Manhattan Loverboy (19 page)

“It’s not a knife. It’s a laser beam.”

“That’s even worse!”

Looking at me, she tightened her face like a fist, and through gritting teeth she hissed, “Okay, go ahead, feel it! Grope it!”

I told her that I’d wait till after the operation. The doctor returned and told me to follow him.

“There’s something I want to say before I go,” I said to Amy.

“What?”

“Remember how, before Gorbachev, the U.S. and Russia had enough weapons to destroy the world, and each of the other’s weapons were pointed into the heart of the other, how that created great distrust, but kept the other on each other’s minds to the point of constant, day-to-day anxiety?”

“Yeah.”

“It wasn’t like a big country dominating a little country, and it wasn’t like two big, dumb countries at constant peace, was it?”

“No, the doctor’s waiting for you.”

“It was two big countries with huge and sophisticated weaponry pointed directly at each other, and both countries were stuck on the same globe.”

“So?”

“A generation of drills, school children under the table, backyard bomb shelters, the birth of bottled water…”

“So?”

“It was adversarial polarity.”

“So?”

“I, too, have developed an adversarial polarity for you.”

“Huh?”

“Mr. Aeiou,” Sawbones Slocum called, “I get paid by the hour. Let’s paint those pupils, shall we?”

“What I’m trying to say is I’m animus possessed!” I explained.

“Huh?”

“I love you,” I replied, employing the colloquial term. Then the strangest thing occurred: I distinctly saw the swell of a tear in Amy’s cold, functional eyes.

“I’m sorry about everything,” she replied and kissed me. Despite the laryngitis, she assured me that she would be there waiting for me when I got out. I followed the doctor into the examination room.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

‘DON’T DIS YOUR SIS’

Dr. Mortimer Slocum reassured me that although the operation was new and difficult, it was a quick procedure, and he’d have me out of there in twenty minutes tops.

“There are no side effects or anything?”

“Why, are you a lawyer?”

“No.”

“Just stay home for a couple days and for god’s sake, don’t take off the cotton patches until tomorrow afternoon.”

“What patches?”

“You’ll have to keep your eyes patched until tomorrow.” He then called in a nurse. Together we went into a small room where I was laid back. He looked into my eyes, placed the soft plastic lenses, and inserted what felt like a tiny, red-hot poker into each eyeball. I felt a blinding light.

As a strobe of light zapped my cones and rods, I remembered Byzantine Emperor Basil II. Upon capturing fifteen thousand Bulgarian troops, he had them blinded, leaving every hundredth man with one eyeball in order to lead the rest of them back to their homeland.

Why was I doing this? I wondered. Then I remembered. My reagan pup-tented in my pants as I fantasized having sex with Amy while the procedure was done to the other eye. Then he applied bandages.

He excused himself, departed, and in a moment, Amy was there before me.

“Did it hurt, my little bat?” she hissed and rattled. The laryngitis had pulverized her voice.

“Excruciating, my little snake,” I replied, placing the guilt-ridden foundations upon her to support the sexual colossus I was hoping to build. As she led me outside and into a cab, I started slipping my hand down her buttoned blouse.

“Don’t you want to wait,” she whispered, “until you can see?”

“I’ll see feelingly.” I borrowed Shakespeare for the occasion. An eternity passed as she paid the cabby and we fumbled up the stairs. I rubbed up against her with every step. As she grappled for her key, I groped at her. By the time I heard the door slam, my reagan was ready for its own performance of
Bedtime For Bonzo.

“Hold it!” she whispered, fighting her sore larynx. “I’m not nearly as experienced at this as you are, Bundles. I’ve only had sex three times, and I don’t want this to be any cheaper than it is.”

“Too late,” I replied, and rushed her.

“Hold it!” she said. “If we really have to do it like this, at least let me get a drink.”

“All right, get me one, too!”

I heard her go off to the kitchen and in a moment she returned with two glasses and a bottle. We drank our swill quickly. Then I battled her, bathed in her, drank her, nipped and nibbled her, all mere foreplay. Her clothes restrained and disguised her true resources. Before long, she appealed for a second bottle of vodka.

