Slaves of New York (31 page)

"Beak?" I said.

"Yes."

"Feet?" I said.

"Yes. The birds are very tiny, you just pop each one in your mouth. Curiously without flavor, but a lot of crunch, Marley." He looked at me and smiled, as if there was more to his words than met the eye. "There was a big cage of monkeys in the corner of the room, which wouldn't have been allowed in this country, but in many Indonesian and Asian countries they don't have any regulations about animals in restaurants, you know, so I didn't think anything of it. But I did notice that in the center of each table was a large round hole. After the businessmen had eaten their soup, the waiter took one of the monkeys out of the cage and brought it over to the table. All the men nodded and said that it was fine, as if the waiter had brought over a bottle of wine. I began to feel uneasy. The waiter placed the monkey in a sort of stool and strapped it in. The monkey began to scream in a way that was extraordinarily human. Then the waiter brought the monkey underneath the table and placed the chair holding the monkey beneath the hole so that the monkey's head was sticking up through the hole."

"I don't want to hear this," Sherman said. He put his hands

over his ears. Willow looked most fascinated; she picked up a tiny brush made from scallions at the edge of her plate and crushed it into her mouth. Then she lit a cigarette.

"The monkey stopped screaming and began to moan. As if in sympathy, the other monkeys in the cage hooted and rattled the bars. I felt very much as if I was witnessing an execution in the gas chamber, though I didn't know what they were going to do to the monkey; but the businessmen were so detached, they seemed like newspaper reporters, watching but not commenting. The waiter came back to the table carrying a large chef's knife. With one stroke he sliced off the top of the monkey's head. The monkey was still alive. Its eyes were moving. At least, I thought it was still alive. Each businessman picked up a spoon, leaned forward, and began to scoop out the brains of the monkey and eat it."

"Alive?" I said.

"Oh, yes, the monkey was still alive, at least briefly. Well. It was all I could do to keep eating my rice birds. I don't like to watch my food die in front of me; I like my meat to be killed and cooked offstage before I eat it." For a moment Borali looked embarrassed, as if he had revealed something he shouldn't have. Yet why had he told this story? He turned to me triumphantly. Was he trying to tell me I was no better than the monkey eaters, that I should put aside any hopes I had of achieving sainthood?

Naw.

"Ugh," Lacey said. Her face was even paler than usual, her nose could have used a little powder, it glowed like a tender bulb. Sherman took his hands away from his ears.

"Finished?" he said.

"What's the meal that's even worse?" I said.

"Get out, Marley!" Sherman said. I ignored this.

"I have a strange fear of opening cans," Willow said. "Though when I bother to eat I live mostly out of cans: some tuna fish, canned asparagus, mandarin oranges. It's the simplest way to eat. And yet, I have this silly fear of opening cans

—that I might find the wrong thing inside. A tip of a finger. perhaps, or something chewy and not quite identifiable ..."

"Ah, don't let me get started on my cannibalism stories." Borali said.

"What are they?" I said. I was quite eager to find out.

"Well, I don't really think I should bring them up over dinner," Borali said, looking at me slyly across the table. "Maybe you'll come over after dinner for a drink." And then he looked around the table. "I don't think the rest of you could take it."

Then for some reason Sherman just fell apart. "I thought I could keep my mouth shut but I can't. You've totally wrecked my fucking dinner, Marley. Whenever you're around everything totally deteriorates. This was supposed to be
my
dinner! You show up with my ex-girlfriend, egging people on to tell disgusting stories—I don't know how I got to be friends with you in the first place, but I sure as hell made a big mistake. You have absolutely no feelings. You, too, Lacey, but as far as I'm concerned, at this point you don't even exist."

Well, I could tell he was mad. His face was bright red; as the waitress went by with a platter of drinks he snatched one away and gulped it down, without bothering to look. Even Willow was nodding her head in agreement, though Borali just looked amused. These were the politics of the art world.

