Scream (5 page)

Same with sheep. You can't just take some sheep and say, I release you! You are free now! Run wild! The sheep is not going to survive out there. After it rains, it is just going to topple over from the weight of its own wet, unshorn fur. It's going to get caught in barbed wire and bleat to death.

The one thing—of course!—no one up here could tolerate was any suggestion that guns shouldn't be legal. They would just about blow your head off at the very mention of the topic.

At first, when I arrived in Schuyler County, I thought I should get to know a little bit about the place. I found an ad in the paper:

What an interesting event to attend! I thought. Local culture.

So I went.

The Interlaken Sports Club was in a metal building, miles away from my house, in the middle of a field. People lined up to buy their tickets, and it was sold out by four thirty. Everyone waited at long tables until the command to get our food was given. Set up on long steam tables were approximately fifty special dishes, served buffet style in aluminum trays, made from items with no stated provenance or history. Where did the stuff come from? Ancient food from ancient freezers? Roadkill? All dishes were created by the members of the Interlaken Sports Club.

There was squirrel and rabbit stew; there was opossum gumbo, turtle soup, frog legs, moose stew; and then there was venison: venison sausage, venison lasagna, venison pot roast, venison hamburgers, and deep-fried venison balls.

I went to this event all by myself, way the hell out in the middle of nowhere, in the middle of winter, too.

Did it make me change my mind about venison?

A lot of things changed.

As soon as I moved up there I became involved with a construction worker. A little bit about my boyfriend:

When he leaves, there are always little piles of his bullet casings on the windowsill, or on my underwear on the floor, and his rifles lean against the walls in every corner.

He has a cabin full of heads of what he shot. He has a mustache and wears those worker boots and those Carhartts and if he's not carrying a rifle, it's a chain saw.

Okay, he is very cute. He's all muscles and tattoos and wears T-shirts that advertise motor oil or say things like
DEAD DEER WALKING
. He's got a big truck, it's a black and chrome GMC Sierra 4x4 and he puts on Aerosmith or “She Thinks My Tractor's Sexy.” He cranks up the volume and he drives me to Walmart and while I shop he waits in his truck—just like real locals, where the men wait in the truck while the wives or girlfriends go in!

The local men never go in, either because it is a sissy thing to do or because they are like rare, elusive birds who cannot leave their indigenous habitat, too shy, never seen outside their natural environs—whatever. They don't leave their trucks. Or their barns, or tractors, or recliners.

He wakes up at 6
A
.
M
. (5 in hunting season), smokes a Kool in bed, and then jumps up. He has to chop down trees or grind stumps or he's off to snowplow the shopping plaza parking lots for twenty hours. Unless it's hunting season. Then he walks miles through the snow to sit in a tree until a male deer with at least ten points runs by after a doe in heat. And he shoots it.

He used to race stock cars, he had two kids with two different girls by the time he was seventeen years old, he's got a dick down to his knees.

It's disgusting. I mean, I am an old person; I am fifty-seven! You should just not have a boyfriend when you get to be that old, right? You should not be having sex.

But when he grabs me by the arm and pulls me across the room and before I know it my pants are down around my ankles and he's got me bent over a chair, what am I going to do, complain about it?

On the other hand, he can be so, so, so mean. Not, like, he hits me, but he has issues.

He would not go with me to the Wild Game Dinner at the Interlaken Sports Club, for example. And he will not eat a “farm-fresh egg” from the local produce place where the woman has very old chickens; she never kills them. These are happy chickens and lay eggs rarely because they are old. You have to order a dozen in advance, and their yolks are bright orange. He only wants pale ones from the supermarket, collected from the Factory of Suffering Chickens.

He would not leave a job site, even though it was 7
P
.
M
. on one of the only warm days in six months, to go on a walk with me through the forest. He said he had broken up with his girlfriend, but then he claimed he had to go with her to a Christmas expo and convention in a nearby city for five days in order to drive back all the angels and Christmas tree accessories she was stocking for her Christmas shop.

Okay, mostly I can't stand my husband, but (right now at least)
I hate
my boyfriend!

My life has turned into a sweater with a hole in it: whether it's raveling or unraveling, it doesn't make any difference.

time in brooklyn

I
'm not saying life was any better back in Brooklyn. I couldn't stand it there, either. Like when the incident of the doorman molestation occurred—I don't know—ten or twenty years ago?

Achmed, the doorman in my apartment building, was young, always friendly and nice, sometimes maybe too nice. He kissed me on the cheek at Christmas, and it wasn't just a peck on the cheek—he kind of grabbed me and rubbed up against me. There were other things that should have been clues.

On Mother's Day, Achmed gave me a huge bunch of flowers. I mean, this bouquet was beautiful, it wasn't some tired bunch of flowers from a Korean deli. It was a lot nicer than any bouquets my husband ever gave me. Don't get me wrong, I like flowers from a corner bodega, too. But this was from a fancy florist, white lilies and tuberoses, in a vase with tissue paper. They were in a box at the front desk. Achmed was looking at me, doggy-style. At first I was like, Holy crap, who sent me these beautiful flowers!

“I did!” he said.

