Bernard Boyce Bennington & The American Dream (3 page)

The man stopped and took another drink, this time a bigger one which almost drained the glass. Without even asking, Jack Fedogan pulled another Michelob off the shelf, flipped the cap, and placed it on the bar.

“Eventually, earlier this year, just as the summer was giving way again to autumn’s moods of melancholia, the lure of settling down coupled with a suddenly looming mortality persuaded me to actively look for a mate. But the question was, how should I do it?

“Singles bars were out. They were filled with folks that I could scarcely identify with, sharp dressers all, driving sleek continental cars and wearing the latest colognes and playing the latest CDs. Sex was what those folks were after and it wasn’t—at least not primarily—what I was after. What I was after was The American Dream…a wife, a house, Norman Rockwell-style picket fences, and the smell of meatloaf coming from the oven.”

“That’s quite a dream,” Jack says, his mind drifting back to his life with Phyllis.

“You know,” Jim ventures, “I had a dream once…dreamed I won the Lottery.”

Edgar nods. He’s thinking of informing the others that sex would be pretty high up on the list of things he wants right now, but instead he says, “Yeah?”

Jim carries right on the way Jim can do when his mind isn’t fully on what his mouth is doing. “Bought a car.”

“Why’d you need a car in New York?” McCoy asks.

Jim gives a shrug, shuffles his glass around on his coaster. “I don’t.”

“But that was the first thing you did?”

“I didn’t say it was the first thing. Just that I bought a car.”

“What else did you buy?” Edgar says, a smile tugging at the corners of his mouth, taking a rise out of Jim.

“Don’t remember. Just remember the car.”

McCoy says, “What kind of car was it?”

“A Mustang.” In Jim Leafman’s mouth the word sounds like a mantra—
musssss-tannnng
—or a sibilant call for rain by an old Apache or Shawnee, staring up into the sky looking for water-bearing clouds.

“Now
that
was the American Dream,” says Edgar. “That’s what they called it. By the 1950s, young couples marrying, heading out to the suburbs, buying houses and cars, starting families. It must’ve seemed like we had it all.”

“Ah had a dream!” McCoy says, trying to capture the milky rounded tones of Martin Luther King.

“I was six in 1950,” Edgar says. “Didn’t know nothing about no American Dream. My folks lived-”

“You want to let the guy finish his story or what?” Jack asks, frustration spread thick in his words.

Edgar nods and waves for the newcomer to go on with his tale.

“Dating agencies were the next consideration but even those made for a short-lived solution, the problem being that I just couldn’t cope with the intrusive questioning of the patronizing proprietors.”

And so it was, Bernard Boyce Bennington explained, on a cloudy and cold October day, with the leaves in Central Park blowing across the street in crinkly brown flurries, that he hit upon the idea of checking the ‘want ads’.

“I sounds a lot easier than it really is,” he tells them. “Most of what was available fell either into the outré style of the
Village Voice,
which failed to deliver any solutions, apart from providing lurid photographs of ‘college girls just minutes away’, ‘outcall Asian bodywork’ and ‘hot and horny local girls’—most of whose names seemed to be Cherri or Jade or even Strawberry, and all of whom ensured complete satisfaction and discreet billing…not to mention ‘All Major CC’s, ATM & Debit Cards Accepted’—in amidst the usual three- or four-line enigmas such as ‘Bottom in need of Top’ and ‘Romantic SBF Seeks Big Dipper’…or the traditional of
New York
magazine, whose ‘Strictly Personals’ section offered ‘matchmaking’ and ‘marriage’ in amongst advertisements placed, purportedly, by ‘professionals’, a select band with which I did not, in all honesty, believe I had much if anything in common.

“In a moment of rare desperation, I even called up an ad which promised ‘A Hot Line To My Wildest Dreams’ only to find that the sultry voiced girl—who actually sounded as though she was expiring-”

“Expiring?” says Jim. “You mean, like…sweating? How can you sound like you’re-”

“That’s
pers
piring,” Edgar points out.

Jim grunts something by way of an apology and visibly shrinks on his stool.

“Anyway, this girl,” the man continues, “offered only Tarot readings, phrenology sessions, numerology classes, palm-reading and my future as prophesied by the stars…and, as I assumed Michael Keaton—my favorite actor, by the way, since Tim Burton’s Batman movies—didn’t know me from Adam or Zachary, that had to be something to do with astrology.”

