Manhattan Loverboy
This is a work of fiction. All names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to real events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Published by Akashic Books
©2000 Arthur Nersesian
Design and layout by Fritz Michaud
Cover photo by Sasha Kahn
Chapter illustrations by Elizabeth Elliott
Title page illustration by Kim Kowalski
Author photo by Delphi Basilicato
ISBN: 1-888451-09-2
e-ISBN: 9781617752216
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 99-96428
All rights reserved
First printing
Akashic Books
PO Box 1456
New York, NY 10009
[email protected]
www.akashicbooks.com
Portions of this book have appeared in the
Portable Lower East Side
and
Big Wednesday
To Burke Nersesian
and Patricia Gough
Thanks to:
Paul Rickert
Don Kennison
Mike McGonigal
Alfredo Villanueva
Nathan Henninger
Alexis Sottile
Johanna Ingalls
“Did you make love with her?”
[Legal proofreading is the closest I’ve ever come to being submerged in a sensory-deprivation tank. Forty-one hours in a law-office cubicle, proofing a mark [the new document] against a master [the original, revised document], slugging line to line, is a task that, despite the technical terms, requires all the intelligence of a fast-food cashier; the less brainpower you have the better. It was in the throes of the final arch-seconds of the tip-top hours of a forty-one-hour shift—forty-one chain-smoked, coffee-bleached, fluorescently-blinded, street-noise-obliterated, air-conditioned, deli-sandwiched hours of proofreading in the Nietzschean heights of one of those thunderously towering office buildings [the shadow of which obscures us all] in the Wall Street section [an area so dense with skyscrapers that if you could open the window of one and reach out, you’d grab a fistful of steel and glass from another building [but since the whole hundred-plus stories of the fucking building is a single, never-ending metal window pane—one of those buildings alone could make you hunger for the nuclear annihilation of mankind and all its loathsome symbols—that you can’t open anyhow, let’s not even discuss it!]]—that I fell in love [a/k/a. a.p].]
CONTENTS
LA VÍA DEL TREN
SUBTERRÁNEO
ES PELIGROSA
Long before love there was solitude. Solitude begat need. Need begat anguish, and anguish brought me to love. Before I was a proofreader, I was a solitary graduate student. Many years before I was a student, I was an orphan. A very tall and silent lady from the Bundles O’ Joy Adoption Agency escorted me to my new home. My adopted father thanked her, led me into his study, and carefully explained his motives for having me brought there.
“We’ll try to love you, Joey, but we should explain that you’re something of a substitute.”
“A substitute?” I uttered, barely able to pronounce the word.
“Mrs. Ngm.” That was what he called mother. “She’s not like other women.” At this point, my new-found mother emerged.
“Sir?”
“She’s barren.” He pointed to her lower reaches.
“And Mr. Ngm,” Mrs. Ngm put in, “he’s…inadequate.”
“What does that mean?”
Mrs. Ngm went to the fruit bowl and tore open a tangerine.
“Do you see any seeds in this tangerine?”
“No.”
“This tangerine is Mr. Ngm.”
Their sense of inadequacy was passed on to me. They treated me very well, but not like parents. And they never failed to explain that I was only someone picked at random to fill an irrational parenting urge. Yet even this parental urge was not very apparent. Mr. Ngm rarely came home after that day, and Mrs. Ngm kept dashing out of rooms as I entered them.
I’m not sure whether this is a syndrome for adopted children, or whether it was just my own reaction to adoptive non-parents, but as I grew older I became increasingly obsessed with the identity of my real parents. This obsession, unfulfilled, eventually manifested itself in an acute interest in histories.
Faulkner said that American Indians said that the spirits of their ancestors said something like, man can’t own the earth because the earth owns man. Man’s identity is suited to his parcel of earth. We are but a single cell in these long bloodlines of countries and cultures. People are the living earth, they are the terrain come alive: Arabs are the desert, unchanging yet turbulent; the English are the sea, humid and unfathomable; Russians, in a variety of ways, just go on and on; Americans are the youngest sons of the earth and act immature. But the American melting pot of integration isn’t even hot yet. The twentieth century was the century of immigrants; we can still see our torn roots elsewhere.
I clearly remember the day my preschool teacher asked what everyone’s heritage was. Young as they were, my classmates bleated out: “I’m Irish,” “I’m Afro-American,” “I’m Vietnamese,” etc.
