Manhattan Loverboy (10 page)

“What’s hiding under this rock?” she muttered, and pulled out something I had never seen before—a copy of my birth certificate.

“Where did you find that?”

“You were born in Japan?” she asked, reading it. Looking under her shoulder, I saw that on some sundry vital statistic, under “Place of Birth,” it said, Tokyo, Japan.

“I never knew that!” I replied.

Her response was a fit of gracious sneezes from her cute little nose. I located a slightly used napkin from the recesses of my pocket and offered it to her.

“This place is a pigsty.” Sneeze.

“Judge not least ye be…”

“It’s a filthy mess!” Sneeze.

“I don’t deny that it can use some work. But a new broom sweeps clean.”

“You need a new tractor.” Sneeze, sneeze, sneeze.

“Come on in, I’ve got some Yodels and other Hostess pastries in the pantry…”

“I’m going to break out in hives if I stay here much longer. I’m allergic to this room.” She retreated into the hall.

“Well, you cunt…”

“What?”

“Do you want to go to a motel or something?” I asked, hoping that she missed my slip.

“A motel? What in the world for?” she asked with a coy indignation.

“For the same purpose that we came here,” I sneered.

She gave me an unusual look and replied, “There are no high-ceilinged motels that I can rent in Midtown Manhattan for less than two hundred bucks a month, even with a simian sleazebag as a roommate.” And then she began departing down the stairs.

“WHAT!” I said, after a momentary lapse into utter disbelief. I raced down the steps, catching her as she was hailing a cab on Third Avenue.

“I’ll have to send some people over to help clear out my room, and then we’ll need to sit down and draw up a sublease agreement. I might also bring in some carpenters to throw up some partition thing, maybe just a free-standing divider in the middle. I want you to call my office and tell my secretary when you’ll be home. Do you understand?”

I automatically nodded yes.

“Are you going to forget?” I shook my head no.

“Damn, look at you. ‘Course you’ll forget.” I promised her I wouldn’t.

“I just need a place for two months until something else comes along. I’ll return to you a renovated place and a year’s rent. Fair enough?”

I automatically nodded yes again.

She hailed, and a cab screeched sideways to a halt. She got in, slammed the door behind her, and disappeared into that maze of moving metal that imperils the tortured people of this shaky city. Why in the hell would she want to live with me? She could buy and sell little people like me ten times over. What the hell was this all about?

With my last calories, I crawled up the stairs. Like someone with diarrhea who can greet defecation by simply sitting on a toilet, I found sleep as soon as I got supine. But there was still no escaping the low-income sleep.

Many of my dreams and revelations came from the margins of the city, places like the subway or bombed-out, boarded-up brownstones, dank and populated with ill, foreign, ugly, hungry, poorly-clad people. Their laughs were nowhere near as powerful as their cries. They met their pleasures in perversity. Their behavior was irrational, repetitious, erratic, tormenting, and I invariably awoke being chased. On this particular occasion, I dreamed I had just broken out of a large, leathery roach egg, and my father, a sewer rat named Drogun, was chasing me. I was at a perilous place on the food chain.

I awakened with a start, took a leak, ate a quart of Cherry Garcia ice cream, thought about the women’s suffrage movement in the middle of the nineteenth century, disentangled my scrotum, and plunged back into that toxic gutter of muddy sleep.

CHAPTER FIVE

“WHOEVER SAID ‘SIZE
DOESN’T MATTER’ WASN’T
TALKING ABOUT NEW YORK
APARTMENTS”

A nanosecond later, I awoke to the sound of something very heavy being dropped very near my head. I opened my eyes slowly. Amy and a couple of yuppies were rummaging around in the apartment. I went back to sleep. Later, I awoke to the sensation of having my bed hoisted up in the air and transported across the room. More yuppies filled the house. Every time I went back to sleep, I would awaken only more exhausted and drained. The next time I awoke, the place was packed with yuppies. I could see these were not the old yups of the early ’80s, engendered by the false boom, who died out by the market correction of the late ’80s. These were a deadly swarm of survivor yuppies who had mutated with New Democrats in the Clinton age. Their well-pressed lapels and jackets looked like wings. They were filling the place slowly and insidiously, like the crows in the jungle gym scene of Hitchcock’s
The Birds.

