The Fuck Up (27 page)

“What’s your name anyway?” she asked.

“Je ne parle pas anglais.”

“Je parle français.”

“Je ne parle
anything.”

“Fuck you, too,” the beautiful face said. Now she could link up with the first bitch, and they could both discuss what a bastard I was. I drank more alcohol. The figurative seems to become the literal when drunk. My sails swelled, my keel rose and dipped, the winds blew, and the waves pounded over my decks. A drunken vertigo spun me, the booze was a typhoon, a whirlpool, and ultimately a tidal wave. Drinking more and more and more, I vomited in an ice bucket behind the bar and drank more. I could batten my hatches no longer and tried to go to the bathroom. I stumbled through the party to a smaller room in the back, which seemed to have a haystack of coats. Upon them I collapsed, forgot about the toilet and dug a foxhole in the cloth and furs and fell deep asleep.

“Where’s my coat? Where’s my wrap? Where’s my jacket?” Questions bombarded my little sleep, but the drunkenness provided extra cover. Slowly people plucked at the haystack of clothes. Gradually I got cold and began to shiver.

“Where the hell is my boa?” I heard some whiny Queens accent screaming. “Where’s my boa … where’s my coat … where’s my …”

“Fuck your where!” I mumbled.

“Who is that!” she hollered. “Irving, there’s a human being under that stole.”

Someone removed the thing above me and my face was exposed. Through squinty eyes I saw a blurry Helmsley. “Helmsley? Is that really you?”

“You know this guy?” Helmsley asked Owensfield.

“Helmsley?” Owensfield asked. “You mean Helmsley Micinski? I heard he committed suicide.”

“You know Helmsley?”

“I knew of him. We published some translations of his. He was a good translator.”

“Why didn’t you publish any of his poetry?”

“Get off the lady’s wrap,” the guy who looked like Helmsley said. Helmsley was dead.

“Please get off the lady’s wrap,” Owensfield corrected the fellow.

“Why didn’t you publish any of his poetry?” I asked Owensfield.

“What poetry?”

“Get the hell off the coat,” the Helmsley look-alike said. This time he grabbed me by my shoulder and wheeled me around onto my feet.

“Helmsley was constantly sending out poetry. He had a file full of form rejections from the
Harrington.”

“I never saw one poem from Helmsley Micinski.”

“He wrote more than anyone I knew.”

“Well, he never sent me a thing. I heard he wrote some decent poems back in the sixties, when he was just a kid in his teens. Word was that he was finished. Now please, the party’s winding down, try sobering up a bit.”

I slowly made my way over to the bathroom and peed my guts out while wondering whether Helmsley had lied to me. Maybe lie is a harsh word since he was his own victim. Writing was everything to him and maybe he couldn’t write. He was always preparing, making notes, making tedious outlines, doing subtle character studies, forever sharpening the knife that, if he never truly used, he would one day have to turn on himself. To come to terms with the fact that he was burnt out at thirty would be devastating. As I drunkenly thought this, the squawking lady’s words were still echoing in my
ears, Where’s this, where’s that? I sat on the toilet seat and murmured, “Where?” The word seemed to be a philosophy unto itself, and all the implications right down to the homonyms seemed to embrace Helmsley:

I then pulled my pants up and did the buckle and belt and rejoined the party. Lying on the bar was a pen and napkin. I scribbled down the little poem and stuck it in my pocket. Retreating back to the couch, I reclined in a pain-minimizing posture and napped a bit until I started feeling the earth rumbling. I awoke to a bunch of people hauling the couch I was on. They were clearing the room to dance. I rolled off the moving couch and landed on the floor: pain. Owensfield came over and after he helped me to my feet, I asked him, “When is my poem being published?”

“In this issue.”

“When is that making its debut.”

“What do you think this party is all about?”

“It’s out?”

“Eureka!” From thin air he seemed to produce a copy. I grabbed it and thumbed to the table of contents, no name. I skimmed the magazine, but I couldn’t find my name anywhere. Snatching it back, he quickly turned to the poem and handed it to me. I recited it proudly and drunkenly. Then I noticed the byline and started worrying, “Thi … who? Who is that?”

“That’s you, remember.”

