The Secret Society of Demolition Writers (10 page)

Afterwards, you gauged every woman you saw as a possible girlfriend, but felt unable to ask for a date in case you were gay. Around this time, information about AIDS was scanty and full of rumor, and you heard it was some sort of super-clap from Mexico. After learning it attacked gay men, you began worrying that you had it, and read as much as you could about AIDS. One of the symptoms was listed as “loose stool.” You knelt before the toilet and tried to measure the relative looseness of your stool by prodding it with a pencil. This actually loosened the stool even more, which immediately made you scared that you had AIDS. The bathroom door swung open and in walked one of the guys who lived down the hall of your rooming house. He saw you bent over the toilet and said, what are you doing? You stared at him, then stared at the toilet full of brown water which you were stirring with a pencil, and realized with a tremendous sense of relief that for the past several months you had been playing with your own psychological shit, and now you were doing it for real. Very slowly you said, I like women. He backed from the bathroom and never spoke to you again.

Years pass and you marry someone and own major appliances. There is a mortgage and car insurance, and you attend grade school functions so your kids can see you there. Outright flight looks good a lot. You and Carlos up in Alaska would be ideal. The best would be if Pynchon was there, and the three of you had a little weed field that was guarded by the Weatherman-woman, who turned out to be really smart. She’d even learned some minor first-aid skills from her doctor husband, and could provide medical assistance to the Alaska natives, who would become your buddies and teach you how to make igloos. Now, that would be deck with a capital D.

If you’d even shown the slightest bit of interest in money fifteen years ago, you might still be with that French girl and she’d have a tattoo. After all, you two did have a romantic year in Paris, something that can never be taken away or duplicated. You hit every museum and park in the city. You studied at L’Alliance Française, visited the former ateliers of the great artists, plus the graves of Modigliani, Gertrude Stein, Apollinaire, and Jim Morrison. You lived in hotels, ate in cafés, and kissed in beautiful gardens. Then you went broke. Back in the States, you had a cramped apartment in Salem, and looked for a bigger place in Boston. Finally, after seeing a dozen that were no good, she came home and said she found a place and you said great where, and she said Malden, and you said great how much, and she said cheap, and you said great when do we move in. She said we don’t, it’s just for me. She moved out and took the furniture and you slept on the floor where the bed had been. (This was an extremely dramatic gesture that you are simultaneously embarrassed by and proud of now. Even worse, a guy dropped by to visit and you lay down on the floor to feign a nap so he could find you and offer sympathy.) Pretty soon after all this you thought you were gay.

These days you’ve quit all your bad habits and sometimes you miss them. You don’t use drugs, smoke cigarettes, drink liquor, drive fast, gamble, or even drink coffee anymore. It’s not the vices you long for but the exhilaration of risk. Otherwise you feel crushed by the mundane patterns of existence— errands and chores, food and sleep, loveless sex and paying bills. At this moment your entire life has led to sitting alone on the deck and being aware of it.

The eastern sky has begun to glow. You never saw that French girlfriend again, and you hope she got her picket fence. You hope she got everything she wanted out West. You hope your wife does, too.

Wonderland

THERE ARE TWO GREAT THINGS about being accessories editor for a major women’s fashion magazine, a magazine that I can’t name but we all know what it is because, face it, there’s only one major women’s fashion magazine. The first is the belts. A belt isn’t something you want to really pour a lot of change into. Either you have your boring basic black lizard belt, what we fash-mag hags call “a classic piece.” Or you have your leopard belt, or your magenta patent belt, or some chain thing that looks like it ought to be used by law enforcement, the kind of thing you wear once and find, three years later, on the floor of your closet behind your waterproof boots and some old bikinis with a nasty stain.

If you’re accessories editor of a major women’s fashion magazine (or, more accurately,
the
major fashion women’s magazine), there’s a whole closet full of belts. You just go in and snag one, put it back the next morning. Or not. I have a seven-hundred-dollar ponyskin belt with a horsehead buckle somewhere in my closet, and, trust me, there’s no way I paid for it.

