“That’s not technically true. There’s a precise anatomical definition for a dwarf regarding the limbs-to-torso ratio—a definition that I exceed by ounces and inches.”
“Okay, you’re short and fat. Hold on, I got another call.” She pushed the red, putting my life on hold.
What a broad! What pursuit of unbridled honesty! Now I wouldn’t have to wear the corset or the lifts in my shoes. But more important, she cut right through the fat into the bone; she thought like an obnoxious male. She probably had a slide rule or something that could calculate the size of a man’s reagan by just listening to the tone of his voice. In another moment, she was back on the phone speaking:
“You’re Joseph Aeiou. You’re twenty-three years old. You live a lonely life in a two-bedroom apartment on the upper East Side. You graduated Columbia on a Knights of Pythias scholarship, dropped out of an exclusive masters program to pursue a career as a stand-up comic.”
“That’s not entirely true.” Whitlock had taken some liberties filling out my employment history, but I didn’t want to identify him and this whole falcon-and-falconer relationship we were having.
“You’ve been a mediocre proofreader for several months now.”
“Facts shade the truth!”
“You probably drink a lot of coffee and beer, have a lot of books and records, take a lot of drugs, compulsively masturbate, TV always on…”
“Let me remind you that Hugh Hefner was a twenty-seven-year-old using his kitchen table as a desk when he put out his first historic issue, which…”
“That’s how you see yourself, isn’t it?” she said knowingly.
“Actually, no.” Although I presumed I had the same sleaze-capacity as Hef, I lacked the slick veneer. I was more of an Al Goldstein type.
“I’m curious about your apartment.” She brushed me aside and took off. I had fumbled the puck, and now she was skating with it. “Do you live in a railroad flat?”
“No, I have two large bedrooms…”
“Tell me about the floors in your bedrooms.”
“The floors?”
“What are they made of?”
“Wood.”
“Buckled? Splintery? Lacquered?”
“Both are polished parquet.”
“Tell me the measurements.”
The apartment had been in my adoptive family for at least one generation. It was large, rent-controlled, and well-situated. I gave her more facts—about the recently installed crappy intercom that sucked in all the street noise, the fall-apart aluminum storm windows (a Mafia-landlord racket), and the width and height of door frames—and figures; I provided the average utility rates as well as the rate of increase per annum and the weight/stress ratio per square foot. I’d retained these housing details after getting stoned one day and deciding that I wanted to be a slumlord. But after a few hours, after coming down, I decided to be a warrior for the people, and then I got stoned again.
The rapidly fired questions unfolded into greater, more precise questions. We exchanged details faster and faster like machines until the pitch of our voices got insect-high. We abbreviated terms, more data per breathful, like seasoned catholics doing the rosary. At first, I sensed she was drawing a two-dimensional diagram. But as the questions got more minute, I realized it was lifting off the page into a three-dimensional model, complete with a small replica of me looking something like a demon spawn of the Pillsbury Doughboy and the Michelin Man. But it didn’t really matter; I was utterly infatuated with that hot little voice. Looking down at my trusty reagan, I realized that I was in an achingly turgid state.
“Exactly what rent do you pay?”
“A hundred and twenty-eight fifty a month.” I tied a tourniquet about my bobbing reagan to keep the little heathen still.
“Perfect! I’ll be under the big brass clock in Grand Central at 5:30.”
“The old four-faced clock on top of the Info Center?” I asked desperately.
“No, the big Merrill Lynch clock.”
“But they removed that clock.”
“Meet me under where it used to be. I commute from Westchester, but I’ve had it with commuting. In order to squeeze out more productivity hours, I need a place in the city.” Suddenly, without a farewell, the line went dead. I thought maybe she’d hit the red button again, and was ingesting more facts on me. But after an eternity of holding the phone to my ear, a dial tone broke through.
I was pleased with the conversation. I really couldn’t win her with my charm or accomplishments. The only strategy that ever really worked for me was pity. But never in the 250,000 years since the earth engendered homo sapiens had there been such a hot babe!
