Manhattan Loverboy (22 page)
Opening a suitcase filled with Amy’s stuff, I searched through papers, notebooks, work-related crapola. Flipping through utility bills, unclear warranties, tax-deductible restaurant tabs, a terrifying quantity of metered cab receipts, a copy of my Wittenberg Bible-sized sublease, and so forth, a tiny and much-abused appointment book finally relented, and dropped out.
Thumbing through the book, I saw a listing of appointments. Aerobics were tri-weekly, gynecological appointments were bi-monthly. “Stooges,” a client, loomed early in the month, reappeared daily for two weeks like a nervous tic, and then fell off the face of her schedule book—a deal closed. The one cryptic and recurrent staple in her schedule book was a notation that read in capital letters: TOB. It occupied the Tuesday, 7:00 p.m. time slot as if the time were a parcel of real estate. The obvious deduction was that TOB was short for someone named Toby? Tobias? Tabatha? Tobolopolous? A lover she kept? A masseuse she required? A sex club she frequented? Who knew? I flipped through the little pages of her book looking for elaboration of a Toby. None was evident.
Fanning back through the days, weeks, and months, past notions that came and went, I kept encountering that same one: TOB. At last, something yielded. At one time slot, instead of TOB, it read: O. Building. What was the O. Building? I decided to try calling Amy at work and ask her point blank.
I called her office; her secretary picked up.
“Amy, please.”
“Yes, who shall I say is calling?”
“I’m calling for the O. Building.”
“Yes, who shall I say is calling? Is this you? Is this that sleazy guy I was warned about?”
“Yes. Do you know what the O. Building is?” Very often secretaries are informational run-offs for their basin bosses.
“I was warned about you.”
“What is the O. Building?”
“Is this a prank? Are you masturbating?”
“Not yet, I’m trying to find the O. Building.”
“Where is the Old Building?” she misunderstood me.
“No, the O. Building.”
“It’s probably the old Whitlock offices over on Wall Street.” She gave me an exact address.
I thanked her, told her I was masturbating, and hung up.
FACT: I WAS MYSTERIOUSLY BORN IN TOKYO WHILE WHITLOCK WAS THERE. AND THEN MYSTERIOUSLY PUT UP FOR ADOPTION.
FACT: I WAS MYSTERIOUSLY GIVEN A WHITLOCK SCHOLARSHIP EVEN THOUGH I NEVER APPLIED FOR IT.
FACT: THE GRANT WAS SUDDENLY CUT AT MY TWENTY-THIRD BIRTHDAY.
FACT: MY ADOPTIVE FATHER WAS NEVER VERY PATERNAL.
QUESTION: WHY WOULD AMY, A JUNIOR PARTNER AT ONE OF THE COUNTRY’S BIGGEST LAW FIRMS, NEED TO MOVE IN WITH A NUTCASE LIKE ME?
All roads pointed to one answer:
?
Early Tuesday evening, I dressed in office formals, an old tweed suit. As I was about to leave, I decided not to take the cheap handgun. I carefully slipped it under my pillow as any good member of the NRA would.
I took a city bus through the constipated bowels of lower Manhattan. I arrived at a filthy, old, limestone office building on Wall Street. Under the tarnished plaque it read, WHITLOCK INC. Long before the sudden and erratic growth of the American economy, rising like the bow of a great ship, reaching its greatest heights just before it majestically slips under, before the freakish erection of rhombus-shaped buildings and the picket fences of adjacent skyscrapers that rendered this neighborhood into a slow-motion parking lot of traffic at the base of a human-filled air shaft, before all that, this modest monstrosity must have been one of the first office buildings in the area.
Six o’clock on Tuesday, an hour before Amy’s fateful TOB meeting, I purchased a weekly leftist newspaper and stationed myself across the street from the old building. I ate a tuna fish on challah while waiting for Amy to show up. I stooped behind and around structures, compelling the too-tight belt of my too-loose pants to dig painfully. I unbuckled it and waited. Slowly, strange sights appeared. Unusual men emerged. And they didn’t arrive in any of those tacky rec-room-on-wheels limos either. These guys came in chauffeur-driven Rolls or classy, old, English sports cars, which they illegally parked out front, fuck the parking ticket.