“Like hell it is.” It was a bizarre name—Thi Doc Sun. It was as approximate to my name as Cassius Clay was to Muhammad Ali. He took the magazine, pronounced the name aloud and asked, “Isn’t that you?”

“No, but maybe I should change my name to that.” Thi? I drunkenly recalled the name from somewhere, and then I remembered; it was the Cambodian night porter.

“God, I’m sorry. I promise you, I’ll print an errata in the next issue.”

“It doesn’t even matter,” I laughed. “The only reason I wanted to do it in the first place was to impress Helmsley.” But it did matter. I thought for a minute about Janus and Glenn, I proudly told them both about my getting published. Now, if they bothered to check, they’d find out I was a fraud. Poetic justice.

Owensfield brought me over to the bar and secured a very expensive bottle of booze, which he uncorked and poured into shot glasses, “This is my favorite.”

He poured more drinks and we talked awhile. Finally he mentioned that he had heard several people compliment my poem. He summed it up, saying, “For thirty-four words it offers a raw glimpse into gutter-level East Village.”

“Glad you liked it. You know, I’ve just completed another poem. It’s only a couple of words really.” I took out the napkin and gave it to him. He mumbled it aloud.

“When your ware wear, where from there.” He thought about it a moment and said, “There’s not a word here about East Village.”

“I have a broad sweep.”

“When we want a broad sweep we get a broom.” He handed me the napkin back. He was bored with me and he walked away, mingling with others. I chuckled drunkenly, considering that I had been fired from the theater and
there was no way Owensfield would ever get his film presented. I remained loyal to the bar. The preppie bartender apparently had abandoned it and people were helping themselves. I was so drunk that I was somebody else, but that person was still conscious, so there was still something left to liquidate. A blur of bottles and glasses, somebody was reading poetry, but all I could recall was a couple lines of white dust.

I’ve never
been able to recollect going to sleep, but I’ll never forget waking up the next morning. I had had my unrestrained go at the drugs and alcohol, and now they had their go at me. I don’t know the clinical terms, but the result was some kind of partial amnesia which lasted for the next couple of weeks. My memory of those weeks to come remains choppy. I vividly remember waking that pivotal morning because of several foreboding images and sensations which I made into dreams. The first “dream” was being back in a hospital, perhaps Roosevelt Hospital, and sitting very still next to someone, perhaps that poor Yuppie, because he was coughing and hacking uncontrollably. I just heard the constant groaning sounds, but I never saw
a doctor or a nurse. Perhaps we were all just put in some kind of quarantine ward. The next dream was the earthquake, a long snake-like torso that kept sinking downward. Then I dreamt that I was in Ternevsky’s hot tub, and then I got very cold and itchy.

When I reached down through the haze to scratch, I realized that I was drenched. Slowly I slithered out from under that colossal mudslide of sleep. I kicked down that wet sheet, pried my body out of the bed, and rotated to a sitting position. Instinctively I groped for my cane, but it was nowhere bedside. The drunken dome of my skull was feverish, and my eyes were hot gel. Although I had a basic control, simple logic, and partial recall, I had not yet detoxified. The gravitational pull was never stronger, inertia never more tempting, but slowly I assembled a whole picture. Old men on double decker cots were regimented tightly around the room so that it held a maximum capacity I had peed in the underside of one such cot, I was naked and wet; slowly all these details dripped onto the sizzling hot frying pan of my brain. On my hands and knees, I felt for my clothes, but I found nothing. I was sure of only the floor. This I pursued to a wall and got to my feet and fumbled around the double beds, only able to open my eyes for long blinks. I was cold but it didn’t matter. Hand over hand, I moved along the rough wall toward a distant door frame of light from which I heard a groaning sound.

When I finally got to the door, I had to readjust to the fluorescent lights, which overexposed the filthy, tiled bathroom. On the very first of a row of unpartitioned toilet bowls an old black guy was making miserable sounds as he tried to shit. I held to the wall, squinted at the floor, and limped over toward the farthest bowl. The floor tiles were cracked. The opposite side of the room was lined with marble urinals. I went to the last where I was about to pee when suddenly my stomach started kicking. Barely had I turned around when my face started spilling gunk. I almost fell head first into the crapper. For several minutes I was stuck there in spasms, as all, dating back to those ledge sandwiches, vomited up. “Whoo wee, I remember gettin’ dat
sick once,” I heard someone behind me say. After finishing, I turned to a gathering of derelicts who were watching.

