Manhattan Loverboy (14 page)

In front of the H.U.A.C. hearings in Hollywood, Sterling Hayden had denounced his former mistress. Clifford Odets named J. Edward Bromberg, whom he had just eulogized. Screenplayist Martin Berkley had rattled off 161 names. When Amy got up in the witness box and wagged her finger at me, I knew how the former mistress, the late Mr. Bromberg, and 161 names must have felt. When she started her denunciation, my flimsy, wonton noodle-like heart started flapping like an angel fish on a table top. I had loved (realized an adversarial polarity for) her.

They had all those macho, archetype-possessed men testify against me. They had the cops testify against me. They had the workmen testify against me (they commented on the smallness of my reagan). They had my former co-workers at the Strand Bookstore testify against me. They dredged up an old school teacher to testify against me. They established beyond all reasonable doubt that I was a failure. Initially, I was just an under-achiever and undisciplined, but gradually they slipped in words like recalcitrant and incorrigible. They read from a print-out of my T.R.W. credit history. It indicated that I had defaulted on my student loan. I didn’t have a bank account and I was unable to get credit cards. In short, I was a bad risk, kept gaspingly alive in this dusking age of undeserved entitlements.

Then they went through great pains to vindicate society. America was strong. I was its runt. Opportunities were plentiful. Incentives were ubiquitous. The courtroom was pure, I was its speck. We might have won in Vietnam if guys like me hadn’t protested and then moved to Canada. The prosecutor put forward some far-fetched theory that I had been sent by the Japanese to oversee the fall of America. He gave an outlandish image reminiscent of the rooftops in Saigon loaded with refugees vying with each other to board evacuating helicopters.

My lawyer didn’t object; he was too busy flossing his teeth with an embossed business card. Even if he did object, the judge probably would have overruled him. The general thesis was that I had come from the right side of the tracks and had gone to the wrong side. I had only myself to blame. I was once lean, quick, and handsome. They proved how through self-will I had turned short, fat, and dumb. It was as if the promising side of me was suing the lazy side of me.

Also, many of the statements that would bring the inevitable judgment to a speedy appeal were stricken from the record. Other things occurred that simply eluded the record. For instance, I repeatedly caught the judge giving the plaintiff a nod of familiarity, a wink of complicity.

Wolf down wads of cotton candy, blocks of fruitcake in brandy sauce, a storm of Hostess Snowballs, a toilet bowl full of Lime Jello from a hospital cafeteria, prunes in heavy syrup from a parochial school. Pepper it with headcheese, Scooter-pies, kale. Then, as a chaser, add a six-pack of Colt 45 tall-boys and do some high-impact aerobics. You’ll feel the bottled-up nausea I had to hold in. And you’ll understand why I suddenly bolted to my feet and yelled, “Lies! Fascism! Totalitarianism! Death of Justice!”

“Objection, your honor!” screamed the attorney for the plaintiff.

“You’re blowing our case!” screamed my attorney, who was also for the plaintiff.

“Shut up both of you!” said the judge, to my shock and delight. All eyes, like spotlights, were upon me, and for a moment I was in command. I had complete faith that if I could unify that fragmentation of knowledge into the correct blend of words, like the right digits of a combination lock, I could indeed get what I wanted.

“Young man, I will not have accusations like that bandied about in my courtroom. Do you have something pertinent to tell the court?”

“Yes I do, sir.”

“Make the oath, take the stand.”

The court officer rambled, I said “I do,” and did. “Well, it’s like this. This is a case of the rich squeezing the artist out of his workplace because they’ve turned their own homes into beehives of boredom.”

“Ah, then you’re an artist?”

“Yes sir.”

“Well, I’m quite sympathetic to that. Indeed, I work for the Volunteer Lawyers for the Arts,” he said. I glanced over to their lawyer and I could see him unbuttoning his top button behind his tight little tie knot. God was on my side this time.

“What paintings have you painted?” he asked.

“I’m a writer,” I said.

“Ahhh, prose, playwright, or bard?”

“None, your honor.”