Over the next hour or so, a lot of alcohol was ingested in small, slippery quantities, and in the bathroom I felt my way through the medicine chest for some lewd quaaludes that I had from long ago. Soon she was as smooth as silk, soft as a pat of butter, and loose as a goose. But in another moment she started sinking into sleep. She couldn’t say a word, just a bunch of gurgling sounds. I finally placed her on the bed and wormed my way up that list of psycho-sexual fantasies like a rectal suppository. A couple times she would moan in pain, and her consciousness would peek out from the shroud of intoxication as she appealed for the traditional positions that were a part of her family values.

“Nonsense,” I retorted. “Moral sex is banal sex.”

On and on we went, the hunter and hunted, like a nation buying joy it never earned, spending money it never had. At one point, feeling like a teenager, I gave a sensuous hickey just above her breast. Eventually she passed out, and after a couple more hours of unilateral adversarial pole-arising (a/k/a lovemaking), so did I.

The next day, late in the afternoon, I awoke to the sound of the shower. I carefully peeled off my eye patches, and my eyes slowly adjusted. Checking my blue eyes in the mirror, I discovered that I finally had something in common with Paul Newman and Frank Sinatra. I fuzzily remembered almost everything from last night. I went to my half of the house and did some pore inspection. Then she came out of the bathroom, entered my part of the house, and looked at me strangely.

“What’s the matter, my turtle dove?”

“What did you do to me last night?”

“Whatever do you mean? We made love.”

“YOU DISGUSTING PIG!!” she suddenly shrieked. “Oh god, how could I delude myself so miserably? You’re even more disgusting than you were before!”

“What do you mean, my love?”

She stormed out, back to her apartment. I trailed after her, but she’d locked the door. When I returned to my apartment, I wondered what the problem was and how much money it would cost to rectify. My devotion to Amy was the most sobering path I had ever walked, and I didn’t want to lose it. Suddenly my phone, which few had the number to, rang.

“He doesn’t live here or want any,” I answered, hoping to fend off tele-sellers and wrong numbers.

“I got photos of you with a piece of tape on your chin feeling up some thirteen-year-old girl at the Nuyorican Poet’s Cafe.” It was Whitlock.

“What?”

“And I just want you to know, sleazebag, that it wasn’t your looks and charms that did it. We paid her to let you.” So that G-man did some work the other night.

“Hah.” I feigned a one-note chuckle.

“They’re in the mail to Amy. Let’s see how you talk yourself out of this one.”

“She knows all about it, asshole. You think you can extort our relationship to death? Forget it! We have an open, honest relationship. A simple relationship that takes into account the dynamic excursions of the male libido.” I hung up the phone. That fucking thirteen-year-old hadn’t looked a day younger than fifteen.

The phone rang a moment later. Him: “Look, I give up. Just say it. Dictate your terms. What do you want to stay out of my life and leave me and Amy alone forever?”

“Nothing.” I hung up the phone, he called back. I had no intention of parting with Amy, but I remembered the determination that Whitlock used when he called me after the stand-up comedy episode at
YUK!
, so I decided to make him an offer that he would refuse.

“I want cash, cold and hard and green. And a lot of it.”

“How much?”

“Three hundred and fifty-seven thousand dollars, and thirty-eight cents.”

“WHAT!”

“That’s my price, and I’ll never see her again.”

“You’re crazy!”

“That has nothing to do with it.”

“I ain’t giving you a cent. I can hire some college kid to kill you for a thousand bucks, pal.”

“Sure you can. But even dead she’ll be mine. Morrison, Elvis, and Jim Croce all reached greater heights of popularity in death than in their lives. She’ll be my number one Elvis impersonator, pal.”

“I’ll give you half of that.”

“Fuck that. You’re rich. In fact, get me back into the masters program, reinstate me in the proofreading agency, and come up with four hundred and eighty-two thousand dollars and twenty-eight cents.”