Slowly I got to my feet and could feel my bloated bladder bursting free. Turning around, I just made it in time for the high arc of urine to hit the marble urinal. In spite of all the agony, all the aches, in spite of the hangover that made my eyes feel like they were spilling out of my head, the transparent piss that was racing out of me brought me to new heights of glory and ecstasy.

“Did they start serving yet?” the black guy at the end shitter asked the exiting spectators.

“Not yet, but yous better hurry. Ernie already turned on the lights.”

“That Ernie’s a scoundrel!” laughed the old guy as he tugged up his trousers.

I hobbled over to one of a line of sinks. The damned sink only had a single faucet; a cold water faucet that had one of those fucking overwound springs that would snap off unless a hand actively applied a constant life-force to hold it open. I jerked with that fucking faucet, trying to wash my face and body, but it was no damned good. Finally I went over to the toilet and took a wad of coarse toilet paper and used it to plug up the drain. Then I filled the dirty basin with cold water and submerged my wounded face in it. When I finally took my face out of that icy water, I was still drowsy as hell so I gave the face a couple stinging slaps. After that, I stroked my fingers slowly over my stubbled and scabbed face, and looking at the blood on my fingertips, I realized that I had broken open a couple of scabs.

“They serving!” I heard someone yell outside. Because there were only those sanitary, “deodorizing” blow driers, I gently patted my face dry with the coarse toilet paper.

Outside the bathroom, a network of fluorescent lights revealed a large barracks-like room packed with men, mainly black and old. Many of the beds were already empty I took a sheet off one and wrapped it around my naked body. Then I followed the others out to the stairwell. There was a long motionless line along the right banister. I got on the end of the line and waited, trying to hold that filthy sheet
around me, toga style. It kept slipping off. Several times, I had to move up a step because the big guys were cutting in down in the front. Finally the line started moving, one step every minute or so.

“There’s my main man.”

“Shake my hand, Ernie.”

“Go get ’em Ern.”

“Hey Ernie, is you still datin’ dat Loni Anderson girl?”

A fat middle-aged guy with apple cheeks, cauliflower ears, and a potato nose wore a fresh T-shirt and a white apron, and as he moseyed up along the procession of broken and dilapidated men, each one either offered a hand or a comment. I held the banister tight in one hand and the sheet tight in the other, and waited for Ernie.

“Where the hell are my clothes?”

“Well, would you looky here,” Ernie said in a loud and humiliating volume and added, “New Jersey’s awake.”

“Huh?”

“What are you talking about?” I asked.

“This ain’t Saint Patty’s day and you ain’t at McSorley’s. I’m talking about how on every major weekend the cops dump me with you drunken Jersey boys. Do me a favor when you get home and tell your friends that before they pass out here, the least they can do is wear an ID tag. Even luggage has that much. Bed space is a hot commodity in these parts.”

“Hold on.” He talked too fast for my shaky comprehension.

“You hold on. When things calm down you can call Mommie and Daddy in my office—collect.”

“No one I know would accept the charges,” I replied drunkenly but he didn’t seem to hear. He just kept walking away down the stairs, and I stood there holding the banister.

Finally I could see the front of the line moving down the stairs. The men were
disappearing into a doorway. When I went through the doorway, I first picked up a tray, then a bowl, mug, spoon, and napkin. Next, someone in white put a small carton of milk on the tray, and the next guy in white put a full ladle of oatmeal in the bowl, and another guy put an orange on the tray. The last guy filled the mug with coffee. Then I took a seat. There was no exchange of words. I had trouble doing this while holding the sheet around me. Men ate everything completely, but due to my sickness, I could only eat one or two bites of the oatmeal.

“You want the orange?” someone asked me, I shook my head no.

“Geez, let him have a chance to finish.” Big Ernie appeared behind me.

“Da man say he didn’t wan it.”

“You can hold on to the orange until you get hungry” Ernie said to me.

“I got nowhere to put it,” I replied, referring to my nakedness.

“Follow me, I guess it’s time for that collect call.”