Thoughts Without Cigarettes (33 page)

Parting from each other turned out to be harder than either of us had expected, though Butch, despite having had to put up with the torture of seeing her with someone I think he secretly, or not so secretly, looked down on—
me
—seemed almost mirthful over the thought of her suffering. It really didn't matter: I never saw her again, and if the truth be told, once again I am at a loss for coming up with a happy ending to yet another of my tales.

We wrote each other for a few years, then that stopped, and I really didn't know anything more about her until about a decade later, when Butch told me, as he tended bar in his father's place, that Ellie, for whatever reasons, had committed suicide—and as casually, with a smirk on his face in fact, as if he were reporting a baseball score. Sometime thereafter, Butch himself died in a car wreck, hitting an overpass on the Jersey turnpike while driving his father's Cadillac at over one hundred miles an hour, possibly, as neighborhood gossip speculated, on LSD. That news was broadcast widely, incidentally, on both radio and TV because among his passengers was one of his former classmates at Colorado, Frank Gifford's son, Kyle, who was badly injured.

On the other hand, despite my occasional sorry attempt at fitting in with the hippies, all of twenty-two, I passed a year working in one of the more incredibly sophisticated literature-nurturing jobs of all time: as a salesclerk at Macy's department store. It was actually far better than it sounds, though the pay stank and the store had been going through a decline in those days. I have no idea why I turned up in their second-floor employment office one morning, but I do recall telling the interviewer that I had an aunt, Maya, who had once worked for them in the 1940s, and I suppose that gave me a slight edge. I must have seemed respectable enough, having cut my hair short for my job hunt, and going to college at night also didn't hurt my chances, and so they hired me.

I've since looked back, dreaming about writing the great department store novel, though composing anything else but songs wouldn't have occurred to me back then. My on-the-job training, which came down to learning about “send” and “take” orders and the working of an archaic cash register, lasted for a few weeks, if that, whereupon my floor manager, a certain tall and regal Sicilian, Mr. Trampani, whom I rather liked, put me to work selling curtain rods and window shades, among other household items.

I also had a stint up on the seventh floor selling trendy new items like antigravity pens and neon dial clocks for a department they named Design Seven, where, wearing a blue frock one afternoon, I had the embarrassment of encountering some of my Brandeis hippie schoolmates, who thought finding me in such a straitlaced job the funniest thing in the world. Then, too, I occasionally worked as a flyer, filling in at different departments—shoes, electronics, furniture—a fun rotation since it broke the monotony and repetitious nature of those days, and most spectacularly so during the holiday season, when whatever low morale plagued the employees vanished in the overwhelmingly magical onslaught of Christmas cheer, as the mostly gay display-window staff went crazy decorating the store. That old-time movie
Miracle on Thirty-Fourth Street,
which is set in Macy's, inevitably came into all of our heads—you couldn't avoid it. In the employees' dining room on the ninth floor, stills from it hung on the walls, and a pianist wearing a Santa Claus cap played carols on an upright set off in the corner, next to a little tree: In such an ambience, I couldn't help but daydream about meeting Edmund Gwenn's Kris Kringle in the corridors; also, if you ever wonder where those sidewalk Santas, ringing their bells and going ho-ho-ho for the Salvation Army, come from, in those days at least, you would have only had to look in the Macy's basement employees' locker rooms, where some twenty or so of those volunteers gathered to get into costume in the mornings.

Actually, I never really had much to complain about working there and I did a good enough job, being fluent not in Spanish but in numbers. Mr. Trampani thought enough of my performance to actually tell me one afternoon, “I've had my eye on you for some time, young man,” as if delivering a line from a movie, and went on to offer me the opportunity to study, at the company's expense, at their management training school in, of all places, Denver, Colorado. According to him, I would have a wonderful future in retail if I wanted one. But even back then, while I really appreciated the fact that he was looking out for me, I couldn't see myself committing to anything for long.

At so young an age, I had, despite my tendency to go off the deep end emotionally, endless reserves of energy. After working all day, about three nights a week, I'd take a series of subway trains and end up at the far northwest Bronx, where I took some fill-in courses at Lehman College. My big goal was to matriculate to City College, where, in the event that I did not make it as a musician, I believed, I'd end up studying to become a schoolteacher of some kind. I became one of those fellows you'd see hunched over a history or math textbook on the number 4 train heading uptown, at around seven at night, later making my way off that El and walking the six or so blocks to the school, as if it were nothing at all. (I couldn't begin to do that now, night after night.) I'm not sure how I managed to stay alert during the unavoidable torpor of those classes—most of the students, many of them older, had full-time jobs and were often low of energy—but we were allowed to drink coffee and to smoke in the classrooms. Some teachers even kept ashtrays handy, but I'd also bring along one of my own (cheap, metallic, the kind sold in a John's Bargain Store for a dime apiece), and if no transit cops were around later, on my way home, I'd have a smoke on the platform, during those endless waits for the train, inevitably thinking, at some point of the night, about my poor father.

