Any Resemblance to Actual Persons (10 page)

Oliver placed his hand in his hip pocket where I knew he had the money. It looked like he was preparing to draw a weapon, which was probably not the smartest pose to strike, but I didn't say anything.

The guy came back into the room with a desk drawer in his hands. He set the drawer on the coffee table and then sat down between us. “Five dollars a line,” he said. “I chop.”

From the drawer he removed a mirror, a gold straw, and a very full plastic bag.

Oliver—I could only hear his voice on the far side of this guy—said, “We were thinking of getting a gram. Like, to go.”

“No to-go orders,” the guy said. “It's by the line. Dine-in only.
New policy. I chop. You put down the five spot, do what you do. It only leaves this apartment in your brain, not in your pocket. Po-po crackdowns. New policy. I chop.”

I could see only Oliver's knees and his thin fingers shuffling over his knees. I could hear the guy's deviated septum as he breathed. Oliver's hand emerged from the other side of the guy and dropped a ten on the coffee table.

“All right, then,” the guy said, then leaned down and started chopping. As he did, Oliver and I looked at each other over his back. Oliver shrugged, mouthed the word
Stay?

We did. Oliver and I were usually pretty chatty on blow—logorrhea and compulsive oversharing being one of the drug's oddly pleasurable, though occasionally problematic, effects, just like the always-frustrating tumescence it gives me—but even after a few lines we were still too intimidated by this guy to say much of anything. Perhaps it was the aura of sweaty awkwardness—the three of us just sitting side by side on the couch, Oliver periodically laying down another ten—or maybe this was the plan all along, but the guy eventually said, “Got just the thing for you two,” then stood up, walked behind the couch—my heart flapping wildly against my ribcage—and started tinkering with something metallic. Too scared and high to look behind me, I just stared straight ahead and imagined the various medieval torture devices the guy was piecing together. Then I heard that familiar baseball-card-in-the-spokes sound that reminded me of old home movies, and suddenly the screen in front of us was alive with action. It took a moment in my brain for the shapes to go from abstract to familiar and then congeal into coherent action. With today's proliferation of pornography, via cable, VCRs, and the
Internet, it's easy to forget what life was like when those images weren't so ubiquitous, and how surprising it could be in 1976 to see two adults in the midst of sexual congress. I probably hadn't really observed two people fucking since that screening of
I Am Curious (Yellow)
I'd gone to in Santa Monica two years earlier. Suffice it to say, my experience with smut had been severely limited to the subtitled variety shot in blurry chiaroscuro. By the time the guy sat back down between Oliver and me, the shocking focus and overlit Kodachrome palate of this feature alerted me to the fact that this was not the work of a French auteur; this was genuine filth. And it wasn't until I got over this excitement that I realized there was no lady in this mix. Though nearly hairless, the smaller of the two on-screen principals was, in fact, male.

Oliver laid down another ten.

My mind focused by the alarming amount of cocaine we were doing (I was beginning to realize that Oliver was intent on spending all the money we'd brought when we thought take-out was an option), I studied the movie, fascinated by the strange geometry of the action. I was ready to burst inside. I needed to talk. The blow was grinding my molars down to nubs, my palate and nose were numb, and I had all sorts of ideas and questions about the semiotics of gay porn, but I was following Oliver's lead and Oliver wasn't saying anything, so I did my best to remain silent; you would have needed pliers to unclench my teeth. Ron laid down another ten. I heard the barking again. It seemed closer. I desperately wanted to ask the guy if homosexual couplings always consist of a typically masculine male—hairy, brutish—with a more feminine partner—thin, smoother skin, finer features—as we saw in this particular film, or was this simply a conceit of the genre that
suggested a heterosexual standard was being projected onto homosexual relations? I'd write a paper about this! Ron started hiccupping, something he often did on blow. The guy crossed his arms and I caught a wicked whiff of what I figured to be Cool Water. I gave a sympathy hiccup. I noticed that I'd been picking at a loose thread in my sleeve, which was now about an inch shorter. A third gentleman now joined the two on screen. Ron laid another ten on the table, and the guy kept scratching his crotch.