“Essays? Journalism?”

“Well, I’m pursuing histories.”

“Well, what histories have you written?” he asked impatiently.

“None, really. I’m planning on bringing history to the masses.”

“How?”

“Well, let’s be honest, Your Honor, sitcoms are the popular venue.”

“So what you’re saying is you write screenplays?”

“Not quite,” I replied, “I’m on the idea-pitching level of the writing pyramid. I can hire some grad student to put the idea into words.”

“Pitching?”

“Well, I mean, I’m working on a cinematic treatment of world history…”

“Cinematic treatment. In my day, we used to call that a novel.”

“Your honor, let’s be honest, the written word is dead.”

“I see,” he grinned a bit. “So you’re one of those people that always introduce themselves as writers, but quietly believe the written word is dead.”

“Yes sir.”

“You’re a bad name to those few, poor, struggling writers who genuinely scratch, scramble, sacrifice, and do write!”

“I…”

“You’ll sit back in your seat and not another word from you, idea-pitcher!” I quietly returned to my seat, and the attorney for the plaintiff spent the remainder of the day insulting me, then I went home.

On the last day of the inquisition, I realized that the judge, with his large jaw, thin lips, and wire-framed glasses, looked vaguely liked Vyshinsky, Stalin’s chief prosecutor during the purges. I anticipated the sentence. He’d point at me: “Take Mister Vowels here, the ‘pitcher,’ to a garage filled with old trucks, turn on the engines to drown out the gunshots, and away with him!”

Well, that wasn’t quite it. I was to stay something like ten kilometers away from the plaintiff and stop harassing her. If I persisted in harassing her, I would be sent to Riker’s Island. He said, “You would be subject to the pangs of an overcrowded prison.” Pangs rhymed with gangs, and overcrowding implied there’d be a tight fit—gang-raped, macho-male-homo-inmate style was the explicit implication. In the words of inner-city youth James Ramseur, victim/villain in the “subway vigilante” Bernie Goetz case—the municipal trial of its day—replying to the cross-examinations of Goetz defense attorney Barry Slotnick, “I know what time it is!”

Walking home through lower New York, I felt depressed. To paraphrase E.B. White, I was seventy-something blocks from where preppie-victim Jennifer Dawn Levin had been strangled, thirty blocks from where graffiti-artist Michael Stewart had been killed, sixty blocks from where homeless Joyce Brown was snatched from the gutter and “rehabilitated,” a hundred and thirty-odd blocks from where Eleanor Bumpurs had been bumped off with “necessary force,” a state away from New Jersey, and I was slowly heading in the direction of where both John Lennon and Malcolm X had been blasted away.

CHAPTER EIGHT

QUIT YER LOOKIN’ AT ME

Unlike TV, fate had let evil once again rule out over good. But fate never let things get too evil, otherwise things would destroy themselves, and there’d be no more evil or TV. When I arrived home, I felt depressed and lonely. I turned on the TV. It advertised one of those party-line numbers “where you can hold a party on the phone.” I dialed. For two minutes while I seethed, eight unidentifiable people with the same voice said hello over and over.

She was a growing evil, a cistern collecting power. She had sucked the life forces out of me. I was estranged from my self-esteem and securities. I could kill her and then myself. It was a fair trade; she was as evil as I was good. Besides, the mild sentences dispensed by our criminals’ justice system made crime quite appealing; hell, I could probably get out of prison while I was still relatively young. I had far more faith in the criminals’ justice system as a criminal than I did as a victim.

How should I do it? I started drinking coffee and doing some drugs to help me think more clearly. The possibilities were endless, and as the drugs catapulted me to greater heights, and my anger became more rampant, each new idea—like rungs of a sadistic ladder—lifted me higher than the prior thought. I worked my way up to abducting her, drugging her, then shackling her, keeping her conscious. If she came down with the flu, I’d fussingly nurse her back to health before continuing the torture. When I’d squeezed out the ultimate drop of pain from her eviscerated body, and she’d finally died, I’d either disappear to Alaska and live with all those burnt-out Vietnam vets or vanish in Arizona with all the pedophile priests.