I got a little sleep, which after so many hours awake only made me sleepier. I took a cold shower, had about a gallon of coffee, and sat on the toilet for around twenty minutes, without yield. Then I put on a new T-shirt which I’d won the last year from WFUK for being the eighty-fourth caller, and I played some records to get the decibel level of my confidence up. I emptied the stuff from my pockets that usually makes my pants droop. I had no roll-ons or aerosol crap, so I smeared some natural maple syrup on my neck and chest. It felt sticky, and I smelled like sap, but I realized I had no time for a shower.
I quickly went to the hiding place in the bathroom. I never had anything valuable but I was a great believer in hiding places and all their implications. When UFOs finally get around to squashing all mankind like bugs on their windshield and turning the earth into a big service station, if they fast-forward through the remains of our cultural history they might think—by our literature, arts, and music—that our planet was one great love-in. In point of fact, the gnarled imprint of guilt, shame, and distrust are on everything. The hiding place in the toilet underscored this. I only wished I could curl up in there. I took a twenty out of it, in case she wanted to go for drinks.
I squeezed into a rush hour subway. Three-and-a-half million people joined me. As we rode the number six to Forty-Second, we vied for seats and gripping bars. Like a dividing vacuum, whites exiting the subway were sucked into a pinpoint zero gravity center, apparently located somewhere in Grand Central. Blacks tended to stay on the subway.
Once up and out in that cathedral of commuters, I was locked in the density level of all these men in trench coats. I shoved until I could shove no more and, looking up between bobbing heads and entombing shoulders, I saw her. She seemed to be at the hub of a galaxy of people. She was truly statuesque. She seemed to be standing on a pedestal, a Goddess Diana in her modern-day temple of Ephesus.
Drones don’t approach the queen. A small shell of space surrounded her. With this advantage, she was able to survey the panic-stricken faces of trapped and orbiting commuters. Light seemed to be striking her at such an angle that it lent her a marble texture. I tried calling to her, but my voice couldn’t compete with the din of the crowd; I tried waving to her, but my arms were wedged at my sides. Whenever I tried moving toward her, the crowd looped me further away. It was the spin-dry stage of rush hour. All I could do was stand there and wait until she spotted me. By that time I had to go to the bathroom something awful. All those people sucked the limited supply of oxygen. Others, somewhere on the outer edge of the city, were pushing in toward me. Everyone in the entire City of New York was at that moment contributing some inward pressure toward me.
The pounds per square centimeter on my rib cage and vital organs were immeasurable. Soon, I could hold no longer. I started farting incredibly. I literally felt as if I were deflating with flatulence: the odor of a million burning tires. Soon I started inhaling, gagging on my flatulence; I could feel that crap-gas filling my lungs, asphyxiating me! Businessmen started retching on the rising brown fog. A nucleation occurred.
After sitting stagnant for hours, stewing in acidically-reduced cold-cut sandwiches and pounds of slaw, my intestines must have resembled a two-ply garbage bag—the manswarm scrambled away from me at all costs. It was during this ripple in the crowd that enough of a space opened to individualize me. She looked down at the gap in the crowd and saw my wiggling shock of unwashed hair. She took giant steps, her stiletto heels seemed to be six feet tall. A giant Fay Wray seizing her chimp Kong, she rescued me to a place of calm.
“You’re eight minutes late!” she yelled. “Do you know what my time is worth? Do you know what I would do to you if you worked for me?”
“I tried…I swear I tried…” It was difficult to speak, and I started hyperventilating as she continued yelling at me.
“Do you realize that because of you I will now be eight minutes late throughout my entire life. I’ll never, ever be able to regain that lost time. You KILLED eight minutes of my life!” The crowd, the lack of sleep, the fact that the woman who I wanted to be mine—my lady—was infuriated with me—I was overwhelmed and I started weeping. Soon, it was uncontrollable.
“That’s enough of that,” she said, but I couldn’t stop.
“That’s more than enough of that!” But I only cried the more.
“That is quite ample,” and, “here, here” and, “there, there” and, “that certainly fills the quota,” all followed.
But I only cried the harder. It was all too much. A monsoon of coffee had burst the dam of my nerves, flooding me into a neurotic state. I started twitching and hiccupping through the tears. But the dam, as it turned out, had not completely broken until it happened. Both commuters and homeless alike watched in disbelief.
I involuntarily peed in my pants. A thick trickle ran down my right leg, along the marble floor, into a large, yellow puddle. It soon trailed off into some drain, connecting me to other bodies of foul waters.