(I must stop here. I see that I've made a rather embarrassing blunder. All those Rons in the above paragraph should really be
Oliver
s. In the space between that paragraph and this paragraph was about five minutes of anxious fretting, seeing if I could simply use some liquid paper to cover up the
Ron
s and replace them with
Oliver
s, but of course that wouldn't work.
Ron
is only three letters.
Oliver
is six. If I were to Wite-Out every
Ron
and try to type it over with
Oliver
, the
er
of
Oliver
would inevitably overlap with each successive word. And that whole paragraph would then just be a jumble of nonsense. Once I realized this, I was moments away from tearing that whole sheet of paper from my IBM Wheelwriter 1000, crumpling it up, tossing it into the waste-basket, and starting with a clean,
Ron
-less leaf of white, 20 lb, 92 bright paper. But then I realized this was a perfect opportunity to come clean, to admit that I've been transcribing much of the above scene from a short story I wrote in 1979 called, simply, “Chicago.” I have it here next to me on my desk. I brought it out because it is a largely autobiographical tale, and so I figured if I were to recount the real incident here, twenty years later, I should have some assistance from the me who was, in 1979, at a better proximity to remember it with more precision.
Of course the short story version has a few fictionalized details. The narrator's brother died in Vietnam. The narrator has a girlfriend back in Iowa who is really beautiful. The narrator is six foot two. And the character based on Oliver is named Ron. But the rest is pretty spot-on. After writing the story, I mailed it to Oliver, who was at the time an intern at Doubleday and reading submissions for
The Paris Review
. I then waited eagerly for his phone call, the one in which he'd pass the phone off to George Plimpton, who would congratulate me on “such a fine piece of literary craft”—he'd communicate only in blurb-speak, of course, in his New England drawl—but after calling Oliver a couple times, he finally read it and simply mailed the manuscript back to me, its margins flourished with his Arabic-like scrawl.)

The following morning, when Oliver shouted, apropos of nothing, “We have to go! We have to go now!” (Oliver's 1979 marginalia:
“Apropos of nothing”? Is the reader supposed to take that seriously, or is it an indication of this narrator's
[the note bending up the page]
myopia, and if so, how does that inform the rest of the story?
), the profusely sweating guy just looked at us, his eyes almost albino-pink, and said, “Ya'll don't have to go. You should stay.” (Oliver:
It's probably more realistic that he did not, in fact, say this, probably more likely that the narrator was, in fact, the one who wanted to stay
.) The guy just sat there, however, as Oliver and I headed for the door without turning our backs on him. “Thanks,” I said. Then Oliver tried to open the door, realized we were locked in. I panicked, tried to help him manage the absurd number of bolts on the metal door. There was even one of those steel rods, one end of which sits in a metal-sheathed divot in the floor, the other end against the door. I removed the rod, and since it took some muscle
and maneuvering on my part, when it finally came unwedged it swung backward in my hands and clanked cacophonously (Oliver:
“clanked cacophonously”–seriously?
) against what appeared to be a moped engine—or perhaps a motorcycle engine with pedals glued to it—sitting on the countertop behind us. “Sorry,” I said, realizing that I was shouting, then began whispering, “Sorry, sorry,” like an incantation as we continued to try to unlock the door, which was beginning to feel like some biblical test, the final crucible in the escape from the lion's den, the unlocking of the three dozen deadbolts of Judea. Just when I thought an aneurism was inevitable, the guy, suddenly behind us, reached over our heads, undid the small trinket of a lock at the very top of the door, opened it for us, and said, “Drive safe now.”

I certainly tried to drive safe, but with my heart trying to crawl up my sinuses it wasn't easy. Oliver—both the 1976 passenger in my car and the 1979 editor in the margins of the story—remained entirely silent for the five-hour drive back home. Here follows two pages of florid descriptions of the flora-less landscape between Chicago and Iowa City, which I employed to convey the long stretched-out silence and coke-induced awareness of everything. But I'll skip all that and get to final line of the story: “That was the last time Ron and I did drugs together. I miss our conversations.”

