wilfredo, such as "Will he call me?" and "What did I do wrong?" and a few others I had about my career, and I dialed her number.

A tough-sounding woman answered and wanted to know who I was. When I explained, she put down the receiver and yelled, "Agnes!"

Then Agnes got on the phone. She didn't seem surprised to hear from me, but she said that she had a cold and that though she did give readings for some people over the phone she would probably have to keep interrupting the reading to blow her nose, and so it would be better if I came over in a day or so with $30. I told her okay, except that right now I was obsessed with whether or not this guy would call me, and that was what was making me nervous. I said, "Can't you tell me anything right off the bat?"

Agnes said that Wilfredo probably wasn't very important in my life, and that sometimes people—meaning me—went through a period where they just didn't want to be alone and wanted someone to care for. But that due to something that had happened to me in one of my past lives, I was bent on repeating the same pattern over and over; in other words, I was interested in a particular type of guy who made me feel rejected. In a little while, however, I would meet a man called Lenny, and he would be the right person for me.

I was reassured, except I would have liked to hear that Wilfredo was going to call me. I felt so adamant that Wilfredo and I were meant to be together. Agnes didn't seem to understand that what I was experiencing was like a metal hand squeezing my torso. It was like I was stuck on a soap opera inside a tiny TV, and the plot wasn't going the way I thought it should. "Would it matter if I tried calling him again?" I said.

"Just keep it light and merry if you do," she said, hanging up.

I decided to go uptown and skulk around near where Wilfredo worked and lived. There was always a chance I'd catch him leaving his apartment on his way to his studio: I knew he kept odd hours.

On the subway I read an article in the paper about a whale in San Francisco named Humphrey who kept trying to swim upstream away from his whale school and the ocean. Scientists

studying him believed there was a reason for his aberrant behavior. Maybe he was a pregnant female. In that ease he was acting in an understandable way—looking for a quiet place to have a baby. Obviously these scientists believed in an orderly universe, where there was an explanation for everything if they didn't know what it was.

Just at that minute a man got on the car and hit me in the legs with his briefcase. I didn't really pay him any mind. He was respectable looking, some sort of brown briefcase and a brown suit, quite innocuous. I went back to reading my article, but then a few stops later an altercation broke out, right in front of me. The man was getting off the train and smashed his briefcase into someone else who was getting on. I looked up just as a very tough-looking street girl—about fifteen, wearing sneakers with fancy laces and a leather jacket—was screaming at the man, "Don't you say 'Excuse me?' "

The man started to curse at the girl. "Get off the train and fight me," he said from the other side of the doors.

The girl shouted a few swear words back. She was standing with a couple of urchin girlfriends. "I'm going to get you!" she said.

The man managed to throw a side kick, karate style, at the girl. The girl backed into me just in time, as the doors were closing, and I saw the man's grinning face as the train pulled out. The girl was really upset, obviously she wasn't as tough as what she hoped she was projecting. I wanted to tell her the man had hit me, too, but she looked too angry.

The man must have been one of those pathological people I had previously only read about, like the man who enjoyed stomping on women's insteps. I pictured him trudging through a crowd at Grand Central Terminal, casually hitting one woman after the next with the pointy edge of his briefcase. Such random rage made no sense to me yet maybe this man was following some natural law. Who was I to have less faith than people who had studied such things for many years?

