Demonology (17 page)

—The one young man who started that restaurant on Washington Street. I knew him when he was just a boy. His parents are very
proud of him. Very proud. Told me that he got the idea for it from eating sandwiches over to the Jersey shore. This goes back
a ways. My own boy was in the armed forces then.

—Mrs. Vincenzo, you shouldn’t talk.

—I’ll talk if I want to.

—Buddy just move off a couple feet, here, give the lady some fresh air, the paramedic remarked to Aaron, over whose face then
passed a dark cloud of rejection. Meanwhile, adjacent, the operator of the crosstown bus, on the radio, —A fender bender type
thing. A flat. Young lady been nice enough to give away some of her soft drinks, and the kids? They all drinking sodas. Some
playing cards.

—You want me to get that open for you? Offered the guy on the hood of the station wagon, motioning at M. J.’s front door.
—Could open that
easy.
Just need a credit card or something. Let me do it.

Every northeastern town had its eccentric with
the artificial tan.
Many of these characters got their tans from local tanning salons, and Hoboken had a tanning salon, but it was on the uptown
end where M. J. rarely traveled and anyhow she believed that
tanning salons involved irradiation.
Fair of skin, as her family were all fair of skin, she was from a long line of ivory that in winter looked delicate and in
summer looked unhealthy,
people of the ice,
this ancestry of Anglo- and Irish-Americans who by birthright didn’t have to live in towns that were built up on swamps as
Hoboken was,
she was white,
and this gentleman on the hood of the station wagon was tanned through some means, through an
applied juice, a poultice, an Egyptian henna or some such, which he attempted to mete out over himself evenly, under cover
of night, in a harsh bathroom fluorescence.

—I’m supposed to be having a party in less than an hour. The guests are coming really soon. Where’s my boyfriend? He’s supposed
to be here.

—You just need a credit card is all.

So his neighborliness revealed itself as an attempt to get to her credit cards, which, in any event, were her parents’ credit
cards, namely a Visa card issued by her parents’ bank and an American Express Platinum. All of the money, or requests for
money, flowed back to that originary trunk, as all her parents’ money flowed back to the central bank and its charter for
which Washington voted, when president, in 1791. All money referred to the original money of British feudal lords, which,
transferred, supplemented, by plastic cards, karats, ducats, nuggets of gold, stock certificates, bonds, computer printouts
of mutual fund holdings, was nonetheless merely a recognition of the origin of money, held by people who did not tan well
and who did not need to apply juices to their pale veneers. She assumed, moreover, that all original money was stewarded
by men,
because women were held to be forgetful and given to mercurial temper and who were anyway inclined to leave the control of
money to others, who had pockets. The men were all in a bar someplace, mired in self-hatred, flattering courtesans who would
look hideous in the morning, they were pondering the box-office dominance of a certain Austrian bodybuilder whose accent made
him sound startlingly like a fascist; it was almost impossible
not
to imagine that this Austrian, who may possibly have used juices to tan his
veneer, was a fascist. She used to come home at night and Gerry would be sitting at the kitchen table with the local phone
book open and she would ask what he was doing, and he would say,
Reading the phone book.
She would ask why he was reading the phone book. He had no explanation, he was just reading, and when again they were attempting
to think of people to invite to the
Mad Son Electric Opening Gala,
he’d turned to reading the white pages, unable to make contact with her in a way that satisfied either of them, uncertain,
even, what it was to make contact; Gerry improvised,
Looking for rock stars,
because there were these Hoboken bands and they just lived up the street, they all had day jobs, one guy copyedited for one
of the larger publishing houses, and you used to see them on the buses going into Port Authority and Gerry was thinking he
was going to invite these celebrities to the
Mad Son Electric Opening Gala,
but then he never did, nothing came of it.

—You don’t have your own credit card? M. J. said. —Because I’m not sure I want to sacrifice one of my credit cards for a lock.
I mean, they’re not really mine, anyway. They’re for emergency use, and if I lost one, I’d have to notify the bank.

—Suit yourself, the
tan man
said.