She looked pityingly on me. “Every man I’ve met has been weak in some way…but you are the sniveling weakest.” I sniffled more.
“Man is unrivaled,” she proclaimed to an older group who had not evacuated the city in their mobile years and, by default, became native New Yorkers. “Man revels in weakness….” She paused; something must have clicked. I guess she extrapolated: Man equals weakness; I’m the weakest; ergo, I’m the most manly. I conclude this because of her next execution. She reached down, grabbed me, and pressed me so tightly against her breast that she actually lifted me about a foot off the ground. I felt like a saline implant. Rocking me back and forth, she started repeating over and over, “There, there,” pause, “here, here.”
I regained my composure slowly. Even though my feet couldn’t reach the ground, my confidence was returning to me. Still whimpering so that she would continue holding me, I snaked my right hand carefully along the tight space between our bodies, gently placing the open palm against the invitation of her right breast, a da Vinci shape molded in heaven’s own marble.
Dropping me, she emitted a high-pitched shriek that only dogs, I, and burly men who hate little people could hear. Pow! She whacked me with the back of her hand across my nose. Pow! A burly man who spends his life keeping an eye on little guys like me punched me deep in my stomach. Like a puck, I plopped to my hands and knees in pee. He kicked me in the stomach. Splash: goal! He disappeared into the crowd.
“Serves you right,” she said as I gasped for breath, trying to prevent myself from vomiting. I could see drops of blood from my nose drip and disperse in the pond of urine.
“Now, let’s see this apartment and get down to the nitty gritty,” she said, and made her way out of the large building with the pretty ceiling. I couldn’t believe that she could be attracted to me after that. I struggled to my feet and raced outside just in time to see her climb into a cab. Never had a woman—especially one in the presence of whom I’d lost my bladder control—wanted to just have me. I shoved in the taxi after her. She pushed into a corner, away from my salty dampness.
She wanted it bad. I wanted it bad. Apparently the cab driver wanted it bad, too, because he zoomed a hundred miles an hour to a red light five feet in front of us. In a moment the light changed, and the driver put the pedal to the metal.
“Where to?” the cabby inquired.
Feeling prosaic, I said: “To paraphrase E.B. White, I live twenty-two blocks from where Rudolph Valentino once lay in state, eight blocks from where Nathan Hale was executed, five blocks from where Hemingway punched out Max Eastman, four miles from where Whitman wrote editorials for the
Brooklyn Eagle
…” He screeched to a halt.
Because my arms were too short to brace myself against the front seat, and my legs didn’t reach the floor, I fell into the leg area of the cab. She looked down at me and I smiled up at her meekly.
“Tell the chauffeur where we’re going, you grinning idiot!”
I gave him my address as I tried to pry my waist loose from that dead zone. We moved like a high-speed checker piece, crisscrossing the bumpy board of Manhattan. The opponents were traffic lights, jay-walkers, and endless bike messengers who kept banging against the outer shell of our cab.
“We’re not in a rush,” I barked through the bullet holes in the Plexiglass divider.
“Time and tide wait for no man,” the fanatic behind the wheel replied in broken English. I longed for the day that they empty Manhattan of all meddling pedestrians and make it strictly vehicular.
When we finally came to my place, the curb was on my side, the traffic on hers. She opened my door and shoved me out on my ass. Throwing a crumpled bill into the front seat, she stepped over me.
“Off the ground, mole, I’ve got an appointment in Westchester at 7:38.”
I rose and huffed and puffed, trying to keep up with her. Each big step she took translated into a hundred little chihuahua steps for me. The fifty-plus hours of sleep deprivation were catching up with me. Sweat trickled down my brow. I was unable to concentrate or focus my pupils. It was like being in college all over again.
Finally, up some flights of stairs, we reached my floor. She threw open the door, shoving me out of the way, and stepped in. Taking it all in at once—the centerfolds on the wall, the large plastic garbage bags of undisposed trash, the stacks of books, the oddities, the curios, the knickknacks that I’d found in the street, and the light streaming along the columns of dust in the middle of the living room—she looked at me. I was very proud of my place. She silently walked around the apartment. Reaching into a box, she pulled out the brown bag that Whitlock gave to me containing my transcripts and other papers from my graduate program.