The Book of Other People (25 page)

‘Have you been harassing my guest, Perkus?’

‘What do you mean?’

Susan Eldred turned to me and collected the signed release, and we made our farewell. Then, as I got to the elevator, Perkus Tooth hurried through the sliding door to join me, crushing his antique felt hat onto his crown as he did. The elevator, like so many others behind midtown façades, was tiny and rattletrap, little more than a glorified dumb-waiter - there was no margin for pretending we hadn’t just been in that office together. Bad eye migrating slightly, Perkus Tooth gave me a lunar look, neither unfriendly nor apologetic. Despite the vintage costume, he wasn’t some dapper retro-fetishist. His shirt’s collar was grubby and crumpled; the green-gray sneakers like mummified sponges glimpsed within a janitor’s bucket.

‘So,’ he said again. This ‘so’ of Perkus’s - his habit of introducing any subject as if in resumption of earlier talk - wasn’t in any sense coercive. Rather, it was as if Perkus had startled himself from a daydream, heard an egging voice in his head and mistaken it for yours. ‘So, I’ll lend you my own copy of
Echolalia
, even though I never lend anything. Because I think you ought to see it.’

‘Sure.’

‘It’s a sort of essay film. Herzog shot it on the set of Morrison Roog’s
Nowhere Near
. Roog’s movie was never finished, you know.
Echolalia
documents Herzog’s attempts to interview Marlon Brando on Roog’s set. Brando doesn’t want to give the interview, and whenever Herzog corners him Brando just parrots whatever Herzog’s said . . . you know, echolalia . . .’

‘Yes,’ I said, flummoxed, as I would so often later find myself, by Tooth’s torrential specifics.

‘But it’s also the only way you can see any of
Nowhere Near
. Morrison Roog destroyed the footage, so the scenes reproduced in
Echolalia
are, ironically, all that remains of the film - ’

Why ‘ironically’? I doubted my hopes of inserting the question. ‘It sounds incredible,’ I said.

‘Of course you know Roog’s suicide was probably faked.’

My nod was a lie. The doors opened, and we stumbled together out to the pavement, tangling at every threshold: ‘You first - ’ ‘Oops - ’ ‘After you - ’ ‘Sorry.’ We faced one another, October mid-Wednesday Manhattan throngs islanding us in their stream. Perkus grew formally clipped, perhaps belatedly eager to show he wasn’t harassing me.

‘So, I’m off.’

‘Very good to see you.’ I’d quit using the word ‘meet’ long ago, replacing it with this foggy equivocation, chastened after the thousandth time someone explained to me that we’d actually met before.

‘So - ’ He ground to a halt, expectant.

‘Yes?’

‘If you want to come by for the tape . . .’

I might have been failing some test, I wasn’t sure. Perkus Tooth dealt in occult knowledge, and measured with secret callipers. I’d never know when I’d crossed an invisible frontier, visible to Perkus in the air between us.

‘Do you want to give me a card?’

He scowled. ‘Eldred knows where to find me.’ His pride intervened, and he was gone.

For a call so life-altering as mine to Susan Eldred’s, I ought to have had some fine reason. Yet here I was, dialing Criterion’s receptionist later that afternoon, asking first for Perkus Tooth and then, when she claimed no familiarity with that name, for Susan Eldred, spurred by nothing better than a cocktail of two parts whim and one part guilt. Manhattan’s volunteer, that’s me, I may as well admit it. Was I curious about
Echolalia
, or Morrison Roog’s faked suicide, or Perkus Tooth’s curious intensities and lulls, or the slippage in his right eye’s gaze? All of it and none of it, that’s the only answer. Perhaps I already adored Perkus Tooth, and already sensed that it was his friendship I required to usher me into the strange next phase of my being. To unmoor me from the curious eddy into which I’d drifted. How very soon after our first encounter I’d come to adore and need Perkus makes it awfully hard to know to what extent such feelings were inexplicably under way in Susan Eldred’s office or that elevator.

‘Your office mate,’ I said. ‘They didn’t recognize his name at the front desk. Maybe I heard it wrong - ’

‘Perkus?’ Susan laughed. ‘He doesn’t work here.’

‘He said he wrote your liner notes.’

‘He’s written a couple, sure. But he doesn’t
work
here. He just comes up and occupies space sometimes. I’m sort of Perkus’s babysitter. I don’t even always notice him anymore - you saw how he can be. I hope he wasn’t bothering you.’

‘No . . . no. I was hoping to get in touch with him, actually.’

Susan Eldred gave me Perkus Tooth’s number, then paused. ‘I guess you must have recognized his name . . .’

‘No.’

‘Well, in fact he’s really quite an amazing critic. When I was at NYU my friends and I all used to idolize him. When I first got the chance to hire him to do a liner note I was quite in awe. It was shocking how young he was, it seemed like I’d grown up seeing his posters and stuff.’