When I got to the stop where Wilfredo lived I hung out on the street for a while, standing in the slight drizzle and watch-

ing the faces as they came along, one after the next. Everyone had the same features—two eyes, a nose, and a mouth—yet every face was slightly different from the next. I didn't see any two alike, though each appeared to be set in recognizable expressions: despair, fatigue, joy, ennui. I think I could have stood for hours, watching the people go by. Some urgency was diminished. The faces seemed a partial answer to a question I couldn't even articulate. But after a while it started to rain harder, and I went into a bookstore. I bought four books: Dale Carnegie's
How to Stop Worrying and Start Living;
a book on transactional analysis to write your own life script;
How to Make a Man Marry You in Thirty Days;
and something on reincarnation. The four books cost me almost $30, and I was going to wait until I got home to take them out, but as soon as I hit the street I ripped open the bag and pulled one out, starting to read as I walked to the subway in the rain.

ode to heroine of the future

My sister in the end jumped naked from the window of the top floor of a seven-story building. This was after a long string of events. She couldn't get her license back. The state had made her take a drunken-driving evaluatory test and, because of this, she fell in with some dangerous characters—a kind of guru who made her think that what she did made no difference at all. Such were the fates of the heroes in ancient Greece: some perished under seven-gated Thebes, which was one battle; others died in Troy, fighting for Helen. These were the sons of gods and mortal women.

But it is not written how the others died: some by being constantly harassed, some by being picked at, some because the world around them was too great a place and they were not meant for it. Anyway, the sons and daughters of gods and humans were never destined to be around for very long; my sister was a throwback to these earlier times. In ancient Greece the first race of man was made of gold, and they lived like gods without labor or pain, and did not suffer from old age, but they fell asleep in death. But I'm referring now to my sister. The race of the men of gold were hollow inside and easily bent and melted. I only saw her once more before she died: I had arranged to meet her in one of the bars she spent all her time in—all she did besides take drugs and drink and pick up men. I met her one evening in the Gulag Archipelago

with her current amigo. He played in a rock-and-roll group— an ex-junkie in his thirties. He had made it big in the early seventies in a rock group that wore women's clothing and makeup: a heavy drag quartet. But the band was good; I remember at the time I had listened to their music quite frequently. Now for years he had been out on his own, and he had finally managed to put out a solo LP, and made decent bucks in the clubs in Europe and New York, though the life was grueling.

Or so he said. I met them on an evening when he was playing at a nearby club later that night. I didn't trust him—he had the face of a con man, sly and foreign. Besides, he was a Frenchman, and my preference has always been for the Northern Italian type. I didn't like the way he flicked ashes from his cigarette in my sister's direction, nor the way he shook her off when she tried to put her arm around his shoulders—there was a puppyish quality of despair to my sister I hadn't remembered seeing before. I got a kind of nasty feeling about him, as if whatever it was he did with her in bed gave Sis a gratification that was primarily secondary, if you undertake my meaning. He had long curly black hair and high cheekbones; he was dressed in an old sweater with little puffed shoulders. I guess it had once been a girl's sweater, it appeared too small for him. Though in it he looked awfully cute, a cunning little queen. When I looked down at the floor to pick up a dollar I had dropped, I saw he was wearing long winter underwear, flannel, with four or five pairs of socks on over it; each sock with holes in various places, exposing the pair beneath, and a pair of tattered cowboy boots. When he rose to shake my hand I couldn't help but be amused at how the flannel underwear, with nothing on over it except the girl's sweater, gave him a kind of Robin Hood appearance; he should have been wearing a codpiece, egads.

He didn't appear to have evolved much from the sixties. Which was all right with me: I had just gone back to wearing a ponytail myself. "You do look like John Paul Jones with your ponytail," my sister said, rising to kiss me.

"Yes," said Jonny Jalouse, "or like—what was his name? Paul Revere and the Raiders." He spoke with a little lisp, and a lilting French accent. There were many of these lizardy guys crawling around all the time at the Gulag—this one was prettier than most, and if my sister had picked him up he must have had something going for him. He wasn't a bad musician. It was his mouth that interested me: as if a kiss had been planted on his face in the womb, and this later grew into a mouth.

He chain-smoked Gauloises; really, I shouldn't have been disturbed by him. In a different place I might have been reminded of my pal Sherman, a gentle soul. But my sister did have a black eye, and I didn't want to ask about it. When this character smiled he revealed two black stubs of teeth.