Authors: Hank Moody,Jonathan Grotenstein
“Seriously?” I asked, pointing to the bruises on my arm. “Number Two, missie. Might give Number One a run for its money, if there’s any scarring.”
“Pussy,” she said, punching me in the arm.
Neither of us felt like returning to the Falls, and after two days the room felt more prison than escape. We climbed into the car and began the drive back to school. Daphne celebrated the start of our journey with another
Simpamina
.
“Where do you even get them?” I asked.
“From Dino,” she replied.
Dino was a Roman she’d dated during a semester in Italy when she was an undergrad art major. He’d been a genius artist, or so she said. I tended to ignore most of what she said about Dino, as in addition to vast artistic talent he’d apparently been endowed with a cock
molto mostruoso
and the equivalent of a graduate degree in Italian lovemaking. While I was generally confident in my own size and skills, talking Dino reminded me that Daphne was our relationship’s wiser and wilder elder, making me feel like a groping pretender.
“Ah, Dino,” I said. “Your friend with the
Flintstones
name.”
“That wasn’t funny the first time you said it. Or the six thousand times since.” Daphne’s spine stiffened for a fight. And I was feeling stupid enough to give her one.
“Dino,” I continued. “The genius artist who’s what, thirty? And still lives with his parents.”
“You know damn fucking well that’s the traditional living arrangement in Italy. It’s not like the consumerist hell we live in here. Family values actually mean something.”
“Just saying. Real geniuses don’t live with their parents.”
Her response was fast, effective, and very nearly fatal for both of us. She grabbed my arm, pulling me—and the steering wheel—toward her. As I leaned the other way to straighten the wheel, she punched me, without letting go of my arm, around my head and neck as hard and as fast as she could. What she lacked in strength, she more than made up for in speed.
“I hate consumerism!” she screamed.
The car began to spin, slowly, but still precariously out of control. I struggled to restore authority over the vehicle with my free arm while deflecting punches with the other. “I hate consumerism!” she continued to yell again and again, like a chanting monk.
Now we were facing oncoming traffic. Cars swerved past us, their drivers’ faces rigid with shock, terror, and fury at an unpredictable universe. I began to smile, the same dumb expression that was plastered on my face when the Civic completed its 360-degree turn and slammed broadside into the center divider.
We sat in the emergency lane, motionless and silent. Until Daphne leapt out of the passenger seat, skirted three lanes of interstate traffic, and disappeared into a snowy copse of trees.
I banged the steering wheel angrily. I had a pretty good case for leaving her here. Let her hitch a ride. She’d get home eventually, full of piss and vinegar and maybe unwilling to ever forgive me, but fuck it: This time our relationship was done. Number Two had become Number One and there was no going back.
I slammed the wheel a few more times, cursing Daphne, Dino, myself, and lastly my parents for being such assholes that I’d had to even take this goddamn trip. Then I unbuckled my seat belt and played a real-life game of
Frogger
across the highway, hoping to find her.
It wasn’t very hard. She’d fallen to her knees about thirty yards from the road. I approached slowly, softly repeating her name, trying to get a read on her emotional temperature. I interpreted
her silence as welcoming so I moved in, placing a hand on her shoulder. A sharp burst of pain in my own shoulder provided instant feedback as to just how badly I’d misread the situation.
The switchblade was another Italian souvenir, something she began carrying full-time after a female student had been raped on campus. She dislodged the knife from my shoulder. I had time to scream in pain before she stuck me again, this time in my thigh. Then she went for the chest. Some instinct toward self-defense ordered my forearm to push back, flinging her backward almost comically into a snowdrift. I tried to step toward her, but the pain in my leg dictated otherwise. I crumpled to my knees and rolled onto my back, staring at the dark gray sky, bleeding into the snow, waiting to die.
DURING THE KIRSCHENBAUM SEDER OF ’84, hopped up on hormones and Manischewitz, I kissed then-thirteen-year-old Tana Kirschenbaum while we were supposed to be hunting the
afikomen
. I even made a run at fondling her breasts—marvelous then, nothing but improvement since—until, to my great dismay, she shut me down. It wasn’t that Tana didn’t like me: She just already knew better than to trust me. And while I lost a potential conquest, I found a sister. In the years since, Tana had been chief strategist to my romantic entanglements. She helped me make sense of my feelings when love was in bloom and, when it wasn’t, listened patiently to my sins. In return, I offered sage advice regarding her own affairs of the heart, which tended to be long on deep, meaningful embraces but short on the down-and-dirty. “He’s definitely gay” was my most frequent observation.