The other great thing is being a source for stories. Better than therapy and a whole helluva lot cheaper. You didn’t really think all those girls went out there in their stiletto boots and interviewed secretaries and schoolteachers, did you? Anytime you read a story about having sex with your boss or dealing with childhood trauma or knowing when to leave, every single person in it works at the magazine that’s running the story, except for one or two who are the best friends of the person writing the story. Yeah, and the ones who are made up completely.

Probably most of the stories we tell each other are made up, too. We sit around the new company cafeteria, the official chow-down spot for anorexics and egomaniacs, and somebody has a tape recorder and then three months later there’s whatever we said in print, whether it’s true or not. Except that I, for example, get described as “Sharon, 42, a nurse from the Midwest” or “Alicia, 25, who works in advertising in Chicago.”

It’s funny to watch the faces of some of the guys from the business side when they walk by with their slabs of salmon. The business-side guys always stare at us, since to work at the mag you have to look really really good, and they always eavesdrop and turn a really unattractive shade of red when they hear what we’re saying, especially when we’re all concentrating on a story. “A leopard thong and whipped cream,” one of us will yell, or “When his ex calls during sex.” That was for a story on the ultimate turnoffs, and Selena in Features was so sad that she didn’t work for Cosmo, because then that could have been the headline. Instead we had to go with something tasteful like “When Love Goes.” God, I hate tasteful.

So there we were, having salads with no dressing and chocolate mousse after, the bulimic’s lunch of choice, and Selena, who always gets the best assignments because she’s sleeping with the deputy publisher and is a pretty good writer, says she’s got a new one. It’s going to be called “Dating Down.” She goes around the table, saying, “Okay, I need stories about sleeping with men below your station.” She had everything she needed before two o’clock. Cops, construction workers, doormen, even a pizza delivery guy who got fired because it took him forty-five minutes to deliver an extra-cheese three blocks away from the shop: you don’t need the details. Besides, if you read the March issue, the one with Demi Moore and her three daughters in Vera Wang eveningwear on the cover, you already got them.

“Not me, honey,” I said. “I fuck up. Way up.” Nothing they could say would budge me. That was the biggest lie I’ve ever told them, bigger than the one about the account exec buying me the Kelly bag. (My mother hated the color and gave it to me at Thanksgiving.)

Here’s the truth: Halfway through junior year in college I started to sleep with a guy who worked custodial in the dorm. In January the water in the radiator pipes hardly ever rose to the ninth floor, which is where I lived in a single down a corner hallway. Once, you’d probably been able to see across to the administration building from my window, but sometime in the 1960s they’d put up a student center that blocked off everything, including the light. It was one of those buildings that was so ugly it was almost cool, like plastic jewelry. All I could see out my window was the frosted glass of a men’s-room window in the student center across eight feet of gray air. I knew it was a men’s room because almost everyone who came in stood for a minute, then did this jerky dip, turned, and disappeared. It didn’t take a genius to figure out the silhouette of a guy taking a piss.

Lauren, who played squash with me Tuesday afternoons, thought it was the greatest when I pointed it out to her. “Oh my God,” she said. “You have to write about this.”

“It’s incredibly boring,” I said.

After ten minutes she’d sighed. It sounded like she’d been holding her breath, waiting for something to happen. Four guys had taken a piss, one in a red shirt, two in black shirts, and one wearing something with writing that was smeared by the frosted glass.

“You’re right,” she said.

In January this room was so dark and cold that I put the light on when I got up, at noon, for my History of Dutch Painting 1647 to blah blah blah, and left it on all day. Sometimes I even fell asleep with the lights on. I took half an Ambien every day at two in the morning, or, if I’d been to a party, when I got home, and it zonked me out so fast—there’s the bed, there’s the comforter, bam, you’re gone—that lots of times I never got to turn the light off at all.