Oliver did offer one small note, after two pages of silence, tucked away at the bottom of the last page:
A bit sentimental, don't you think?

Oliver was always excoriating me to be subtler, which at the time I took to mean he didn't want to hear what I had to say, preferred it hidden beneath artifice. But I must have feared that he was right, which was why, a year later, when I finally did get that story published,
I neglected to tell him about it. Of course, at the time I told myself that I was embarrassed not by the story but by the venue (it appeared in
COLAtitude Review
, a two-staple lit rag run by the COLA poetry club and distributed for free in the commons on a rack next to the vending machines). But I suspect now that there was something in that story that I didn't want to show Oliver again, like something I'd blurted out in a drunken moment and wished I could take back. Maybe he was right. Maybe I was sentimental. But so what? Isn't that the point? Boats against the current and all that? Not for the ever-cool Oliver, who seemed to have nothing pulling him back, had no affinity for a shared past, was wired to look only forward. Even as he stood there in the La Quinta Inn parking lot, leaning his head down to the open window of my car, he told me, “You're not very subtle, are you?”

“I wasn't trying to hide.”

“What were you trying to do?”

“I just wanted to talk to you.”

“There are less psychotic ways, you know.”

Oliver's features looked a little more finely etched now than they had that afternoon, the seams in his face a little deeper, the lines more spidery. Perhaps it was the strange light or the contrast of my nostalgia, but I could see the gray at his temples, a single hair wiring out of his nostril. I got out of the car. He backed away a little. “Oliver,” I said, “you can't seriously be taking Edie seriously. She's seriously unstable. She's seriously insane. She's just looking for attention.”

“Paul. Just read the manuscript. I'm serious when I say—I mean, I mean it when I say I think there's a way you can be involved with this. Just—talk to me when you've read it, okay?”

A platoon of cleaning women was unloading from a van on the opposite side of the parking lot with military order and precision, like the A-Team disguised in dark-bunned wigs and gingham skirts.

A bouncy digital chime went off and Oliver pulled a cell phone from his pocket, one of those ones that folds clamshell-like in half. “Yeah,” he said into the phone, “I'm on my way up. Don't touch that stuff, just watch some TV.” He hung up, turned ten degrees toward La Quinta, looked at me.

“Hey,” I said. “You remember that story about Chicago?”

“Chicago? You mean that time we saw them in concert?”

“No,” I said. We'd never seen Chicago in concert; he must have been thinking of someone else. “You remember. That story I wrote. There was that guy, and we drove there.”

“I'm sorry, Paul. I need to get back to the room. I need to give Yuna her nighttime pills. I'm really sorry I can't talk right now.” He approached me and gave me a quick half-hug thing, and a very conclusive backslap, then before I could figure out how exactly to reciprocate, he was walking across the parking lot, looking back at me and saying, “Read your sister's book, okay? And call me.”

I did what he said. Unfortunately, not in that order. First, from a pay phone a block away, its receiver redolent of vinegary piss, I called his cell phone, the number of which I had on his business card. I was going to tell him about getting “Chicago” published, though I'd probably omit the part about it being fifteen years ago in a Xeroxed zine; I'd tell him it was forthcoming in
Ploughshares, VQR
, or
The Quarterly
, all three maybe. His phone rang for a while, then went to voicemail. I hesitated for a moment, listened to my breath being fed back to me
in the earpiece—how exactly does one address an answering machine, especially one like this that wasn't even an answering machine, this thing that was no longer a physical box to hold my message but rather something ephemeral, floating out there in the ether:
Where was my voice going?—
so I hung up, and called again. This time it went directly to his voicemail. I hung up and went home where I took forty milligrams of time-release Ritalin, sat down with my sister's manuscript, and read it straight through.