The Fuck Up (3 page)

Stay here tonight. Home is far. The walk, dangerous. The night, cold. Sure, she replies, as if with a slumber party companion. His wife—the menace—away for the holidays, an annual Florida getaway ritual. His slithering and forked tongue moving up and down the PG-13 parts of that luscious body. Wait till she’s asleep. He’s barely restraining, knowing full well this is the last time he’ll drain the goblet, a valediction to the vagina. Beyond this—memories. When her liquor-naive body can resist no more, and the chasm of slumber finally gulps her, he leers. First, just a veiny, reptilian hand stroking along those sacred miniature curls. A gourmand enjoys his banquet slowly, sumptuously. But starvation collapses pacing, hot, flushed thoughts race: if passion were reason,
erectus ergo sum!

Middle-aged, unilateral copulation; grunt/rasped breaths, a semi-erect display, a monsoon of sweat, his nose beginning to itch and run, palpitations, a free hand grants a nipples tweak, lips stroked, reactions reaped, but…but…premature sputterings, flounderings, a disheartening sperm count, hyperventilation…sleep.

Sarah awoke me the next morning. I was naked and shivering. The blanket had fallen to the floor. Sarah had come home earlier than expected. “I couldn’t take the parents.” Apparently everything her mother served was garnished with guilt.

I was glad to be back with Sarah. Despite the holiday break, though, she
was still heavily embroiled in school matters and the hunt for a good graduate school. I sensed something was wrong when at one point I tried to kiss her, and she pushed me away and said, “Not now.”

“What’s the matter?” I asked.

“Why are you such a mess?”

“I’m always a mess. You should be concerned when I’m not a mess.”

“I suppose,” she replied in a small and distant voice.

The only affection I could offer Sarah seemed generated from my hostility to Eunice. At one organic moment I hugged and kissed Sarah, but she remained distant and finally she lapsed into silence. I attributed it to her being worn thin by the parents. She needed to be left alone a while. It was already five o’clock, the sun had set—a cold day was now bleak. I was scheduled to work that night. I kissed her, changed my clothes, and went off to the theater.

When I got there, everyone seemed unusually kind. The candy girl couldn’t offer me enough popcorn. The manager on duty a new guy with whom I got along well, realized that I was tired and allowed me to sit in the lobby and relax. I wasn’t curious about the kindness; I assumed that it was fate’s compensation for all the recent misdealings. I didn’t anticipate that it was all just pity for what was to come. After the movie, I went into Pepe’s office, where he sat like a fat cat eyeing me.

The evening’s intake of cash was in the box on the desk between us. He put the box in a desk drawer. I figured I had been working here for a year now and perhaps he felt it was time to offer me a manager’s position. Staring down at other items that were sprawled along his desktop, he started speaking. “This isn’t easy, because you were here longer than just about anyone else, but I’m going to have to release you.”

“Huh?”

“One of the patrons complained that you were… duplicitous.”

“Duplicitous?!!”

“Uhhh, yeah.”

“Spare me that S.A.T. crap! I went to college!”

“Fine, the fact is I don’t like you.”

“Why?”

“You started a bad habit. People are asking for raises. Whenever I turn someone down, they bring up your name. I’ve got to put an end to this. Simple as that.”

“You can’t do this. I’ll take you to the fucking labor relations board.”

“Go ahead, you don’t belong to a union; this is only a minimum wage job.”

“I gave you a year of my life. I’ve always been on time, courteous. What kind of a person are you!”

Silently he ushered me to his office door where he handed me an envelope. “This is what we owe you.”

Canned! It was the second job that I had been fired from and I felt guilty.

As I walked home, I pieced together details and realized that he had waited until after the holidays to fire me because he knew that nobody else would work on Christmas day for just minimum wage.

When I arrived home, Sarah wasn’t there. By the time I finished soaking in a bath while watching TV, it was midnight. Sarah still wasn’t home. Since I was wide awake and was mulling over being fired, I dressed and decided to go out for a beer. In the East Village most of the bars had started out as Eastern European hangouts, but more and more they became alcoholic cafeterias due to the growing influx of students. By the mid-eighties, the last of the Iron Curtain refugees in most of these neighborhood pubs were just the bartenders.

