Slaves of New York (20 page)

At first it was just by a little bit that my portions were cut, and while others on line in front of me got a whole cup of Jell-O with fruit cocktail, I noticed that I received only half a cup. After several weeks, my rationing grew even shorter: one ounce of meat, two or three carrot sticks instead of five, two peas, and then at last only one pea and nothing else, one pea alone on my cafeteria tray.

Why? What had I done to deserve this? It was unjust, unjust, and in the cafeteria dining hall I saw the faces of the others sneering half-wittedly at me, as if to say, now you have gotten your comeuppance.

As if this wasn't enough, my tray was very dirty. The dietitian had organized the trays so that when I came in, the tray on the top was very dirty, and to pause on line for even a second, even for the second that it took to get a different tray, would mean being trampled by those behind me on line. I had seen it happen, I had seen elderly and infirm hurt and kicked for their slowness on line.

My nails were bitten to the quick. There was no peace of mind to be found in eating one pea for lunch.

The dietitian and the cashier acted as if they did not know me. They looked through me as if I did not exist. I had always felt such a closeness to them, especially the dietitian, who more than anyone had grace and an animal surety.

At the end, when I tried to give the cashier my tickets, she would not accept them. I hestitated to speak out loud, knowing how the others would turn to leer at me, they who had once

been so tactful though crude, but I could not control myself. "But why?" I said. "Why?" She did not answer, and I realized I was the only one using the green tickets. The green tickets were no longer being accepted. But this at least was an explanation, something I could live with.

Slowly I took my tray to the disposing area, I put it on the rack, the spoon I placed in the silverware container, I did not know what else to do. . . .

in and out of the cat bag

The next day was Saturday. Or maybe Sunday. I set out for a walk, thinking this would clear my head enough to decide what to say to the judge when I went to court to protest my eviction notice. I had less than a week left before I was officially supposed to be out of my place.

While I was worrying about this, and thinking how unfair it was that I, Marley Mantello, sensitive artist, should get kicked out of such a crummy place, I almost tripped over Sherman.

Old Sherman was my best friend; or at least one of them. He was a sculptor, working in colored resins that resembled flatulent balloons. I was startled to find him so far uptown, knowing how he usually refused to travel above Fourteenth Street, claiming it led to mental decay. Also he was on crutches, with a plaster cast up to his left hip. "Sherman!" I said. "What are you doing here? And what the hell did you do to yourself?"

I was pleased to see him: I thought maybe he could help me figure out what to say in court. But he looked most terrible. He had the face of a woodland tuber, something unexpected and white springing up from the dense humus of the street. Well, this had always been true of Sherman to a degree. In demeanor he was funguslike, agreeable and yielding, and always had an innocuous comment at hand. To run into him was exactly like finding a mushroom, cause for mirth, though there was a darker side to this. Often I longed to give him a bruising poke,

not out of malevolence, but from curiosity, the desire to kick at something helpless and spongy. But then, I had been the sort of child who did like to kick mushrooms. After a rain I would walk in the woods and collect mushrooms of every hue —creamy purple, frilly and voluptuous yellow ones, stout gray toadstools. And then, my mound before me—grim amanita, red porphyry, quivering polyps—I would smash and injure the palpable flesh.

"I'm afraid I don't feel like speaking to you, Marley," Sherman said, and kept walking.

"Don't feel like speaking to me?" I said, perplexed. "To me, or just in general?" For the latter was something I would have been able to understand, but not the former.

"To you," Sherman said. "For one thing, if you want to know, Fve been thinking."

"Yes?" I said. "That must be nice for you." I was annoyed with his tone and lack of interest in my predicament, even though he didn't know anything about my upcoming eviction. Some friend he was! But I kept walking alongside him, as he bumbled along on crutches.

"I suppose I owe it to you to tell you why I don't consider us friends anymore. I'll tell you, just to help you from repeating this with someone else in the future."

"Fine, fine," I said. "Go ahead. Care for a cigarillo?" And I got one of my special little Tuscano cigars out of my pocket. But Sherman shook his head. "So," I said, "before you tell me, let's make small talk. How's Lacey?" Lacey was old Sherman's girlfriend; they lived together, and were scheduled to get married.

"We split up," Sherman said.

"Split up!" I said. "Say not so! But you two were all lovey-dovey, when last we spoke."

"Yes, well, we don't live together anymore. And if you want to know, I think you're pretty much responsible for what happened between Lacey and myself. When I didn't sell anything from my show, she moved out."

"I don't understand what I have to do with it," I said. It was

true I had always found Lacey attractive, with her blond certainty, and Lady of the Lake pallor. All I could think was that perhaps she had a crush on me, and had left Sherman thinking that I might date her.

"Frankly, Marley," Sherman said, "your way of thinking isn't much to my taste. And it's cost me."

"Cost you?" I struggled to slow down to his pace; already I was half a block in front of him and had to stop just to hear what he was saying.

"Yeah, cost me," he said. "Your way of thinking is always to talk about success as if there's nothing else, as if success in the outside world is the one thing to aim for, and nothing else matters except making big bucks."

"I don't think that's the case, Sherman," I said, but he refused to listen.

"Well, when I was living with Lacey maybe it wouldn't have mattered if you just talked to me. But no. You always went on when Lacey was there, and you always had to mention how the Cooper Hewitt Museum was thinking of putting three of your religious paintings in their new show, and how you spent the weekend with a rich collector. While meanwhile my career wasn't going anywhere at all. So your words had their effect; hell, I can see that now. After a while, Lacey got fed up with living with me. She compared me to you, and said that I would never make anything much of myself and that she had no interest in supporting a starving artist for her entire life!"