Bernard Boyce Bennington drained his glass and, with a quick salute to Jack, poured the new bottle.

“Then came the big break, a small ad in the
New York Press
’s ‘variations’ section.” He reached into the inside pocket of his jacket and removed a folded piece of newspaper, its print smudged in places and the folds starting to tear. He held it out to Jack. “Here, read it yourself.”

Jack took the paper and unfolded it, holding it so Jim and Edgar and McCoy could lean over and read it at the same time. The paper read:

Single White Succubus Seeks Soulmate

Tired of the same old humdrum?

Is one day just like the next and

the
one before it? Do you see less in front

of
you than what’s gone before? Take a break

and
enjoy a relationship you will never forget

But be warned:

once
you’ve decided, there’s no turning back.

The ad finishes with a cellphone number.

“What’s a sucker-bus?” Jim Leafman asks.

“A Greyhound headed for Las Vegas,” says Jack, who has never held with gambling.

“A succubus is a female demon,” Bernard Boyce Bennington answers. “Legend has it that they have sex with sleeping men…and,” he adds, “they steal their souls.”

Jim Leafman sits up from the bar, wondering if it’s his imagination or has it suddenly gotten cold in the last couple of minutes. “She the woman you’re looking for?”

The man nods and takes a drink of beer.

“Couldn’t you just call her?” McCoy says.

The newcomer shakes his head. “I tried that, many times since. Just get a solid tone. But the first time, I got straight through,” he says, setting his glass back on the bar. “It was a little before 2 am on a particularly black night during which the wind buffeted my apartment windows and rattled the glass in the casements. A woman’s voice answers—in the background I could hear soft music, and glasses clinking and muted conversation—and, so help me, she says my name. ‘Good evening Mister Bennington,’ she says to me. ‘Where do you want us to meet?’”

McCoy gives out a low whistle. “How’d she know your name?”

“I have absolutely no idea…but, if she was a succubus then one can only presume that she had abilities far beyond our understanding.”

Jack pushes his cloth to one side and leans heavier on the bar. “Did you go meet her?”

“I regret that I did.”

“You
regret
? What? Was she a dog?”

“No,” the man says to the bartender with a sad smile. “No, far from it. She was the most beautiful woman I have ever seen.

“Long story short, I met up with her, corner of 23rd and 3rd, and we walked into Gramercy Park, hand in hand. I remember how cold her hand felt to the touch, but I didn’t think anything of it…at least not then. It was late at night and it was a cool night and I just put it down to bad circulation. Anyway, unusually for me, I became quite…shall we say, stimulated by her—there was something about her, some aura, some intoxicating scent…a mixture of fresh flowers and musk or patchouli, something sweet-smelling and yet old and musty…hard to explain. And I stopped, just inside the park, and suggested that perhaps we could go back to my apartment, but she declined. Or perhaps hers, I suggested…and she laughed. She didn’t have an apartment. She lived out in the city, she told me, in the bars and drinking holes, the hotel lounges and the nightclubs, a different one every evening. She said that she got all the custom she needed from these places and that the newspaper advertisement was simply an experiment. Mine had been the only call, she told me, and she would not be repeating the experiment.

“We carried on into the park and-” He stopped and looked at his beer for a few seconds. “This is a little difficult for me.” He took a deep sigh and a long gulp of beer, draining the glass. “She was very attentive to me. So attentive in fact that by the time we had gone but a few yards into the park, barely out of the glow of the lamps by the street, she had fully removed her clothes, pulling them off in bravura sweeps of crinoline and lace, whisking them up into the night air to expose white flesh which seemed to exude some kind of aroma all of its own. The grass around us became quickly littered with her clothes, a skirt, then her blouse, followed by a satin vest and a brassiere, and finally by her panties.

“Then I removed my own clothes.”

“Jesus H. Christ,” Edgar mutters.

Jim Leafman twists awkwardly on his seat.

McCoy says, “That kind of thing can get you locked up.”

Jack Fedogan agrees.