In some cases, they got out of private cars. Who were they? There were about a dozen in all, usually with at least one bodyguard as an escort. They were all white, older men, well-dressed with strange clothes, costumes of aristocracy, gold-capped walking sticks, monocles on small vest chains. In one overdone case, a Prussian-looking riding crop tucked under an armpit; in another case, right out of central casting, an antique wicker wheelchair: Old money smelled of geriatric urine. My belt slipped off my pants.
From out of nowhere, a bouncy rottweiler walked up the street and looked at me angrily as it passed, then squatted and took a steaming dump before proceeding on. Along with pit bulls and dobermans, rottweilers are the turnstile jumpers of the pooper-scooper laws. Before the commanding canine could bounce away, a cop car paused.
“Hey,” a rottweiler in a cop uniform called to me. “Clean that up.” He pointed to the poop.
“He ain’t mine,” I said plainly.
“Clean it up or I’ll give you a ticket.”
“He ain’t mine. Give the dog a ticket.” The cop got out of the car, halting traffic all the way back to Brooklyn.
“What, do you just carry a leash on you for kicks?” he said, spotting the leather belt in my hand.
“This is my belt.” I held it up.
“What are you doing here? Let’s see some ID.” Letting out a sigh of protest, I unfolded the copy of the
Village Voice
I was planning to get disgusted by, and shoveled up the expelled remains of the rottweiler’s last victim. Deputy Dog passed, and I resumed my wait.
As I grew hypothermic in my hot-and-cold guessing-game of hunches, Amy’s cab screeched to a halt before me. As she appeared, and the driver tore off her deductible metered receipt, I felt the tender scab of healing love rip open. “Amy, I love you,” I muttered to a mailbox that doubled as a conduit for my heart’s thwarting.
Not knowing what else to do, I figured that I should try to break into this odd little gathering and confirm once and for all that paranoia was not the central governing force in my life. Something was up. I had to go upstairs and find out what role these senior citizens played in my life. The old building had a main entrance and a large, metal set of janitor’s doors. I tried the janitor’s doors, yanking and pulling, struggling and wheezing. Then I went around to the main entrance. A near-dead security guard dozed before a dozen closed-circuit TVs and switches. I passed him and his seismographic snoring, and snuck into the only elevator in the bank that was still functioning. The button panel required key-access to each floor. Fortunately, the tumblers to one floor were switched to open. I pushed the button for that floor. Loud mechanical sounds from above must have heralded my coming.
FROM ‘HOW’M I DOIN’?’
TO ‘GIULIANI TIME’
AND BACK AGAIN
“It is both a reality and a bad dream, but its deepest reality lies, strangely enough, in its manifestation as a dream,” wise man George Kennan once said about another nightmare.
When the elevator door opened, I stepped into the dreamscape of a large, empty, unlit floor. Distant lights at the far end of the room illuminated a table. People were seated around it. As I approached my heart started fibrillating. I recognized Amy, the only kitten among a bunch of old toms. She saw me before I could reach the table.
“I’ve pieced things together,” I confessed.
An elderly man leaning on a golden, lion-headed cane rose from his chair and began a presentation in a strange accent: “The Whitlock Corporation was founded in England in the mid-eighteenth century, 1752 to be exact. Slowly, in the late-nineteenth century, it invested more and more in America. Finally it was rechartered here in New York. Now, economic domination has slowly been revolving eastward. Young man, this is not some petty frat prank. We don’t deal in vengeance.”
“Since the late-’60s,” a guy with a Van Dyke beard took the ball, “the Whitlock Corporation has made heavy investments in the Japanese economic infrastructure. Now the principal problem, as you must know, is that there have been many restrictions forbidding foreign investors in Japan, especially back then.”
“So?” I asked him. All eyes looked to one man who had been sitting in darkness the entire time. He suddenly flipped on a lamp. I walked over in disbelief and touched his face to see if he was real.