"I think I'll turn down that offer to stop by for a drink," I told Borali. "Lacey and I have got to go home so that I can do some work. Thanks for the dinner, though." And I helped Lacey into her coat and went out, snatching up another handful of maraschino cherries on my way past the bar.

So we left. I was starving, and told Lacey we were stopping off at McDonald's for a quick bite.

Inside there were a few dried mice of customer-service attendants: no makeup, just extruded faces topped with pie-shaped platters for hats, and wearing the most adorable of costumes! I was sincere when I thought this—the clothes they wore reminded me of superhero costumes, and I would have

liked to do a piece about superhero waitresses. A sort of nylon sheath in brown, ringed at the neck and sleeves with bright orange.

The tables were covered with effluvia, but I wasn't going to complain; as I explained to Lacey, "At least I can afford some food here. By the way, do you have any cash on you?"

"Some," she said.

"Fine," I said. "Hand it over."

I purchased a chocolate milkshake, fries, and four hamburgers, tender slices of meat wedged between two soggy buns. Screw the raw fish! I was meat happy. "I could live on hunks of bloody red steak every day of my life," I said.

"When I was in Paris my checks didn't arrive at American Express and I was broke for a while," Lacey said. "So I had to live mostly on oranges. Small, sweet-smelling oranges—two for a franc—that were very sour, tasting almost like lemons, and brilliant crimson inside. To me, when I think of Paris, I think of these oranges. But then, I really don't like meat."

I could have figured that much out just from looking at her. She had the pale hair and bright eyes of a llama or other herbivore. So much for getting myself all worked up over our date—really, I couldn't figure out what it was she wanted from me. "Well," I said, "I'm a carnivore. I don't even like to use a knife and fork. If I have a steak or roast beef I'd rather tear it off, bite by bite, with my teeth. There's nothing like the texture of meat, dense and red, the smell, the bloody taste. Of course, I'll admit, I don't want anything to do with killing. I don't want to see any cows bawling, I just want to eat them. Someday I might open a restaurant, 'Where the Elite Meet to Eat Meat.' Someday I'll cook you a roast beef."

"That would be nice," Lacey said.

"I cook roast beef brilliantly."

Next to us was a family I couldn't help but study, not having had much contact with the nuclear American grouping before. A puggy father, who looked like he was about to go out of his mind—he lit one cigarette after the next—and across from him was the mother, the female of the pair. Stuffed between them

at the table were the children, a girl and two boys. The older ones kept up a sort of battle cry, "Mommy, Mommy. Mommy," while she tried to talk to her mate. "At work today," she said, "Jim put his finger through the window. There was a lot of blood, he had to go to the hospital for stitches."

The kid sitting across from her, the littlest, about six, had a pinched face and a bird-snout of a nose. There was red all over his chin from some sort of frozen pop he was eating, something pink and dripping. At last he put down the pop and stuck a finger up his nose, pulling out a long string of snot. I put my hamburger down on my plate. Why must I, Marley Mantello, be the one to bear witness to such events?

Yet I knew these tribulations were given me for a reason. To see that family was like getting one of those little things that float sometimes in the corner of your field of vision and look like molecules. Edvard Munch got a permanent one of those things in his eye in the shape of a bird with a long beak—he was sixty-seven at that time and all of a sudden he started painting pictures with these birds with long beaks in them.

Not that the point about vision defects matters when it comes to painters; nor is it of any use in explaining why El Greco painted such elongated figures, even though some people say it was because of myopia or something else wrong with his eyes. But the guy had to be crazy to paint in the first place, and whatever else was wrong with him was only secondary.

"Come on," I said. "Let's get out of here." I jumped up, pushing the stuff on the table away. "Let's walk downtown," I said. "I'm in the mood to walk." For I had to be careful and make sure I didn't indulge too freely in the pleasures of life, such as taxicabs. Like Raphael, who was crazy about women and wasted a lot of time over them, and then died when he was thirty-seven, which was probably what would happen to me. It was something I thought about occasionally, every five or ten minutes.

