The Fuck Up (17 page)

Once I had them sorted out, I ran downstairs and jumped in the car. I drove around the corner to a liquor store. Giving the owner five bucks, he gave me as many boxes as I could stuff into the back seat. I sped back to Helmsley’s, raced up and down the stairs, up with the empties, and down with them filled. I ballasted that old Mercedes down like a freighter. The old lady watched in amazement as I ran by with the boxes. Finally she hollered, “If you want, I got a whole basement full of them Readers Digest books.”

“Thanks, no thanks,” I yelled back when I was done. The chassis of the old Mercedes was almost rubbing against the tires. There wasn’t room for another page. In a sweaty and exhausted mess, I went upstairs for the last time and asked through gasps, “You wouldn’t know where Helmsley is now, would you?”

“You mean his body?”

“Right.”

She gave me instructions to a funeral home. “Tonight’s the last night of the wake, though, and if you see his cousin Elsa there, tell her I want the china teacups.”

“China teacups, fine,” I replied and was about to run out, but stopped short when 1 saw her poking on the couch. I had slept on that hard old couch endless nights. Mercifully 1 grabbed a steak knife in the kitchen, elbowed the old lady to one side, and slit open the upholstery, liberating those overwound springs.

“Hell’s bells, what’d you do that for!” she screamed.

“Believe me I was doing both you and the couch a favor.” I just couldn’t bear to think of my old couch in one of their tacky Queens basement-living rooms with stucco walls and aluminum siding.

The Malio Family Funeral Home was handling the interment. As I pulled the car to the curb, I was amazed to see such a large group of mourners. They were all dressed loudly in black and they loudly crowded outside together. I parked in front of a hydrant and went in. There were three galleries for bereavement, and only when I entered Helmsley’s display room did I realize that those strangers were only strangers.

In an adjacent room was laid out the dead body of some matriarchal grandmother; the wailing group hovering around were both direct and derivative members of her lecherous hatch. A closed coffin in an empty room was Helmsley’s final salute. People avoided me. I heard someone mumble, “You don’t go to a wake dressed like that!”

I went into his vacant room and pulled the door shut behind me. Helmsley wouldn’t have cared about the filthy clothes, or the streaks of peroxide in my hair. I sat in the front chair that was closest to his box. As I listened to the rumble outside, I grew increasingly angry that no one else had come. They had mentioned his death on TV His academic pals could have found out where he was. The crowd outside should’ve been Helmsley’s crowd. No one had come to see him off, not even that slut Angela, who probably compelled his suicide. What had happened? I would’ve given anything to know. I didn’t just want an account of the events leading up to him jumping off the bridge, but what he saw in her; why did he allow himself to be degraded by her? He was as handsome and intelligent and amusing and considerate as anyone I ever met. How could a lifetime of study and creation have come to such a forlorn end? I rose and paced back and forth in front of the closed lid.

All he asked me to do that early morning was to leave the house, just for a couple of hours, and I acted no better than his beast-lover, making it an issue of pride. After all the patience that I had demanded of him over the years, I suffered that I hadn’t returned any.

Perhaps out of a compulsion to punish myself, but I think out of a macabre need for forgiveness, I opened Helmsley’s casket. He was badly mangled, the bone of his right forearm was ledging out of the side, just below the skin.

Autopsy sutures that crisscrossed his face and body were thick and unconcealed. I ran my hand through his flaxen, still alive hair and I stared into his bluish face. Until there was a knock at the door, I didn’t realize that time was passing. I quickly shut Helmsley’s lid and threw open the door. A tall lanky man in a cheap dark suit, curly hair, and silly porkchop sideburns entered. He looked like a portrait Helmsley had of the poet Pushkin.

“You knew Helmsley?” I asked slowly, assuming, based upon his appearance, that he spoke a foreign language.

“No, I’m sorry, but the home is closing.”