“Believe me,” B. B. Bennington says imploringly, “this is not something I normally do. I was…I was drunk with her, I felt the heavens coming down to meet me and me crashing upwards to meet them; I felt that I could lift a mountain and live forever; I felt so happy I wanted to weep. But that was only the beginning.” He looks up at Jack. “Could I have another of those beers?”

In a flash, Jack reaches behind and pulls a Michelob across, flips the cap and stands it next to the newcomer’s empty glass. Then he shifts his weight to his other leg and says, “Then what happened?”

The man pours the beer, takes a sip and continues with his story. As he does so, he takes something out of his jacket pocket—something in a brown paper bag, folded in a rectangular shape like maybe it’s a book—and he sets it on the counter. All eyes watch the stranger’s hand place the object but no eyes move away with the hand: they stay on the object, four minds wondering what on earth it could be and what significance it could have to the story now unfolding.

Bernard Boyce Bennington shrugs. “Then the inevitable happened, of course. Right there on the grass in Gramercy Park. I…I won’t go into the details here, gentlemen; it is sufficient to say that I have never felt such a feeling before. More than that, I truly never believed such a feeling were possible. She moved with a slow grace, her body lithe and supple, and her mouth…well, it was everywhere. As was her voice.”

It is Jack Fedogan, suddenly aware that there was no music playing, who responds first. He pulls out a Charlie Mingus CD and slips it into the player, keying in track numbers and hitting the play button. As the first strains of music drift into the air, he says, “Her voice?”

“I had my eyes closed, so great was the feeling of elation and spiritual contentment, but all the time we were making love she was speaking to me.”

“What was she saying?” McCoy asks.

“All kinds of things…things about my past, that nobody else could know, and things about comicbook stories, all of which she appeared to have read. She knew everything about me and everything about what I had done or read or hoped for. And she told me that this night, right then and there, lying on the grass in Gramercy Park, was the pinnacle of my life. She told me I would never be lonely again.”

Then he stops speaking.

Jim looks at Edgar and then at McCoy and McCoy looks at Jack and then at Edgar, and then everyone turns to look at the stranger, waiting for him to say something more. Eventually it’s Edgar who breaks the silence.

“And then what?”

“And then she was gone,” comes the answer.

“
Gone
?” It’s a single word delivered by four voices.

Bernard Boyce Bennington reaches for the brown paper package and all eyes follow his hand. “I must have…I don’t know, blacked out or something. But when I came to and opened my eyes she had left me…no clothes, no note, nothing except this.” And he pulls open the bag and removes a small battery-operated cassette player.

“Listen,” he says, and he presses the play button.

At the same time, Jack Fedogan turns down the volume button on the CD system hidden below the bar, forcing the familiar strains of ‘Goodbye Pork  Pie Hat’—in particular John Handy’s flutter-tonguing alto duel with Mingus’s tremolo basswork—off into some ethereal background, like in a party scene in a movie, when the opening pan shot with the loud soundtrack has finished and now the characters have something to say.

And it’s fitting. For as one melody—Mingus’s eternal paean to Lester Young, who died less than two months before this legendary 1959 recording—stops, another melody filters into the Land at the End of the Working Day…a melody without notes or words, but rather one with the sound of the wind in the trees, and the distant hum of traffic and occasional muted shouts.

Suddenly, somewhere deep inside the recesses of the newcomer’s cassette player, the far-off wail of a siren hums like a fly, disappearing before it’s hardly gotten started. And then, closer, there’s a grunt. It’s a man’s grunt.

The grunt is followed by another, deeper
this time, more drawn out.

Then a sigh, also deep, again unquestionably a man’s sigh.

For several minutes the quartet of regulars sits or stands entranced by the sounds coming from the machine sitting on the counter.

They hear trees rustling and they hear the sound of movement, interspersed with sighs and soft kisses and even an occasional word, always in a man’s voice, an
Oh!
or an
Ah!
, and then an
Oh, God!
, the word ‘God’ drawn right out, long and thin and deep.

They feel they’re intruding, Jim and Jack, and Edgar and McCoy, feel like they’re peeping at another man’s keyhole in the dead of night, and deep within them they feel, to a man, the stirrings of desire and companionship, the feelings forcing away the blight of loneliness that affects so many people in cities and towns and lonely truck-cabs lit only by the orange or green glow of the dashboard dials and the waft of cigarette smoke.