—I don’t give a hoot if he was the greatest singer of the century! Mrs. Vincenzo shouted. Aaron rocked beside her in recognition
of her oratory. —I’m saying he ought to come back and visit the town where he got raised up. Doesn’t make good sense. My boy
was in some trouble here in town before he went off to the services and I still lived here with the neighbors and the friends
who seen what I’ve been
through. They understood my troubles. This is where I’m from. I’m not going to be from anywhere else.

—Mrs. Vincenzo, said one of the paramedics, —would you be willing to get into the ambulance now?

A dispute broke out between the kids playing cards, a black kid and a white kid and soon several others had gotten into it,
and they held the white kid down and they pulled off his sneakers, probably cost $37.50 apiece, tied two laces together, the
kid cried out
No! No!
but they held him down. Now M. J. noticed that harvest of sneakers, draped on the power lines. The instigators flung the
sneakers up, tried to get them to drape over the lines.
Please, no, those are brand-new sneakers!
They were calling him
faggot,
because what else did you call a kid, you called him a
faggot,
that was the worst thing you could be. She looked at Aaron to see if he registered this, whether a lifetime of being mostly
hated by your peers was enough to be a predictor of madness and alcoholism, but Aaron had wandered toward the crosstown bus
and was now disputing its route with the driver.

—Must not use the crosstown bus very often, the driver said, —because it’s been some years this bus here been going down Madison.
Other
bus goes down Washington, so now people on this side of town, they don’t have to walk so far, like the people on the other
side, they mostly don’t have to walk so far.

—Maybe it’s not your house, the guy from the station wagon remarked.

—What did you say? said M. J.

—I mean maybe you’re trying to get me to bust you into a house doesn’t belong to you.

—Want to see my driver’s license?

—Could be this isn’t even your street. Maybe somebody else lives here. Drivers license? Hey, you can
buy
one of those.

—That’s really rude. What you’re saying is just rude.

The face of the
tanned guy
(she supposed now that he was called
Norbert),
indicated a substantial cruelty heretofore concealed. She could tell that he would not be a resource
in her hour of need.
Meanwhile, the cars on the street in a furious klaxoning. The ambulance, the crosstown bus parked side by side. Police beside
paramedics. A fireman wandered through asking if his services were needed. At the corner, a traffic cop who had appeared to
wave rush-hour flow onto Seventh Street had recognized a friend among the assembled. He stepped out of the intersection to
chat with this rotundity of sweatsuit. Traffic languished. Next, there was a street vendor, one of Hoboken’s sellers of ices,
with a cart and a dozen bottles, chipping away with his pick, loading on raspberry syrup; around him three or four friends
heaving crimson dice, talking fast in a froth of Spanish and English: results of first games of the football season, difficulties
of wives,
how a couple of Anglos in the wrong neighborhood gonna jack up the rents,
this town where they had gotten halfway through demolishing the ferry terminal so that they could put up
top-dollar developments like amusement arcades, shopping centers, luxury condos,
you could neither take a ferry from the terminal nor use the location for anything else; it was the Committee for a Better
Waterfront versus the people who had lived there since they were kids, played stickball on the blacktop over by Observer Highway;
the people who lived there were mainly
for
devel
opment, even if it brought nothing to them but wrecking balls and Food Courts; and this very theme had now erupted on Madison
Street, before the flickering holiday lights of the
Mad Son Electric Gallery
of Hoboken, whereupon a BMW-owner, wearing Ray-Bans and a yellow power tie, climbed out of his convertible, and took it up
with the men by the street vendor, and yet they all agreed, everyone agreed,
You think it’s a bad idea to have a beautifully designed series of buildings down there, and some shops, with the Empire State
Building, right cross the water?
The men, in their basketball jerseys and worn baseball caps, jeans and construction boots, wordless,
That’s a good idea,
the young urban professional continued,
which will improve real estate values in the neighborhood. Its better for the tax base. There will be jobs.
Strapped himself back into his car, satisfied with urban planning, and there he sat, immobilized in traffic.