So I would walk off the evening as penance.

"But do we have to go to your place right this minute, Mar-ley?" Lacey said. "I feel sort of bad about what happened at

dinner. I know Sherman is kind of mad. We could go find him at the Three Roses."

"Listen, I have to work," I said. "That's the way I am. But I'd love to have you there while I paint."

So Lacey smiled at me, and we continued down the gray, windy avenue. It was freezing cold; I put my hands in my pockets and took long strides, preoccupied with my thoughts.

case history #15: melinda

Melinda was tiny and blond with the luminous dark eyes of a loris or some nocturnal animal. At night she worked in a bar; she had come to New York to be a dancer with an experimental company but had broken her leg in a taxi accident and now hoped to get into choreography or set design.

With the money she collected from the insurance company she was able to buy a small apartment with a backyard near Tompkins Square Park. When she had some extra cash she would go to the ASPCA and buy animals that only had one day to live and take them home with her and try to find them new homes. Almost always she grew attached to the animals and couldn't bring herself to give them away. The animals were a substitute, she thought, for a man and a real relationship, but there were no men interested in her and the animals loved and accepted her in a way that no man ever could.

She lived with eight cats and five dogs: an elderly Schnauzer with no teeth who reminded her of her grandfather; a German shepherd-collie mix that supposedly had been trained as an attack dog but was afraid of everything, including the cats; a pair of schipperkes that liked to howl in unison to the stereo; and a dachshund that had to be strapped into a little pair of wheels as he was partially paralyzed from the midsection down. The animals took up all her time and were spoiled and

demanding, but this didn't bother her; in fact, Melinda rather liked playing mother.

Once late at night she saw a tiny baby rat crossing the street very slowly. It was missing a leg and Melinda scared the rat into a paper bag and took it home, where she kept it in an aquarium. A short time after she took the rat home her dogs and cats all came down with a bad case of fleas but Melinda loved the little rat and also sometimes found pigeons that were hurt and other wounded and delicate animals. In the yard was a stack of cages in which she kept rabbits and ferrets she had bought from a run-down pet store on Houston Street.

The bar where she worked was a regular neighborhood kind of bar where a lot of male artists hung out watching the ball games on TV or shooting pool and most of them had tried to date Melinda at one time or another. Quite often Melinda would invite them back to her place for a cup of coffee, but when they saw her tiny crowded apartment (which was full of angry barking dogs that were all busy defending Melinda or trying to rape her guest's leg, and yowling cats and the rat in the cage) they never returned to visit her again.

Most of the men she knew didn't mind their own mess but it was quite a different story in a woman. Melinda didn't care, however; in a way she looked upon the chaos and terrible odor of her apartment as a kind of test. When the right man came along he would be willing to overcome the circumstances in much the same way as the princes in fairy tales were willing to slay the dragon or go off in search of the magic potion in order to win the princess.

One night, in her bar, a pretty, exotic-looking boy came in. He had dyed black hair and was missing one of his front teeth. He looked like a crazed angel. None of the regulars had ever seen him around before.

After he had drunk four beers Melinda suggested he pay his tab as the bar was about to close. The boy broke down and began to cry. He said he was only twenty-three (though he looked younger) and had no money and was out on the street. His name was Chicho, and he hoped to get a job, either work-

ing with the elephants at the zoo or studying dolphins in Florida.

Melinda felt sorry for Chicho. She said he could come home with her, and in fact he could stay with her on a temporary basis provided that he help clean and care for the animals. Chicho said that would be fine.

After a few days Melinda realized she was falling in love with Chicho. He was so naive, so gentle and innocent, he reminded her of a little injured puppy. Behind his facade of street toughness was a true child who worshiped Melinda and thought everything about her was wonderful.