I tried to get up, but sleep was an obese bed-fellow, and I couldn’t get out from under her. When I awoke for the last time, the lady of the house was there with only a few of them, the final nominees. They were all walking around inspecting details. It was like a competition of fastidiousness. She was talking to some guy with a tape measure and level. Most of my furnishings and belongings were now tightly packed into the rear third of the apartment, away from the healthy windows facing the street. My bed and I were firmly angled upon boxes. The other two-thirds of my apartment had all these idyllic things, like a prefabricated bar with a small statue of mercury and customized shelving. There were also several boxes of Ikea furniture waiting to be opened and assembled. A Port-O-San in the corner indicated that this was a union job.

They ignored me completely as I struggled to my feet and wrapped a sheet around my naked weight, searching for a grenade among my memorabilia.

“I have the lease in my name and I don’t want any roommates,” I said to one of them. But it was as if I wasn’t there.

“Party’s over, everyone out!” They ignored me. “Hey, what is this? I’m master of my castle, get out!”

“Can’t you see we’re talking?” Amy replied lividly. Grabbing me by the scruff of my loose, bulldog neck, she yanked me into the hall and pinned me against the wall.

“Yesterday, you said some things to me that no man ever said to me before.”

“Did I?” I asked, wondering if she was pleased or angry with me.

“You seemed to care about me. You seemed to be the only man on this whole goddamned selfish island who…who… who was interested in my welfare.”

“Well, sorry if I misled you, but you must make a lot of money. I’m sure you must find my assistance insulting.”

“I didn’t get to where I am today by accepting either apologies or buts. I’ve already accepted your offer, and if you fell down these stairs right now and broke your neck, that offer would be something that made you a much grander human being.” To illustrate my humility, she leaned me perilously over the stairway.

“What offer was that?” I asked nervously.

“You said that if I get a carpenter to do a major renovation on your place, and make it presentable, and pay a year’s rent, you would let me stay for two months. Now that’s certainly not asking much, is it?”

I had no recollection of making any such offer, but two months wasn’t a lengthy duration, and there seemed to be a decent profit in the deal. Man was cursed with a mental wattage that overlit the squalid sublet of his pointless life. That wattage turned good men into serial murderers, pedophilic stalkers, and assorted cult members. Drugs and booze were shades and tints designed to dim that needless beam of consciousness. Ergo, the rental windfall would provide me with beer, pot, and other cognitive rheostats for the entire year.

Additionally, some early morning—perhaps after a shower—her monogrammed towel might slip. At the end of it all, I could claim her hi-tech renovated place, with its saturno halogen lights and pastel-painted walls, a regular pleasure dome. I tried to orally accept her offer, but she said that for my protection she would take care of the legalities. We made an appointment to meet at an office where she would sign a sublease agreement. She didn’t tell me the title of the firm, just the vaguely familiar address. It wasn’t until I got to the rhombus-shaped building that my dread and suspicion were confirmed. It was Frankenstein’s castle: Whitlock Incorporated.

When I asked the horse-eyed receptionist for Ms. Rapap-port (Amy’s last name), I assumed that some nerdy boyfriend was going to work out this sublet agreement. He was probably a specialist in corporate real estate who just happened to be working in the snake pit. When the Satanic Shah, Whitlock himself, appeared arm in arm with my little sublet roomie, my heart blew up like an M-80.

“What are you doing here?” Whitlock spat at me.

“This is Joseph, the roommate I told you about,” she replied.

“Wait a second,” I said to her. “Where did you meet this clown?”

“Be quiet!” he growled. “This is an office; people are making money.” Turning toward Amy, he asked, “Is this some kind of set up?”