—Over my dead body a bunch of trees down there on that water! Over my dead body! We don’t need no more parks! We got plenty
of damn parks already! That’s just going to cause filth from pigeons and rats! We need tax monies! observed Mrs. Vincenzo.

Autumn,
county fair of tonalities.
People filed out of workplaces, out of tenements, onto stoops. Last time they could do so for months. Leaves clogged the
street, the sewer lines. Where had these leaves come from? They were three blocks from the nearest tree. Northeast storms
had blown through earlier, as storms did this time of year, and the limbs of the trees, those that remained in the Mile-Square
City, were picked clean; each new gust brought a dusting of yellow symbols of decay. Clearly, it wasn’t only M. J. who made
a poetics, a worldview, out of a drop in the temperature
and a diminishment of light.
I
tremble like an aspen leaf,
Nijinsky said. Her parents’ house had beautiful autumns. When the weather was fine, she practiced out on the lawn, while
the man next door clipped graying blooms from his once bright hydrangeas. She bobbed above the clean lines of a box hedge,
perfecting leaps,
faint with hunger.
She was always hungry. She was always cold.

The tawny huckster with the scheme to break and enter, Norbert, accepted her offer of a
Major Video, Inc.
lifetime membership card and began working on the lock, which seemed to involve scoring the paint job on the door frame with
the edge of the plastic lamination. Gerry Abramowitz had his own Major Video card. This one could be sacrificed. From desperate
sprees of video rental Gerry returned, in his usual nervous way, uncertain, taciturn, with a home festival of science fiction
films and teen sex comedies.
Talk to me a little bit,
she asked. He’d laughed. He stayed up watching films after she’d gone to sleep and left early with his stack of bibliographical
index cards. Her locksmith
pro tern
tried buzzing the tenants on the first floor. He bent the video membership card until it had a veiny fracture in it. M. J.
was almost certain, in the light of streetlamps, that guests for the party had now begun to assemble. There was a couple in
bowling shoes and Hawaiian shirts, his and hers, hair slicked with the grease of the period, Tenax or Vaseline; there was
a guy with heavy tortoiseshell frames and a secondhand madras jacket. All bantering. M. J. would not meet these, her guests,
on the front step, locked out, having given away Diet Coke and orange soda. It was humiliating.

—The Carnival Tradition, from Bakhtin, said the madras jacket.

—I thought it was Bakunin, said the woman.

—That’s anarchism.

—I know what anarchism is. You’ve got your B’s confused.

—We could go to the Middle Eastern place, you know.

—Uh, no civilization endures without temporary suspension of the rules of civilization.

—Let’s wait a few more minutes.

—Got a cigarette?

Whereupon the door to the building next to M. J.’s opened, being 619 Madison,
known drug location,
according to law enforcement circles, known for its
potent smok-able form of cocaine.
They had never given her any trouble over there, in the
known drug location.
They were vital and spirited American entrepreneurs. The door, a flimsy old composite affair, into which had been installed
cheap stained glass, from Sears, swung back, and out of it came the dream within this dream, a cherub, a teenaged boy from
next door, a Hispanic young man, an Edgardo or Jose or Miguel, perhaps, a fraternizer with users of the
potent smokable form of cocaine,
but with a perfect Hispanic celestial quality that he, young Angel, would have until he was older, had put on a few pounds,
become a working stiff, traded beauty for dignity; for now as perfect as a boy in Hoboken could possibly be in pressed jeans,
black work shoes, James Dean windbreaker, expertly tousled black hair, having strode out of a jailbreak movie, carrying somebody’s
turntable,
she couldn’t help thinking that he was stealing the turntable,
and when he saw the crowd outside the front door, he turned, as if to rethink the plan, to secret himself indoors, away from
the authorities. Did anyone still buy
LPs? Even that store down by the PATH terminal where the gruff stoner with sideburns and ponytail wordlessly dispensed obscure
rock and roll on vinyl —Syd Barrett, Lothar and the Hand People, the Nazz —even that store was on its way out; so why would
Angel, the Hispanic cherub,
steal a turntable?