My first thought was to ask him if he was drunk, and to tell him he was nuts, but something stopped me. It was so painful to see Sherman wandering the streets like this, reeking of alcohol and plastered into a cast. An outcast. By comparison things were going remarkably well for me; my career was at last beginning to take off, and I had a few interested collectors who faithfully bought my work. "Well, Sherman," I said, "I just can't agree with you. I can't see that I had much to do with your breakup with Lacey. Hundreds of couples break up every day, and not all of them hold me responsible."

Yet I did have to stop and think about what Sherman had said. Well, obviously I couldn't have been the cause of the breakup of their relationship, but was it possible I had had something to do with it? I did know that on some evenings, while Sherman was at home painting, I used to drop by the delicatessen where Lacey worked, and maybe I had said a couple of things to her alone that I wouldn't have said in front of Sherman—things that weren't too nice, not in actual words, maybe, but in attitude. Maybe I made it clear that I didn't think Sherman's work was so great.

Okay, I was the kind of guy who had to be superior to everyone all the time, whenever I could. In some ways I was very vain, but everyone knew this about me, and it was an endearing part of me that my true friends were able to accept. Did this mean I wasn't really a saint?

My mother would have said that a real saint is not a perfect person, that he would be a god if he was. A real saint was just an ordinary person, irritable, hard to live with, and then almost accidentally doing a saintly deed now and then. But I, Marley Mantello, had always thought of myself as coming pretty damn close to saintliness. And now, seeing Sherman like this, miserable and blaming me, I had to stop and reevaluate: maybe I wasn't so noble as I thought.

I shrugged. "So what happened to your leg?" I said. "It must have been a terrible blow to your ego."

"I walked into a bus while drunk," he said. "The bus hit me sideways, my leg is broken in three places. See you around, Marley." And he walked off, slowly, on crutches.

I thought that this was the end of the matter and walked off morosely in thought: for some reason I hated to end a friendship. Only a few minutes later, while standing waiting for a red light to change so I could cross the street, I felt a tug on my shoulder. "Ah, listen, Marley," Sherman said, with a forced grin, "I know you think I'm a jerk. Anyway, I've got a terrible hangover. I'm being an asshole, I know."

"Yes," I said.

"Listen, come by later tonight for a few drinks."

What was all this about? "I don't know," I said. "I don't know if I'll feel like coming over to your place."

"I'd meet you somewhere, but with these crutches it takes me too long. I've lost all the hair under my arms because of them."

"Well, come over to my place," I said. "It's the last week I'll be there, I'm being evicted."

"Oh, I didn't know," Sherman said. "Well, sure, that'll be great. There was something I wanted to ask you. See, I've been in touch with Lacey since we split up, and I sort of told her that I might be able to come up with a job for her. She lost her job at the deli, and I mentioned that you were probably going to hire someone as an assistant to help you get ready for your next show."

"I don't know," I said, taken aback. "What happened? How did she lose her job?"

"Ah, this guy came into the deli and asked if they sold half a grapefruit. Lacey told the guy they didn't sell grapefruit halves, only whole ones. But this guy was very persistent and didn't believe her, and insisted she go and ask the manager. So she went into the back room, not realizing the customer was following her. And she yelled 'Hey, Eddie, some asshole out there wants to buy half a grapefruit.' And then suddenly she realized that the customer was standing right next to her, and she said, 'And this gentleman here would like the other half.' Anyway, I think they were planning to fire her long before that: she used to carry home half the food in the store with her every night."

"Mmm," I said. "Tell her I'll let her know; yeah, I'd love to have an assistant, but I don't know if I'm going to have enough money."

And we parted, this time on good terms. I felt a bit better— my feelings had been hurt, but I wasn't so bad as all that. I thought, All right, Sherman, so you're not a genius (for this is what I felt was the true source of his rage against me, that I

was a genius and he was not). So you're not a genius, but what do you care? Life can still be good to you. Break down and get a teaching job, you'll paint a little when you get the chance, on weekends and so forth, and life will be pleasant enough. There are a million painters in this world, how many of them are really going to be any good?

But I was sorry for thinking Sherman was not any good—I remembered all the fun we had had together, such as how we would go to a restaurant, when we had some money, and play this little game we had invented. We would decide in advance that any time the waitress said a certain word, such as "get" we would fall off our chairs. So that when she said, "What can I get you?" off our chairs we would flop. And when she came back, asking "Can I get you anything else?" we would collapse again.

It was a long time since we had played such games; thinking about this made my eyebrows twitch. They felt so brittle I thought they were possibly going to drop off. It was a peculiar sensation, and I wondered if I didn't have some disease of the skin or hair follicles. If I went bald and lost my eyebrows it would be terrible.

I arrived home some hours later. I was exhausted, but like Dickens I have always loved to walk and some afternoons would walk a good ten miles. My apartment, the sublet from which I was being evicted, looked just as terrible as when I had gone out earlier—worse, even, for there was a foul reek of something fecund and feline, like the stench of old lion spore upon the veldt.

Turning on the lights I noticed a curled black pile on top of the messy bedclothes, and on closer inspection I realized some animal had performed its ablutions right in the middle of the bed: animal, human, or supernatural.

A kind of omen, perhaps—but who would be so deranged as to inform me in such blatant fashion that they thought I was full of shit? The being had climbed on top of my desk and

scattered papers everywhere. A pool of bright yellow piss was not even dried. Was I to take this as coming from some being from another world? There was no sign of a real entity.

"Jesus Christ," I said. I couldn't even deal with it; without looking around any further to examine the desecration that had taken place in my absence, I went into the bathroom. But before I even flicked on the light, I noticed two toffee-colored eyes glaring near the toilet. Rather than look further, I clasped my hands over my eyes, and strangely they were freezing and clammy cold.