“I should be asking that!” I started.

“I gave him a break by letting him work as a proofreader after he tried to kill me,” Whitlock revealed.

“Bullshit. The truth is you have a knack for finding girls I’m interested in and soiling them,” I said, adding, “He doesn’t practice safe sex.”

He punched me suddenly in the gut. For a man his age, it was very powerful, knocking all the wind out of me. Grabbing my shoulder, Amy held me up.

“I’m sorry,” she apologized to me for him—or vice versa.

“Now, Andrew, this is my affair. He has an apartment within my budget range. Remember who you are.”

“Forget it,” I piped in. “I’m not subletting to any friend of this guy.”

“Come now!” she replied. “Enough of this. I want you two to shake hands.”

“All right,” Whitlock muttered, snatching my hand like a pickpocketed wallet.

“I actually thought we were kind of bonding for awhile back there,” I replied as we shook.

“Good boys,” she replied.

“This way,” he said, and shoved me toward his war room. She trailed. His office was an agoraphobic’s nightmare with the latest gadgets of fun and comfort. He instantly began pleading with her while I tried to catch my breath.

“For god’s sake, Amy, let me buy you a place. You can pay me back whenever you want, but don’t do this!”

I silently concurred.

“Sorry, Andrew, but I insist on autonomy.”

“Then for Christ’s sake, buy yourself a co-op,” he pleaded. “Interest rates are nothing now. The real estate market has hit an all-time bottom.”

“It’s still too costly,” she replied, “even for me.”

He sighed the sigh of troubled love and mumbled something in the intercom to his horse-eyed secretary stabled outside. The door opened, and a lackey wheeled in a document; it was thick and written in fine print. In size it resembled the Treaty of Versailles. After she signed it, she handed me the document. Eager to just get out of there, I took out the Montblanc pen I had stolen from Whitlock earlier.

“My pen!” he exclaimed, snatching it from me. “That was given to me by the Prime Minister of Carraway, you thief.” He handed me a Bic Ballpoint.

“So what am I signing here?” I thumbed through the document.

“A basic sublease agreement,” said the well-pruned tyrant.

“A sublease agreement doesn’t have to be the size of a phone book.”

“Actually, that’s a standard corporate real estate agreement there. Admittedly, my people made some modifications for this situation. If you like, take it home and look it over.” I flipped through it quickly, a lot of party-of-the-first-part crap. It read like a Cartesian equation, an endless series of pointless statements and reasons.

“This looks like something from the foreign ministry. I’ll get a standard Blumberg sublease that you can sign,” I said to her.

“As a woman, I’m asking you to sign it.” I’m not sure what sacred power being a woman carried, but I wasn’t moved. It looked like a confession to the Lindbergh baby kidnapping.

“Come on, sign the damn thing, and let’s get you the hell out of here,” Whitlock yelled.

“I’m reluctant.”

“Sign it, or I’ll have you blacklisted from the proofreading circuit.”

“Andrew, you won’t do anything of the sort!”

“He already did something of the sort,” I explained. “He had me expelled from college before I could drop out!”

“Well, he won’t do it again,” she said.

“He can’t do it again. This is unfair. I didn’t know he was your boyfriend.”

“He’s not,” Amy exclaimed.

“Well, I still don’t want to have anything to do with anyone who’s a friend of his. You two deserve each other.”

“What exactly happened between you two?” she asked Whitlock.

“Nothing at all. Joseph and I are best buddies,” Whitlock said.

“This guy ruined me!” I countered. “He humiliated me, slept with Veronica…”

“Excuse us, Amy,” Whitlock said, as he walked her to the door, “Me and Mr. Aeiou have some unfinished business to work out.”

“No, we don’t.” I rose and headed out with her. I was afraid to be alone with him. He closed the door on her, and we were alone.

“Now, Aeiou, take it easy,” he said, cracking his knuckles.

Whitlock went to a small refrigerator in a corner of his office and handed me a bottle of Heineken with a pubic hair on it.