I thanked him and left. The mob of a family outside was gone. The Mercedes had a ticket on the windshield. Slowly I drove back to Glenn’s house and carefully parked the Mercedes in her garage. After locking the garage door, I went back upstairs into the living room. I had forgotten to turn off the TV, so I used one of the two remotes to lower the volume. Then I quickly downed a double bourbon. About two minutes later, Glenn entered wearing a nightgown, and stretching her arms out, she declared, “I’ve had a refreshing nap.”

“A refreshing nap?” I murmured, still picturing Helmsley drained of life, and locked in sleep. Her remark seemed to be a freakish contradiction. I started laughing, uncontrollably laughing at what she said. All that had occurred in the short period of her nap. She stood there and looked at me as if I were crazy. If I tried to explain all that had just happened she would have no doubt about my insanity. Instead, I pointed to the TV “I’m sorry. I just watched ‘The Odd Couple.’ Boy, is that Felix unpredictable.”

She had a drink and felt refreshed and talked about her boyfriend and how she was adjusting to the break up. So I filled my glass and kept up a polite expression.

“…as if my wings were clipped…you know, so what now? Well I’m not sure myself, just all the little things that I’ve always wanted to do, but he prevented me from doing. All I really know is I have this sudden sense of being free!”

She rambled on itemizing all the grievances and why she felt good about the break up. I just drank more and smiled more and nodded more. While she talked, I envisioned Helmsley in that closed book of a coffin in a dark room. As I got drunker, I thought more about the meaning of death. In this instance, most poignantly, it meant a potential unrealized. Reams of blank pages, unfilled. He truly intended to dedicate his life to writing. All the plays, the novels, the essays, the short stories, all those philosophical tracts that he would pretentiously talk about or those he actually had written: now, only I would know. He would have found life unbearable if he had known that he was going to die with virtually none of his plans achieved. It retroactively drained the meaning from his life; so why would he kill himself?

Suddenly I heard Glenn again. “The thing about my relationship with him was that I was in constant admiration of him. I used his language, I looked at things with his values, but I realize now it’s because I was essentially intimidated by him deep down. That’s why I really thank God that I’ve broken up with him, because now for the first time I can see what it is being myself…”

“But he gave you so much,” I replied, applying her statement to my relationship with Helmsley, “can you really just forget about him like that?”

“He took so much more,” she replied. “He was utterly demanding and selfish.” I couldn’t follow her here, because Helmsley asked for so little. It
was as if we were passing on crisscrossing escalators, hers ascending and mine descending.

Soon we watched some TV and played a board game. Eventually after some persuasion on my part, and reluctance on hers, she told me a little about her first marriage: they were both too young. There seemed to be something more she kept restraining herself from saying, and I was too stretched out of shape to induce her any further. After a late night snack, we went to bed.

I lay next to her and quietly she slid under the sheet and tried to start up the engine. The combination of booze and dead Helmsley was too much. I just couldn’t solidify. But she only reacted with greater determination. I wanted to tell her, but, like her, I too was restraining myself from getting emotionally entangled. Finally I tugged her off and told her that I just wasn’t up to it, too much bourbon. She felt the chill, rolled over, and went to sleep.

I awoke the next morning in a sweat. I had dreamt that Helmsley had died, and so he had. Glenn wasn’t lying next to me. I found a note on the night table, it read:

The alarm clock had been set for seven; so she was up four hours ago. I went downstairs and fixed myself some breakfast. While eating, I kept thinking about Helmsley. I went downstairs and saw the Mercedes, loaded up to the ceiling with his books.

Without removing the books, I took the car out and drove back to Helmsley’s neighborhood. I drove along streets that we had walked together just a week before. Finally I stopped in front of his house. There, next to a line of garbage cans, I saw all the remaining books loosely piled. They trumpeted: Helmsley is dead. I drove some more. When I passed the bar where I first met Angela, I parked the car, entered, and ordered a beer. It was a perpetually shaded room with old men just killing time. A placard over the bar read, Italian American Legion Post #118, Veterans of Foreign Wars. Carefully I looked around; there was no sign of her.

Eventually I got up the nerve to ask the old bartender, “Hey, you know anything about that guy that jumped off the bridge the other day?”

“Why?” he barked back. “You a snoop reporter?”