‘Posters?’

‘He used to do this thing where he’d write these rants on posters and put them up all around Manhattan, these sort of brilliant critiques of things, current events, media rumours, public art. They
were
a kind of public art, I guess. Everyone thought it was very mysterious and important. Then he got hired by
Rolling Stone
. They gave him this big column, he was sort of, I don’t know, Hunter Thompson meets Pauline Kael, for about five minutes. If that makes any sense.’

‘Sure.’

‘Anyway, the point is, he sort of used up a lot of people’s patience with a certain kind of . . . paranoid stuff. I didn’t really get it until I started working with him. I mean, I
like
Perkus a lot. I just don’t want you to feel I wasted your time, or got you enmeshed in any . . . schemes.’

People could be absurdly protective, as if a retired actor’s hours were so precious. This was, of course, a second-hand affect, a leakage from Janice’s other-worldly agendas. I was famously in love with a woman who had no time to spare, not even a breath, for she dwelled in a place beyond time or the reach of anyone’s Rolodex, her every breath measured out of pressurized tanks. If an astronaut made room for me on her schedule, my own prerogatives must be as crucial as an astronaut’s. The opposite was true.

‘Thank you,’ I said. ‘I’ll be sure not to get enmeshed.’

Perkus Tooth was my neighbor, it turned out. His apartment was six blocks from mine, on East 84th Street, in one of those anonymous warrens tucked behind innocuous storefronts, buildings without lobbies, let alone doormen. The shop downstairs, Brandy’s Piano Bar, was a corny-looking nightspot I could have passed a thousand times without once noticing. BRANDY’S CUSTOMERS, PLEASE RESPECT OUR NEIGHBORS! pleaded a small sign at the doorway, suggesting a whole tale of complaint calls to the police about noise and fumes. To live in Manhattan is to be persistently amazed at the worlds squirreled inside one another, like those lines of television cable and fresh water and steam heat and outgoing sewage and telephone wire and whatever else which cohabit in the same intestinal holes that pavement-demolishing workmen periodically wrench open to the daylight and to our passing, disturbed glances. We only pretend to live on something as orderly as a grid. Waiting for Perkus Tooth’s door’s buzzer to sound and finding my way upstairs, I felt my interior map expand to allow for the reality of this place, the corridor floor’s lumpy checkerboard mosaic, the cloying citrus of some superintendent’s disinfectant oil, the bank of dented brass mailboxes and the keening of a dog from behind an upstairs door, alerted to the buzzer and my scuffling boot heels. I have trouble believing anything exists until I know it bodily.

Perkus Tooth widened his door just enough for me to slip inside, directly into his kitchen. Perkus, though barefoot, wore another antique-looking suit, green corduroy this time, the only formal thing my entry revealed. The place was a bohemian grotto, the kitchen a kitchen only in the sense of having a sink and stove built in, and a sticker-laden refrigerator wedged into an alcove beside the bathroom door. Books filled the open cabinet spaces above the sink. The countertop was occupied by a CD player and hundreds of disks, in and out of jewel cases, many hand-labeled with a permanent marker. A hot-water pipe whined. Beyond, the other rooms of the apartment were dim at midday, the windows draped. They likely only looked onto ventilation shafts or a paved alley anyway.

And then there were the broadsides Susan Eldred had described. Unframed, thumb-tacked to every wall bare of bookshelves, in the kitchen and in the darkened rooms, were Perkus Tooth’s famous posters, their paper yellowing, the lettering veering from a stylish cartoonist’s or grafittist’s hand-made font to the obsessive scrawl of an outsider artist, or a schizophrenic patient’s pages reproduced in his doctor’s monograph. I recognized them. Remembered them. They’d been ubiquitous downtown a decade before, on construction-site boards, over subway advertisements, another element in the graphic cacophony of the city one gleans helplessly at the edges of vision.

Perkus retreated to give me clearance to shut the door. Stranded in the room’s center in his suit and bare feet, palms defensively wide as if expecting something unsavory to be tossed his way, Perkus reminded me of an Edvard Munch painting I’d once seen, a self-portrait showing the painter wide-eyed and whiskered, shrunken within his clothes. Which is to say, again, that Perkus Tooth seemed older than his age. (I’d never once see Perkus without some part of a suit, even if it was only the pants, topped with a filthy white t-shirt. He never wore jeans.)

‘I’ll get you the videotape,’ he said, as if I’d challenged him.

‘Great.’

‘Let me find it. You can sit down - ’ He pulled out a chair at a small, linoleum-topped table, like something you’d see in a diner. The chair matched the table - a dinette set, a collector’s item. Perkus Tooth was nothing if not a collector. ‘Here.’ He took a perfect finished joint from where it waited in the lip of an ashtray, clamped it in his mouth and ignited the tip, then handed it to me unquestioningly. It takes one, I suppose, to know one. I drew on it while he went into the other room. When he returned - with a VHS cassette and his sneakers and a balled-up pair of white socks - he accepted the joint from me and smoked an inch of it himself, intently.