“Hey, I’m willing to compromise in the middle.”

“The meter’s running, pal. Now, I’m looking at my watch; you got ten seconds to make up your mind.” I silently counted to five and then hung the phone up. Just as quickly, it rang again.

“Okay, I’ll do it!” He wasn’t supposed to accept the offer. I hung up the phone in a panic.

I ran into the bathroom and locked the door. I had no idea what to do. I was terrible at confrontation, even with my big, new body. I still reverted to a seven-year-old when in fear. I jumped in the bathtub and covered my eyes so he couldn’t see me. Through the wall, though, I could hear Amy wildly weeping in her apartment. Last night’s intimacy had been too much for her, poor kid.

I went to the green door and tried knocking softly. I really did love her. I wasn’t aware that I had done anything wrong. But even I am capable of some guilt. I kept reminding myself that whatever kind of violation I might have unintentionally performed, she, with her unauthorized series of zip-lock operations, had made me look like an amateur, even if they were an improvement. But I felt incredibly guilty. It must have been a sacrifice for her to miss one of those power lunches to find me a blue-collar vocational skill. I gently knocked on Amy’s door.

“I’ll kill you, you pig. Stay away from that door.”

“Let’s put this behind us.”

Like a promising act at CBGBs, I could hear her violent shrieks to the accompaniment of explosive glassware. Suddenly there was a knock at my front door. Through the peephole, I saw him, the unshelled nut. I turned up the TV to blanket all sounds from her room and opened my door. He was holding his extra-thin briefcase. He meant business.

“Christ, can you lower that?”
My Favorite Martian
was blaring.

“Afraid not, pal. It drowns out the voices in my head.”

Using his knee as a desk, he set down his briefcase and unclicked it open. WOW! I seized a tightly ribboned stack of hundred dollar bills. It looked genuine with a capital G. He handed it to me—mine! For a moment I lost myself. I asked him to wait in the hall and transferred all the cash into the compartment under the toilet. I had to have it. I wouldn’t even spend it, I could just look at it and masturbate. I opened the door again. He was still there expectantly.

“All right, you want her?” I asked, preoccupied with how I was going to sell Amy, who I loved, who hated me, to this man (who hated me), whom she disliked.

“No, I just wanted to see what you’d do with a half-a-million bucks.” He wasn’t even good at sarcasm.

“All right, look, I’m going to stage a scene. Just play along. Do what comes natural.”

“Huh?”

I lowered the TV and went back to the adjoining green door, the Glinika Bridge where the former East Berlin met the former West Berlin of our former relationship. I started banging. “Open this fucking door!” I screamed. “My reagan’s at attention and you’re my first lady.”

“Uruuuugh!” she screamed.

“You arch slime-bag!” he said. Rushing over, he punched me in the back.

“Get off me, you preppie boy!” I shoved him into a pile of boxes that collapsed to one side. The common door opened. She had heard the commotion and bit the bait. She watched for a minute as I struggled to contain the Terminator-Whitlock. I kept whispering to him things like, “enough,” and “quit,” and “uncle.” But he kept punching, and it really hurt.

“Enough!” she called, as she walked through my half of the house out the front door. She went downstairs carrying a small overnight bag.

“Give me my money back, asshole!”

“No way,” I replied calmly. He punched me hard in the nose.

“Punch me, kick me, chew me, kill me. I finally got you, and there’s no way I’m going to separate with that cash. My life is worth much less than it, so you’ll have to kill me to get it.”

“I don’t kill people, I hire others to kill them.”

He pushed me down and raced around my side of the apartment, searching for his unearned cash. It was already pretty emptied out, but he turned over the few boxes I had. I didn’t mind much until he started tossing around my newly purchased clothes. In my kitchen, everything was already near barren; I had no food, one pot, one pan, and one plate. Rushing into the bathroom, he tossed all my skin-care products into the garbage while emptying the medicine cabinet. He still couldn’t find it. Then, exhausted, frantic, truly undone and defeated, he raced out the door.