My fantasy was interrupted by a knock at the door, and there she stood—my tormentor, my future victim, alone, ready.

“May I speak to you a minute?”

I will be your destroyer and therefore I am your maker
, I thought in my drugged-out state, but I only said, “What?”

“About today, about this whole thing.”

“I want you out of my house,” I said, instead of saying,
I will eat your innards.

“This half of the house is mine.” She pointed to the front half of my apartment. “I just was hoping that maybe we could be on some kind of cordial basis, since we’re neighbors.”

“I’m afraid not. I hate you more than anybody ever hated anyone else throughout both recorded and unrecorded history as well as future history and, for that matter, transcending all planes of possible consciousness throughout our bowl-shaped universe as well as all spatial and temporal planes.” I had finally loosely said what I really thought.

“Well, I don’t really believe that. Do you want me to tell you what I think?”

“Not really.”

“I know that I liked you and I think that you liked me, and you had extra room, and I needed the space, and I think that you realized that if we were roommates, maybe we could become closer.”

“What do you mean ‘closer?’”

She stepped closer. “I mean lovers.”

“Lovers?!!” So ironic! Indeed, I had become her devoted, loyal, and eternal hater.

“Ever since I saw you, do you know what I saw?”

“What?”

“A gnarled acorn.”

“Flattery won’t work.”

“An acorn, a seed that if well managed could one day sprout and become a magnificent oak.”

“Oh?”

“Do you know what I sometimes see myself as?”

“What?”

“Rich, fertile soil.”

“Really?”

“I can help you.”

“How?”

“You’re unemployed. You’re unwashed. You’re eating the wrong foods, reading the wrong books, rutted in very bad habits.”

“That’s what I am.”

“Suppose I told you that you could have consonants in your name instead of all those subversive vowels.”

“Consonants?”

“Suppose I told you that you could be tall.”

“Tall? What do I have to do?”

“Just trust me.”

“You’re wicked. You’re trying to take what remains of my apartment and sanity away.”

“Suppose I tore up the lease. Suppose I signed a statement saying that my stay here was subject to your day-to-day approval.”

“Wha?”

“Suppose I tore down the wall?”

“Cha?”

“Suppose I tore off my work clothes and lived with you as a supportive wife. Suppose I propped you up when you were weak and praised you when you were strong?”

“Xzk?”

“Suppose you disposed of all those profane old magazines, and I became your love-slave, your centerfold, your sperm bank.”

“[@#|?”

I sputtered and spurted in my pants. I felt my heart bulging as if a charred sausage link were stuck sideways in my esophagus. It was immediately apparent that all hatred was just sexual polarity for her. Everything started tightening as I said, “I la…I laav…”

“What?!”

“I love ya.” A tight fist that wouldn’t unclasp was in my chest; I couldn’t breathe. “I’m having a heart attack!” I gasped as I dropped to the floor. I had always intended to have CPR instructions tattooed on my chest, but, like everything else, I’d never got around to it. I saw a long dark tunnel. I was speeding through it. It was kind of a superb subway ride free of beggars, turnstile jumpers, and rats. I wasn’t scared. I knew I was dead, and then a pinpoint of light appeared in the way-off: God. I asked him if psycho-comedian Andy Kaufman was really dead, or just perpetrating his greatest, driest gag.

As if I was a non-refundable beer can, he simply said, “Returneth.”

I felt shifted in reverse, going backward, and then from up on the ceiling, I could see Amy pounding on my chest. Responsibly, she had attended the Red Cross classes. While she was mouth-to-mouthing me, I tried tongue-kissing her. Instead, I gagged and passed out.

I awoke in a hospital with tubes in my arm and mouth and nose, and beeping from the electrocardiogram in my ear. My entire corpus appeared wound up in toilet paper; my legs had casts. My face was bandaged and it felt swollen. I also felt a numb weight on my chest. Between the slits of gauze, I slowly started inspecting my surroundings. I saw a figure slumped over in a seat in the far side of the room—her.