“I served with him in the 107th back in ’Nam,” I replied Americanly, and then raising my beer mug toward the flag, I drank it down.

“You served with that guy?”

“Sure, he saved me when I got hit at the Diphthong Delta.” And then taking the liberty, I kicked my leg up to a bar stool, rolled up the hem of my pant leg and showed him where Angela bit me the other day.

“The wound looks fresh,” he commented.

“Some wounds heal faster than others.”

“I can’t believe that guy served.”

“Hey pal, I don’t know if you’ve ever been in combat, but you change afterwards.”

“I know,” he muttered pride fully, and without a request he gave me another draft.

“Look, that poor guy was here fighting with his girl that night.”

“Did you know the girl?” I asked.

“Oh sure, she’s a local girl.”

“Angela? Was she with him when you saw him last?”

“No, he raced in here alone. It was about two nights ago. It was about midnight. He got loaded pretty quickly and just sat quietly for a while. He looked pretty roughed up.”

“What do you mean roughed up?”

“Someone had beat up on him. You know, he had blood coming out of his nose and mouth. I had to clean up a whole pile of bloody napkins later.”

“Then what?”

“Bar closed, he left, and that’s all she wrote. I guess he went right to the bridge.”

When Helmsley was sitting here, drinking his heart out, I was with Glenn, just a half mile away. If he went directly to the bridge, he would have had to walk right by the house, within twenty feet of where I was lavishing in splendors. If I had just looked out the window, I might’ve seen him walk by, a drunken and despondent shadow; I might’ve saved him.

“Have you seen Angela since then?” He shook his head no, walked to the other side of the bar, and there he poured a drink for someone.

“Do you have any idea where she might be?” I asked when the bartender passed by again. “I just want to talk with her.”

“Sorry,” he said. He didn’t want to talk anymore. He knew he was treading the line; a snitch is the lowest form of life everywhere.

“Listen,” I said finally. “When I got hit, I went down. My leg was a shred, the VC were hopping around us, finishing us off. That guy carried me out of there. Do you understand? Now I just want to find out what happened, and I’m gonna find Angela anyway.”

“Try the OTB around 1:30,” he said. “But listen, I didn’t tell you dirt, all right?”

“Not a word,” I replied and threw him a salute. Then I drove around the corner, put a quarter in the meter. I leaned up against the car across the
street from the local betting place and waited. After fifteen minutes or so, I saw her enter with a group of guys. She was wearing a large cowboy hat and a wide-framed pair of dark sunglasses. Through the store-front glass, I watched her clown around awhile with the guys until they took out their racing papers, and chatted: “Devilrun’s got bandages and is running on bute…. Yeah, but Breakingwind runs well on slop… Hippityhopity always comes from behind…” Soon everybody started placing bets. They all watched the horses run on the monitors then either ripped up their tickets or collected. Slowly the group she came in with mingled with others, and I casually entered the place and leaned up alongside of her. She was busily jotting notes on her racing form.

When there was no one around, I quickly grabbed her arm and muttered, “If you don’t mind, I want to talk with you.”

“Who the fuck are you?” She broke loose hollering. Out of nowhere a fat guy with a neck the size of my waist had me in a painful headlock.

“You want I should knock his teeth down his throat?” he asked Angela. I felt like a taxidermed head mounted above a fireplace, and as she slowly realized who I was, I impossibly tried to prepare myself for a great deal of suffering.

“What the fuck do you want?” she asked. “You’re the little shit that broke my nose.”

“And you killed my only friend,” I hoarsely replied in the vice.

“What the fuck are you talking about?”

“You and your brothers.”

“You want I should snap his neck?” the pizzeria owner asked.

“Let him go,” she issued a reprieve. The guy let me drop and walked away.

“What the fuck are you talking about?”

“Who killed Helmsley?” I asked.

“He killed himself, the stupid shit.” Then she lifted up her sunglasses and showed me a shining black eye. “Look what the little shit did to me.”

“What happened?”

“We got into a fight and I decided that he was a fun fuck but it was all over. He wasn’t a man. He was a pretty boy and I told him so, and I told him that it was all over.”