With the exception of last Thanks giving—it’s hard to believe that a year has passed since my Long Weekend of Glorious Ingratitude—the Kirschenbaums have provided the setting for most major holidays. My own parents are short on family ties: Mom’s clan of no-nonsense Protestants reside mainly in her native Indiana, while Dad’s relations—to call them lapsed Catholics doesn’t quite capture the length of the fall—always seem to be engaged in some blood feud precluding any possibility of face-to-face contact. Larry Kirschenbaum, who’s thrice defended my father on charges of driving under the influence, is the closest thing Dad has to a friend. Still, my father harbors an abiding suspicion, repeated each time we pile into the car to go, that the invitation allows Larry to write off the cost of the meal.
This year’s table seats thirteen, which for the Kirschenbaums is an intimate affair. No one is sober enough to retrieve dessert. I’m fairly certain that Dottie, Tana’s heavily mascaraed but otherwise remarkably preserved mother, is flirting with me. There really isn’t any other way to make sense of her so far unquenchable interest in my current job, slinging soft-serve at the Carvel on Jerusalem Avenue.
Dottie’s stocking foot, now tracing a line up my leg, confirms my theory. Awkward, as I’m sitting next to her husband. Doubly awkward, as I’m pretty sure Dottie and my father have engaged in carnal gymnastics on more than one occasion. Sure enough, Dad—who’s spent most of the night fixated on Tana’s glorious rack—is glaring at me with a look that might be intimidating if not drowned in scotch. I’m relieved
to see that Mom’s too dead-eyed to notice, thanks to Dr. Marty Edelman, an orthodontist whose recent vacation to Napa Valley apparently produced no detail too small or insignificant.
While I can imagine worse fates than sinking my Fudgie the Whale into Dottie’s Cookie-Puss, the idea of going where my father’s been strikes me as a little too Oedipal for comfort. I excuse myself and step outside for a cigarette.
Uncle Marvin has beaten me to the stoop. He isn’t my uncle—avuncularly speaking, he belongs to Tana—but he’s as much a fixture at these things as the cloth place mats. A year or two north of sixty, he still sports a full mane of shiny gray hair, less a sign of virility than a cruel reminder. He was one of New York’s Finest during the seventies, until six bullets to the legs and groin led to an early retirement, a permanent limp, and a urinary tract fucked up enough to require a permanent piss bag. Tana claims he’s supplementing his disability pay with part-time work evicting foreclosures—a booming business thanks to the recent savings and loan scandal—but none of that money seems to have found its way to his wardrobe: polyester pants, long-collared shirt, and a black leather jacket that, like Uncle Marvin himself, has seen better days.
“Uncle Marvin,” I say.
Uncle Marvin grunts at me like I’m an idiot. I’m not offended—we’ve had entire conversations that didn’t consist of much more. He watches me bang my pack against the back of my hand for a few seconds before reaching into his jacket for a hand-rolled cigarette and a book of matches. Then he slips a
match between two fingers and lights it directly into his cupped hands, which form a natural shelter from the icy wind. A pretty cool trick, I have to admit. As he puffs his smoke to life, I counter by flicking a Zippo twice across my pants leg—not the only thing I learned during my brief college experience, but definitely the most useful. I light the unfiltered Camel and take a deep drag, suddenly noticing an odor even more exotic than my favored blend of Turkish and American tobaccos.
“That doesn’t smell much like a cigarette,” I say.
“You fucking kids wouldn’t know good grass if it smacked you in the eye.”
“I’ve smoked marijuana before,” I reply, recognizing that I’m in serious danger of being outcooled by a ball-less old man dressed like Serpico.
“Well, my niece sure as shit ain’t.”
“I thought we were supposed to ‘Just say no’?”
“Not advice,” he says, exhaling through clenched teeth, “that would ever come from me.”
He offers me a toke, which I decline. “I’m kind of going through a scotch and cigarettes phase right now,” I tell him.
“Get it in while you can. It’ll all be gone soon enough.”
Conversations with Uncle Marvin tend to be short, given his natural aversion toward anything polite, but I’m not in a hurry to get back inside and more than willing to pick up the slack. “I hear you. I’m thinking about moving to the city.”