But I, little Joseph, was left dumb. I was the rootless orphan. As I got older, I spent more and more time in dark, deserted libraries, searching through history books for my face, my race. Though I never found myself within the photos or descriptions of these worldly books, this compulsion eventually left me with a vast knowledge of history.
Ignorant of history, you think that the world starts when you’re born and ends when you kick. But me, I’m thousands of years old. I’ve survived wars, revolutions, intrigues, and catastrophes of all varieties. I can tell you intimate details of Pharaohs and Cataracts from both the Upper and Lower Nile, from Higher and Lower Civilization. I can give excruciating descriptions on how to get from one administrative building to another in early Byzantine Constantinople. I read, studied, became buddies with personalities on fire and confidantes of God. If I were to see William of Orange, or Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius (who strangely resembled long-retired, New York TV community-chronicler Chauncey Howell), or any number of ancient potentates on the street, I’d be able to stop them and ask what they were doing alive in New York.
I arrived too late for the dorm-room lottery during that first semester at Columbia. But I was intent on not missing an academic year. When I informed Mr. Ngm of the situation, he sent a memo explaining that my scholastic budget was prefixed. Life beyond that would be a test of self-reliance.
I searched the ads in the papers and fliers in laundromats. With a limited amount of money, and not picky, I finally narrowed it down to a choice between a cozy studio in Williamsburg, Brooklyn (one hour away from school), or a wide stairway in an upper West Side loft (a mere ten minutes away).
The stairway was a discontinued passage in a large loft building. The landlord, I learned, would have demolished the conduit, but there was a possibility that the upper floors in the loft could be turned into commercial space. If this occurred, the owner would need the stairs to comply with building codes; so he left it intact.
The place was currently residential; so he renovated the stairway and advertised it as a “mini-triplex-studio.” It wasn’t as bad as it sounded. Like the body itself, the top landing of this stairway/apartment contained a nutritional gateway, my kitchen, the second landing a cushion of fat, my bedroom (my bed was a 4’ x 3’ piece of styrofoam—I had to sleep curled like a cat), and the final landing, the bathroom and exit.
In life, we are born and we slip from day to day until we die. Although there are signifying days and stages of life, there is no clear moment when we might say that we had only practiced living until now, and henceforth we shall actually live. After three undergrad years in that stairway studio, I realized that it was time to reach a landing, a new start. I decided to circumcise my adopted-family name. I planned to give myself a name with a national heritage that more closely resembled where I believed I came from, though where exactly that was was still a riddle to me. Realizing that I might never be absolutely sure, I felt I might as well give my allegiance to a culture worthy of my respect.
But were there any? Of all the great cultures that had ever flourished, of all the imperial civilizations, not a single one had stood the test of time. Their glory had faded. All that remained were crass, consumer societies, mere islands for corporate empires to bridge and tunnel.
One night around this time, I was wandering around the exasperating East Village feeling depressed in the French tradition. I clearly remember a boy in his late teens hidden under a huge, floppy fedora and clad in a baggy, out-of-date suit, who rushed up and asked me if I were Jewish. I thought about it, and decided to play a hunch.
“Yes.”
He hustled me off into an unwashed Winnebago and said it was time to reaffirm my faith. Together, we submerged into a Mitzvah tank. He asked my name. He asked again.
“Levi,” said I, thinking more of the jeans than the genes. Rolling up my sleeve, he wrapped a leather thong around my arm and led me through an ancient chant. I mumbled, faking the words. I wanted, needed the cleansing. His chanting beckoned Hollywood trailers of ancient epics: Charlton Heston in robes and beard, Peter O’Toole in
Masada
, Richard Gere in
King David
. I saw the diaspora pass before me, and looking upon those wandering and beleaguered people, my eyes filled with tears. I saw myself in that sandswept caravan, my people, my past. Suddenly, out of nowhere, a large-headed, red-haired, red-faced Hasid appeared, and with a single sniff he started shrieking.
“Dos is a goy, a goy! Out with him!”
Even after being thrown out of the van and screamed at in public, I didn’t give up the faith. There were little things, odd signs, that revealed to me my kinship with the thirteen great tribes. I craved gefilte fish, matzoh, and sickly sweet wines. Flatchki (tripe) and platski (potato pancakes) were delicious, and knishes were always a treat. Saturdays were a kind of natural sabbath. And I adored the tumbling sounds—
scholum, yehuda
, and
menachem
—like big drums rolling down a stairwell. Soon, I found myself wandering in this great Jewish mist, a hazy history that unfolded forever backward.