I hardly ever let anyone come to my room for sex, and I never let anyone stay afterwards. I don’t like to sleep in the same bed with another person. My little sister used to have nightmares and she’d come in in the middle of the night, whimpering, smelling like piss and chocolate milk, and I’d say, Tough, pull out the trundle. She’d reach out and hold on to the corner of my blanket until she fell back to sleep. That was as far as I was willing to go. “You are one cold bitch,” my friend Edgar said one night in Peripatetic when I told him that.

“Excuse me, but everyone has something that bothers them,” I said.

“What are you going to do if you ever get married?” he said.

“Shoot myself?”

Everyone thought I was being a crybaby when I got back from Christmas break and kept calling downstairs to maintenance about the cold. “You could wear the fur-lined parka to bed,” said a guy who was a vegan at the other end of the hall when I was yelling at our RA.

“This is none of your fucking business, soy boy,” I said.

“I promise, I’ll see what I can do,” said the RA, who kept one of those pathetic white boards on her door so we could write her messages. It was a new rule, since a freshman two floors down had killed herself, as though if there’d been a white board up the freshman would have written “I’M CLINICALLY DEPRESSED AND I’M GOING TO TAKE FORTY SECONAL” on it. For the first five days after I got back I had written “IT IS COLD IN MY ROOM,” and the RA had erased it each night. Finally I wrote “IT IS AS COLD AS A WITCH’S TIT IN MY ROOM.”

“WHAT IS SO COLD ABOUT A WITCH’S TIT?” someone wrote below it.

“YOU MUST NOT KNOW TOO MANY WITCHES,” someone wrote under that.

“YOU ARE ALL CHILDISH,” someone printed at the bottom, but there was no room left so the i-s-h went up the side.

“MY WHITE BOARD IS NOT A BATHROOM WALL,” the RA wrote after she’d erased everything else.

Jesus showed up the next day, probably because I wore the RA down. (Wearing people down is my specialty. Ask the former accessories editor.) Jesus was wearing the green work shirt and work pants that the college made the custodial staff wear, and a wide leather belt around his waist cinched tight. The leather was caramel colored, like my Frye boots. He looked good. No plumber’s crack when he bent down to look at the radiator. If the poor bastard had just had a plumber’s crack, maybe he’d be alive now, going gray and fixing the door hinges for snotty college students.

“Nice belt,” I said.

“I have a bad back,” he said. He had a slight accent, so that it sounded like “bed beck.” The flag of Puerto Rico was tattooed on the back of his left hand. It must have hurt like hell. I got a mermaid on the small of my back when I was on spring break junior year of high school; it was half the size of the flag and I’d had four rum punches to get through it.

“How often you bleed the radiator?” he said.

“Say what?” I said, standing as close as I could without actually touching him. He was wearing one of those high school colognes, but I thought I could smell cigarettes, too, and maybe a hint of chronic. I liked chronic. It didn’t make me sleepy like ordinary pot did.

“You don’t bleed the radiator?”

“I don’t touch the radiator.”

He sighed and used a wrench on the radiator. A long sound just like his sigh came from the floor in front of him. He turned the wrench and the flag of Puerto Rico went up down up down. The hissing stopped and he smiled at me. He was damn good-looking, and I was bored, and so on and so forth. I didn’t feel bad at the time. At the time I felt good.

Maybe if he’d been working there longer he would have known to stay away from me. But he’d only been working at the university since September. Before that, before he’d hurt his back, he’d been a window washer. That was how he hurt his back; he said the harness didn’t support it properly.

“These windows are dirty,” he said a month later, standing naked, blowing the smoke from a big spliff out a small crack at the bottom. I’d been right about the chronic, it turned out.