“Mr. Ngm, what are you doing here?”
“Am I not your father? Can’t you address me as such?”
“I’m sorry, Mr. Ngm, it’s just that…”
“The Japanese government,” he began, “was particularly worried about the future holders of this stock.”
“But what do you have to do with all this?”
“You must understand,” interjected the Van Dyke beard, “this money is locked in Japan. They won’t let us take it out. All we can really do with it is reinvest it and wait.”
“I am a member of this board,” Mr. Ngm replied.
“This isn’t going to end with a lion and a chicken is it? I know that story.”
“Whitlock is on his way here. He should be the one…”
“He’s my father, isn’t he?” I asked Mr. Ngm.
The group of men looked at each other strangely and silently. Finally Ngm spoke: “A secret clause was built into the 1962 trade agreement between the Japanese government and the CEO of Whitlock Inc. It stated that among Whitlock’s trustees, he had to accept a Japanese citizen. That’s when I was voted a member of the board.”
“What does all this mean?”
“The agreement also stated that a future trustee with quite a few powers would come to the board on his twenty-first birthday.” I was twenty-three, so I couldn’t be the Anti-Christ.
“Am I on
Candid Camera
?”
“The board of trustees, as you can imagine, crosses a lot of borders. National feelings at times run deep. We have an ex-U.S. president and a former prime minister on our board.
“So Whitlock, to appease many of the Americans on the board, agreed to have his son born in Japan and thereby be a citizen, but he counter-stipulated that you must be raised here…”
“
America’s Wackiest Videos
?”
“I assure you we did everything for a reason. The result was that you were from the sperm of Whitlock.”
“Am I going to be a patsy for some assassination?”
“I have a meeting in Geneva at 3:00 and no time left for this
Oliver Twist
crap,” said the dick with the Van Dyke beard.
“Mr. Ngm very graciously gave us permission on behalf of the Japanese government to delay your awakening,” the double-headed cane said.
“We were trying to let you grow up a bit more,” said the Van Dyke dick. “After all, we’re not insensitive. It must be somewhat traumatic to learn that you were manufactured as a stipulation, a voucher to a corporate agreement.”
“You’re not being entirely honest,” a new bow-tied figure added, staring at a distant figure behind him. Turning around, I could see him through the smoke and shadows. Whitlock had arrived.
“There was a force on this board,” the double-headed eagle added, “that did not want you to assume your seat, who felt you were
mentis incompetence
.”
“Incompetent!”
“This board decided that you had to pass a series of character tests,” Whitlock explained.
“Tests?” I asked.
“Character assessment tests,” said the double-headed cane. “We wanted to see several things. Among them, we were curious if you would fight for Amy, and stay with her.”
“We were also interested in seeing if you could handle wealth,” Whitlock said. “That money I gave you was in fact the last test.”
“The money? You mean the half-million?”
“How did you handle it? Anything that happens here will be incumbent upon its full return.”
“I still got it. I mean, I spent a couple of hundred, but I can make it back.”
“Return what you have. You can make up the rest later.”
“Fine.” A McDonald’s binge, a tourist night in New York, donations on a subway, and the purchase of an illegal handgun up in Harlem couldn’t have destroyed more than five hundred bucks. I could get that much back selling my collector’s issues of
Screw Magazine.
Whitlock vanished off to a distant room that I suspected was a toilet.
“How could you do this to me?” I asked Mr Ngm.
“If I told you the truth, it could have jeopardized your status on this board.”
“I don’t mean that!” I yelled back. What was the point of trying to explain what it was like never having a father? How could I articulate the lifelong ache of rootlessness? It was apparent that he felt uncomfortable. Besides, I had already reached overload. I rose and walked through the darkness of this empty void. Behind me I felt a perfumed presence—Amy.
“I can’t believe this,” I muttered. “This is unbelievable.”
“That’s why you were paranoid all your life,” Amy replied, and quickly added, “It’s also why you suffer from certain character ailments.”
“What character ailments?”
“Low self-esteem, manifesting itself in your selfish and sleazy nature. You don’t trust anyone.”