As I peeked into the many area bars like the Verkhovina and the Blue and
Gold looking for a familiar face, it struck me how time had passed. All of the old crowd had moved on. After stopping here and there, I arrived at the Holiday Lounge on Saint Mark’s Place. It was brimming with children who paid for overpriced drinks with their parent’s money. By the time I had shoved through them to the rear, I felt ancient. Just as I was about to head back home, I caught sight of a chunky punk in a leather jacket. He was sitting in a booth kissing some girl who was lying horizontally along the bench with her head lying idly across his fat lap. When I positioned around to look at her, my heart quit—it was Sarah! I grabbed his collar and yanked him up.

“What the fuck is your problem?” he yelled.

“I’m her husband!” I hollered. When I tried to pull her upright, she remained drunk and limp.

“What the fuck are you doing?” I shouted, shaking her to gain some degree of sobriety.

“What the fuck am I doing?” She leered. “The same thing you’ve been doing for the past month.”

“What?”

“Humping that candy girl, you fucker.” And she slapped me full in the face and stormed out. I felt my skin turn into goose pimples and walked past the prepubescents, who looked back at me, the twenty-three-year-old cuck-old. I slowly walked home, chewing my bottom lip to a pulp as I juggled half-lies and half-truths seeking a plausible reconciliation.

When I got home, Sarah had heaped all my clothes in the hall and left a sign taped to the outside of the door: “If you try to come in, I’ll call the police.”

I collected everything off the floor: some books, three T-shirts, five pairs of underpants, an out-of-style suit and a pair of polished dress shoes. With that big ball in my arms, I headed down First Avenue to the F train on Houston Street.

The F train
stopped at the Carroll Street station in Brooklyn. Once again, I was off to stay with Helmsley. His apartment was the only place I could go without having to ask permission; I had his key. Neither of us had any immediate family, so we were brother orphans.

He also happened to be one of the most intelligent and determined people I had ever known: he was one of the youngest people ever to attain a professorship at Bryn Mawr. I later learned that he was also one of the youngest professors ever dismissed from Bryn Mawr. Helmsley said they found him a threat to convention; an old colleague quietly confided that it was psychological instability.

I had met him on the F train two years earlier. He was reading Ulick Varange’s book
Imperium.
It was a very hard book to find and few knew about it. Whether it was worth getting or knowing about was another question. He claimed that it was a mild poly-philosophical work but it was wonderful prose satire. When I asked him how he could dismiss a poly-philosophical work as satirical prose, he explained that he viewed our present era as nothing more than a retrenched “Age of Reason.” He showed a preference toward the animist perspective, which preserved the life-force, to man’s harnessing perspective, which was simply a castrating method analysis.

And we spent the night riding around on the F train with him usually talking and me usually listening. I had a lot more patience back then and was easily dazzled by bullshit.

Beyond maintaining his life functions, Helmsley spent almost all his time on two activities: writing and reading. He explained to me that he used to write more than he read but lately the scale had been tipping the other way. He had had two thick and confusing books of poetry published in an extremely limited and costly edition by the now-defunct Necro Publications.

Helmsley claimed that the two works quelled all further desires to be published. But occasionally I’d find form rejections in the garbage can, and I strongly suspected him of being a closet submitter. He actually had a decent reputation as a reviewer and had a growing reputation as a translator. Inexplicably he regarded this as hack work, published under a pseudonym, and never boasted about a publication.

He still wrote and wasn’t shy about the creative process. When he was working on a project, you knew it. He would completely immerse himself in the subject. Although everything was poetic in form, he was paying more and more attention to different cultures through history. He would frequent the museums, attend seminars, study languages, and although he never did, he always longed to visit the subject country. Usually he tried the next best thing, which was re-creating the psycho/eco/politico/-environment and wrestling with the questions that might occupy one of his poetic foils.

He took this study to all ends. One time, while he was studying revolutionary France, he spent a week attempting to re-create the heartburn and gastritis of the time. Could a mushy crepe significantly contribute enough fury to provoke a revolution? I did my own cooking that week.