You want to know how I got him to sleep with me? One day a jammed drawer and a breast touching his bicep, two days later a stiff lock. “Stiff,” I kept repeating. “Very stiff.” The following week a denim skirt and the Frye boots with no underwear. I was an amateur then. It took him three weeks to get his clothes completely off, not because he was shy but because he was quick. The first two times he didn’t even unbuckle the back support belt. No preliminaries. I liked that. I was so tired of college-boy technique: now I’m going to do this, now this, how about this, do you like that? If I wanted a lecture I’d go to a seminar.

Jesus never once asked me if I liked something. I don’t think he cared. I liked that, too. Out of habit I tried hard to get him to talk, to say something that would piss me off, to say something, but mainly Jesus spoke a language of shrugs, frowns, inhaled joints, and raised eyebrows. Also a language of sex. Hands, mouth, dick. For a guy who didn’t care whether you were having a good time or not, he sure could show you one. Or maybe it was just me. The therapist my mother made me see during high school said I liked to be treated badly. “A masochist,” I said.

“Full-blown masochism is a complex diagnosis,” the shrink said. A female shrink. They wouldn’t send me to a guy because of how I’d wound up in shrinkage in the first place.

After four months here’s what I knew about Jesus: that he lived in the Bronx. That he owned a van. That he hated the smell of coffee. That he hated the taste of cigarettes. (Tough shit.) That he hated the job and wanted to go back to windows, or some other outside work. That he got the tattoo in San Juan on a visit home to his mother. That he liked crappy pop music and thought he could sing. That he was wrong about that.

Early on I couldn’t find my diamond stud earrings and I asked if he’d seen them. The next time I called and said my window wouldn’t go up all the way they sent an old fat guy with a silver comb-over and one of those hideous light-bulb bodies, big chest and belly, no ass.

“I found them underneath the bed, all right?” I hissed at Jesus the next day in the back room where they kept the security cameras.

“Fuck you,” he said. “I don’t steal.”

“I didn’t exactly say that you stole them.”

“You did exactly say it. Also thinking it. Joe comes to your room from now on.”

It took me almost two weeks to get him back. “God, are you in a pissy mood,” Lauren said.

“I hate my parents,” I said randomly.

She rolled her eyes. “Please, God, not again.”

My parents are both shrinks. Were both shrinks. I hear the cognoscenti out there thinking: well, that explains it.

That’s part of it. Another part is that when we were at Hilton Head for Christmas when I was fourteen my father took my sister out to get her some new tennis shoes and ran the convertible into the back of a flatbed. First a family of four, then a family of two. Then three when my mother married another shrink she’d known since med school after he managed to dump his wife (not a shrink). Stepdad is another part of the problem, but maybe I won’t go there. I don’t have all day.

The last words my mother and I ever heard my sister say were, “I don’t understand why I can’t wear her tennis shoes. We’re the same size.”

Jesus didn’t like shrinks either. He seemed to have at least a passing understanding of what they did. The longest speech I ever heard him deliver was a shrink speech. “Always messing with your head,” he said, scratching. “Always saying this that and the other thing, and then when you really think about it, it’s nothing. Nothing. And how much they make an hour, huh?”

“Two-fifty,” I said. “The good ones.”

Jesus worked the day shift and had lunch from one to two, which could have been a bad deal because he got off at three and who wants to take a break, work for another hour, then get off work for the day? But luckily I had no classes until three on Tuesday and Thursday, and no classes at all on Friday, so he could get a sandwich and take the freight elevator up. The freight elevator was right across the hall from my door, which seemed like kismet.

“You think I’m a whore?” I said one day when we’d gone so long, on my desk, on the floor, up against the window, he didn’t get to eat his sandwich.

“So so,” he said, buckling his belt.

“Whatever,” I said.

“You want me to say no, I say no. But you don’t want me to say no. You want me to say yes.”

“Who the fuck are you, Sigmund Freud?”

He shrugged and tucked in the back of his shirt. He hated plumber’s butt as much as I did. “Who knows why people are fucked up, huh? They just are. You. Me.”