‘Do you want to get something to eat? I haven’t been out all day.’ He laced his hi-tops.

‘Sure,’ I said.

Out
, for Perkus Tooth, I’d now begun to learn, wasn’t usually far. He liked to feed at a glossy hamburger palace around the corner on Second Avenue, called Jackson Hole, a den of gleaming chrome and newer, faker versions of the linoleum table in his kitchen, lodged in chubby red-vinyl booths. At four in the afternoon we were pretty well alone there, the jukebox blaring hits to cover our bemused, befogged talk. It had been a while since I’d smoked pot; everything was dawning strange, signals received through an atmosphere murky with hesitations, the whole universe drifting untethered like Perkus Tooth’s vagrant eyeball. The waitress seemed to know Perkus, but he didn’t greet her or touch his menu. He asked for a cheeseburger deluxe and a Coca-Cola. Helpless, I dittoed his order. Perkus seemed to dwell in this place as he had at Criterion’s offices, indifferently, obliquely, as if he’d been born there yet still hadn’t taken notice of it.

In the middle of our meal Perkus halted some rant about Werner Herzog or Marlon Brando or Morrison Roog to announce what he’d made of me so far. ‘So, you’ve gotten by to this point by being cute, haven’t you, Chase?’ His spidery fingers, elbow-propped on the linoleum, kept the oozing, gory, Jackson Hole burger aloft to mask his expression, and cantilevered far enough from his lap to protect those dapper threads. One eye fixed me while the other crawled, now seeming a scalpel in operation on my own face. ‘You haven’t changed, you’re like a dreamy child, that’s the secret of your appeal. But they love you. They watch you like you’re still on television.’

‘Who?’

‘The rich people. The Manhattanites - you know who I mean.’

‘Yes,’ I said.

‘You’re supposed to be the saddest man in Manhattan,’ he said. ‘Because of the astronaut who can’t come home.’

‘Yes.’

‘That’s what they adore.’

‘I guess so.’

‘So, just keep your eyes and ears open,’ he said. ‘You’re in a position to learn things.’

What things? Before I could ask, we were off again. Perkus’s spiel encompassed Monte Hellman, eBay, Greil Marcus’s
Lipstick Traces
, the Mafia’s blackmailing of J. Edgar Hoover over erotic secrets (resulting in the bogus amplification of Cold War fear and therefore the whole of our contemporary landscape), Vladimir Mayakovsky and the Futurists, Chet Baker, Nothingism, the ruination Giuliani’s administration had brought to the sacred squalor of Times Square, the genius of
The Gnuppet Show
, Frederick Exley, Jacques Rivette’s impossible-to-see thirteen-hour movie
Out 1
, corruption of the arts by commerce generally, Slavoj Zizek on Hitch-cock, Franz Marplot’s biography of G. K. Chesterton, Norman Mailer on Muhammad Ali, Norman Mailer on graffiti and the space program, Brando as dissident icon, Brando as sexual saint, Brando as Napoleon in exile. Names I knew and didn’t. Others I’d heard once and never troubled to wonder about. Mailer, again and again, and Brando even more often - Perkus Tooth’s primary idols seemed to be this robust and treacherous pair, which only made Perkus seem frailer and more harmless by contrast, without ballast in his pencil-legged suit. Maybe he ate Jackson Hole burgers in an attempt to burgeon himself, seeking girth in hopes of attracting the attention of Norman and Marlon, his chosen peers.

He had the waitress refill his gallon-sized Coke, then, as our afternoon turned to evening, washed it all down with black coffee. In our talk, marijuana confusion now gave way to caffeinated jags, like a cloudbank penetrated by buzzing Fokker airplanes. Did I read the
New Yorker
? This question had a dangerous urgency. It wasn’t any one writer or article he was worried about, but the
font
. The meaning embedded, at a preconscious level, by the look of the magazine; the seal, as he described it, that the typography and layout put on dialectical thought. According to Perkus, to read the
New Yorker
was to find that you always already agreed, not with the
New Yorker
but, much more dismayingly, with
yourself
. I tried hard to understand. Apparently here was the paranoia Susan Eldred had warned me of: the
New Yorker
’s font was controlling, perhaps attacking, Perkus Tooth’s mind. To defend himself he frequently retyped their articles and printed them out in simple Courier, an attempt to dissolve the magazine’s oppressive context. Once, I’d entered his apartment to find him on his carpet with a pair of scissors, furiously slicing up and rearranging an issue of the magazine, trying to shatter its spell on his brain. ‘So, how’, he asked me another time, apropos of nothing, ‘does a
New Yorker
writer become a
New Yorker
writer?’ The falsely casual ‘so’ masking a pure anxiety. It wasn’t a question with an answer.