Due to the ten-percent money-market return that existed in 1983, in which he had invested his parental inheritance minus only the pittance that he lived on, he was actually able to save a little each month and had no need for a job.

“Just from the garbage America throws out,” he once said, “one could live like a well-to-doer in a third-world country.”

His thrift often breached into pettiness. His rent controlled apartment was stocked with charitably resold bargains, irregular discounts, and damaged goods. He pedalled an old cast-iron bike around the town, and his pockets were usually lined with hurriedly snatched packets of sugar and other assorted sealed condiments which he would habitually take when the opportunity arose.

Although he was a passionate lover of all arts, literature was what he tried to produce. To hear him casually rattle off a favorite passage or stanza in which each intonation had been rehearsed to a grace—I would imagine it was like listening to Caruso sing his favorite opera. He easily could sound pompous but he was actually very modest. In fact, he preferred relating to the arts alone. On those occasions when I bore witness, he seemed to go beyond propriety with his eyes rolling and his body swaying like a Shaker in a spiritual fit. I’d get nervous, and try to snap him out of it.

I would usually see a lot of Helmsley for a couple of weeks and then a stretch of time would pass without so much as a phone call. I hadn’t spoken to him for at least two months, but whenever we resumed our friendship it carried an instant familiarity as if only a day had gone by He always seemed glad to see me and always had a place on his couch if I needed a bunk. When we first met, I was writing my premature memoir. He was impressed by the idea, and the amount of time and attention I was giving to it. Because of that I think that he convinced himself I would someday be a bona fide writer.

The subway screeched into the Carroll Street station. It was cold and late and my arms were full with my belongings as I trudged to Helmsleys house. When I knocked on his door, he mindlessly threw it open wide. Despite his under-heated apartment, he was completely nude and bathing in sweat. In his right hand was an old Modern Library copy of
Light in August.
When I first met Helmsley he explained how he had put together his own anthology of selections and which, for the sheer pleasure of reading, he would reread, again and again.

“You mean you just reread excerpts? Is it fair to take a work out of context like that?”

“When you want to hear a song, do you feel compelled to always listen to an entire album?” The particular tune that I had walked in on was the last two pages of Chapter Eighteen—the execution and castration of Joe Christmas. It was high on Helmsleys hit list.

“What’s up?” he asked as soon as I dumped all my worldly goods onto his hard couch.

“Sarah gave me the old farewell.”

“What happened?”

“I fucked up.”

“You got into a fight?”

I went into his kitchen, filled a glass with water, emptied it in a gulp, and replied, “No, I transgressed.”

He stopped asking questions and just gave me a wide-eyed expression.

“I drew water from the well of another.”

“I hope she was worth it.”

“That, I’ll never know.” He gave me another of his curious expressions.

“Are you telling me that you lost everything for her and you didn’t even score?”

I lay on my smelly worldly possessions. “It was a turgid punishment; a flaccid crime.”

Helmsley marched back into the living room fully dressed in his second-hand clothes. “I was about to go for a walk. You’re invited if you like.”

I needed to stew for a while, so he left. I turned off the lamp and thought about Sarah. I had always wanted to believe that love was a hypnotic and sustained state of lust, respect, etc., but that never happened with Sarah or anybody else. We did have a good relationship. Sarah was a nice, attractive, intelligent girl. We functioned well together. To be young and alone in New York City meant you either had to have a lot of parental assistance or have a lot of luck, and I had neither. Entry-level salaries for most good jobs could not pay for basic living expenses. Unless you wanted a quirky roommate, the economy encouraged you to find a lover. Sarah and I complemented each other well. We were emotionally matched and although things never got too sweet, they never got too sour.

At first, as always, the sex was sublime, but after a couple of months that petered out, and if we were lucky, which was about once every two weeks, one of us would discover or rediscover some novel aspect that would serve as arousing. We enjoyed each others sense of humor and knew each others moods, and how to provide mutual comfort. But also I think we both understood that appreciation grew with distance and every so often a controlled neglect was healthy.