“The city?” His eyes narrow. “Everybody I know is leaving. City’s a goddamn cesspool.”
“Well, that should make it much easier for me to find an apartment.”
“Funny,” he says without smiling.
A minute or two pass in silence, which I take to mean our conversation has ended. “Thanks as always for the witty repartee,” I say, tossing the butt to the ground and stamping it out with my toe. “I’d better get back inside before my father makes the moves on your niece.”
“Wait a minute…. When you go into the city, you can pick me up some more.” He raises the joint by way of explanation.
“You know I’d love to help you, Uncle Marvin, but I wouldn’t even know where to—”
“You go see my guy. Here …” He produces a bankroll the size of a baby’s fist from his front pocket, peels off six twenties, and presses them into my hand. “That’ll buy a quarter.”
“A quarter?”
“A quarter ounce. And don’t let him dick you with the stems and seeds. Dead weight, that shit.”
To be completely honest, I am grateful to have something to do that doesn’t involve ice cream.
The next morning, I rise early and dress in the dark, slipping out of the house before my parents can wake up and ask questions. A fifteen-minute walk later I’m aboard the Long Island Rail Road, just another head in the morning cattle drive to New York City. I find a seat next to an asshole in a suit reading the
Journal
. The car bounces gently as the train rumbles past row after row of working-class houses. I’m trying
to decide if “working class” is an oxymoron when a frosted blonde in a work skirt sashays past me. While my time with Daphne taught me, among other things, that I wasn’t the biggest fetishist when it came to sex, there’s something about the combination of stockings and running shoes that does it for me. I spend the next thirty minutes wondering if there’s a railway equivalent of the Mile High Club. On reaching the station, the cattle rise to their feet, driven toward the exits by instinct and caffeine. I drift along for the ride, floating on a wave of group dynamics toward Seventh Avenue.
Uncle Marvin’s connection is in Alphabet City, making convenient travel all but impossible. The easiest thing would be to hail a cab, but I’m still hopeful that my day as a drug mule might result in a profit. So after some consultation with a subway map, I hoof it a block east, shell out two bucks for a couple of subway tokens, and take the F to Second Avenue. A grizzled wino in a ski cap stumbles through the car, rattling a Styrofoam cup, offering God’s blessings every time a straphanger adds a few coins. I feel an urge to shake the guy—what kind of God does he think is watching out for him? I get my answer a minute later, when a second beggar enters the car from the other direction. The flow of donations comes to an abrupt halt. It’s as if the sight of so much hopelessness smothers any impulse toward charity. If there is a God paying attention to this pair of lost souls, He’s got a wicked sense of humor.
Emerging on Houston Street, I try to match the brisk and focused New York Strut. I don’t want to look like a tourist. I
turn left (
north
, I remind myself) on Avenue A and pass through Tompkins Square. Newly erected plastic fences keep would-be homesteaders off the grassy parts—and, in the process, everybody else. The end result looks less like a park than a museum to mourn the passing of public space. “Believe it or not,” says the imaginary tour guide in my head, “children were once allowed to roam freely on these lawns.”
At the park’s far corner, a congregation of skinheads causes me to quicken my pace. One of them has a swastika tattooed to his forehead. Good luck getting a job, Fritzie. I don’t have to make eye contact to know that they’re staring at me, which gets my heart racing, but I’m apparently white enough to earn passage without molestation. While I don’t have any idea whether or not Uncle Marvin’s notion of a New York exodus is grounded in fact, I’m beginning to see the rationale. The prevailing atmosphere is despair, punctuated by moments of terror.
A block later, I’m in Puerto Rico, or so I’m led to believe by the complete lack of English signage. I stand in front of the address Uncle Marvin gave me, a five-story building anchored by a boarded-shut nightclub that doesn’t seem like it will be reopening anytime soon. I buzz Apartment 4D.
“Yah?” crackles the response.
“Marvin Kirschenbaum sent me. I’m looking for—”
The buzzer buzzes and I scramble to push through the door in time. Inside a dimly lit hallway lined by mailboxes, I scan the names until reaching 4D: “The Pontiff.” Apparently this is a holy pilgrimage. I look up, drawn by a sudden commotion
in the stairwell. Raised voices. A slamming door. A bilingual explosion of English and Spanish curse words.