In those years, I had a girlfriend who happened to be into acting, Carol, a lady I met while babysitting my friend Tommy Muller-Thym on one of those nights when he had gotten too high on LSD for his own good. (As when he, a rambunctious soul, would speak of wanting to toss a brick through a police car window.) We were in the Gold Rail bar, where Tommy, in the midst of stunning hallucinations, had attempted to pick up her across-the-hall neighbor, a staunch feminist of a patrician upbringing, as they were sitting by a grubby initialincised table next to us. According to Tommy, her feminist friend needed a good screwing to get rid of her haughty attitude, and told her so. While that remark did not bode well for his amorous chances, I made Carol's acquaintance, as a sort of equally bemused and neutral party witnessing their verbal parrying.

A brunette, buxom and attractive, she was a very nice woman of some not inconsiderable talents, from a fairly affluent family in Chicago, whose parents, both shrinks, would come to view me, with my street ways of talking and lack of polish (breeding), as something of a Neanderthal whose Cuban roots seemed to surprise them: If I can pick out one incident that would have predicted our eventual demise—and the prevalent attitude toward me on their part—it would be the fact that when I, having hitchhiked to Chicago, first met them, the first thing her father did was to sit me down in their kitchen and administer a Rorschach test, her mother looking attentively on.

(But, hell, what did I know?)

My Macy's job overlapped our meeting, but once I had matriculated to CCNY full-time as a student enrolled in the SEEK program—that anagram for Search for Elevation Education and Knowledge—and I left that store, disappointing Mr. Trampani, a real gent, it was she who hooked me up with one of the strangest jobs I ever had, one of those crazy gigs actors passed around among one another on the grapevine. The job, which paid phenomenally well—some fifteen dollars an hour—involved the kind of placebo versus real-drug testing, a few afternoons a week, for which I happened to be temperamentally suited: pain research. Turning up at the facility, in one of those vast and forebodingly dark buildings that were part of the Bellevue complex on the East Side—I would be given a cup of water and two white pills to swallow, at which point I would wait in an adjoining room for about an hour or so, while they took (or didn't) effect, and pass the time reading. Then into the testing room I would go, led inside by a nurse whose long blond hair reached her waist, and for whom, despite her awful acne-ravaged complexion, I seemed to have developed my usual wounded-animal attraction.

One of the tests required that I keep my fingers steeped in a beaker of ice for as long as ten minutes, no easy thing: Checking out a stopwatch and writing figures down on a chart, which had graphs, the nurse would ask me to rate the degrees of pain I happened to be feeling in thirty-second intervals (I think) on a scale of 1 to 6; to impress her with my macho resolve, I'd usually hold out until my fingers had gone numb (which probably threw the tests out of whack, since, while waiting beforehand, I'd often hear other subjects quickly shrieking their lungs out.) A second test was a variation of the above: My fingers in a beaker, an electric current would be passed through wires into the water, which first registered as a tingle, as if one's hand had slipped into a hornets' hive; then, as she turned a knob, it widened into a more numbing prickly sensation, until that graduated into an out-and-out metallic—and broadening—burning, at which point even I would give up. But along the way, while uttering those numbers, I'd keep looking at the nurse's compassionate face, which seemed to grow prettier and less disfigured each time I turned up as a subject.

The most ghastly—and the only test for which I had zero patience—involved what basically came down to the application of a thumbscrew: Each of my thumbs would be fitted with a clamp through which a blunt screw head could be passed; a kind of elongated paper puncher would be pressed, the pressure raised by increments, the nurse twisting a knob, until gradually the screw nub, progressing more and more deeply into the skin and tissue, began intruding on the bone, at which point it produced a kind of deadening pain that made the right side of my head and the top of my eyeballs ache. Despite my Catholic tolerances and everlasting desire to prove to myself that I was no kidney-diseased wimp, I always called out after no more than a few minutes of that medieval torture—it was creepy, even for a medical group testing aspirins and such, and she knew it, which was why, I suppose, she'd look my way apologetically.

However, the most erotic of the pain research trials involved a heating rod and a tincture of black ink, which the nurse would apply to my bared back, from my shoulders to the small of my back: Wearing a pair of latex gloves, she would spread the ink (or whatever it was) uniformly and gently along every inch of my skin, after which she would further smooth it down with a narrow camel-hair paintbrush, which, truth be told, had the texture of a slightly wet tongue. Taking a long black bulbous-headed device in hand, through whose head she could transmit increasing amounts of heat by turning a dial, the nurse would press it against my skin and slide it about in circles, the remotely pleasant warming sensations, which I hadn't minded at all at first, gradually becoming more intrusive and searing, and this nurse, who must have been Irish, muttering with each increase of temperature, “Are you okay?” Interestingly enough, all that heat sent my blood rushing, and while it hurt an awful lot, it felt great at the same time. That heat, in fact, concentrating in my center, had an incredibly invigorating effect on my friskiness—and she knew that too. Later, while she'd clean off my back with paper towels soaked in rubbing alcohol, I had the impression that it wouldn't have taken much at all to get something going with her, and I might have asked her out, except for the fact that I had stupidly blurted out something about having a girlfriend—but lord, that delicious tension came back any time I got near her.

Along the way, I'd drift back to some of my childhood fantasies of being cured of my illness by some caring nurse, even while the sex/ pain thing remained foremost in my mind—what else was there to think about? That strange job lasted only some three months, but it dropped me into a circumstance that, much like love, was both a torture and a pleasure at the same time.