I just didn't know what to do—laugh, cry? It was so great to get this gorgeous bouquet of flowers, but . . . they weren't from my husband, they weren't from a possible admirer, they were from the Egyptian doorman who was young enough to be my son.

It reminded me of how, one time, my friend Paige got a fancy invitation from her cleaning woman, inviting her to tea at the Duke and Duchess of somebody or other. So she asked Andy Warhol to join her. They went to tea at this Duke and Duchess's place in New York City and then Andy said, “Gee, Paige, this is great! Who invited us to this tea?”

“Why, my cleaning woman Helen invited us,” Paige said. Then she introduced Andy to Helen, her housekeeper.

Andy was really mad. He wanted to have tea with the Duke and Duchess of whatever it was, but it spoiled it for him when it turned out he had been invited by Paige's cleaning woman.

Achmed had a thirteen-year-old daughter who was a country-western singer. He would tell me about this daughter and the talent shows she was entering at the time. Once there was a building Christmas party and his daughter performed, a huge girl playing the mandolin with a tiny partner on slide guitar, playing “Achy Breaky Heart.” Many building residents and workers did a line dance where the lobby had been cleared between the Christmas tree and the food and the menorah.

A lot of the residents were old lefties and academics, who had bought their apartments when the building went co-op in the early eighties. They didn't line-dance, but they did dance to “The Tennessee Waltz.” It was very impressive, especially for me. In college I had failed ballroom dancing. I actually got an F for not being able to waltz.

Anyway, one night Achmed the doorman called on the intercom and said he was on his break and asked if I wanted to hang out with him in the boiler room. The boiler room was behind a marked door that said no one was allowed in unless you worked in the building, so I was kind of excited to see what was behind it.

“Okay, sure,” I said.

I caught a glimpse of myself on the way out. I was pretty shabby. “How old do I look?” I said to Willow.

“Well, you look like you might be younger than sixty,” she said.

I went to the basement. Inside this boiler room were gigantic, huge, riveted—gosh, I don't know—boilers? And this area was two stories high at least, and very hot and noisy, and it was like being in a submarine engine room. From around the corner I heard Achmed tell me to come in.

I entered the porters' and doormen's lounge. There was a giant TV, a smaller TV, a big sofa, a refrigerator, rugs, chairs—it was messy and yet a place to hang out. I guess like the basement of some sixties home or something for the kids. Or maybe like some of the nightclubs I used to go to back in the early eighties.

Achmed wanted me to have some cognac, Ukrainian cognac.

I said no because I had my glass of wine with me. Then he turned off the sound on the TV, which was playing a movie with giant cartoon rats.

He sat next to me on the couch donated by some building tenant who had remodeled and who had also given him the cognac. “Are you sure you don't want the cognac?” he kept asking me. I did not know at that time that Ukraine is known for its fine cognac. I said, “No.” This time he got out the cognac and poured himself a large glass.

Then I tried to ask him questions—what his wife did, about his father staying with him. His father, he said, had been visiting but was about to go back to Egypt. His wife came from Peru and they had met online. He had worked in the building for eight years or something and was a member of the doormen's union.

Even though I kept asking him questions, he leaned on me and started to kiss me. I protested, saying we were friends, and tried to leave, but he followed me to the door, once again grabbed me, and tried to kiss me on the mouth.

It was not really possible to pry him off with ease, but eventually I did.

When I went upstairs Willow said I had been gone ten minutes. To me it seemed like several days in the boiler room.

I suppose I was foolish to go there, but I had truly thought we were friends and that he was fond of me. I was almost fifty-five years old and had I removed my clothing, I can assure you he would have screamed. I'd had an operation where they removed a tumor the size of a five-month fetus, which left me misshapen. Then afterward, stupidly, I went to an old boyfriend's wife who was a plastic surgeon to get liposuction and try to even out the lumps. Do not go to an ex-boyfriend's wife for lipo! Not when that ex-boyfriend has never gotten over you. I swear, she
added
fat deposits on me when I was under anesthesia.

In any event, I was not inclined to do anything with Achmed. But then the next day he followed me into the elevator.

Certainly there was a period when I would very much have liked to have an affair. But not then. I was wearing a skirt, and Achmed scuttled up behind me into the elevator. Just as the doors were about to close, he stuck his hand around the edge of my underpants and right up in there.

I was enraged. I mean, this was no white-glove building, but they could have at least insisted on latex. How could I have misread the whole thing so drastically? Now, for the rest of my life, I was going to have to go past a doorman who might either follow me into the elevator and try to stick his hand down my pants, or, even if he didn't, look at me and think, There goes the one from 16A I felt up.

I didn't want to get the guy fired. He had a wife and the singer and another daughter. His father didn't speak any English. Life was hard.

Plus, I couldn't think of him trying to supply me with Ukrainian cognac without remembering that it was in Kiev where I'd lost my mother in a crowd, eight years earlier. I was with her and Willow in a Folkloric Tourist Market, and when I turned around Mom was gone. She had no money, no credit card, no passport, no copy of the address of where we were staying. Willow and I spent the entire day looking for her, and it wasn't until night had fallen and it was raining that I gave up. I think Mom was losing it even back then.

I did find her eventually, five or six hours later, thanks to the U.S. Embassy. She was having drinks with the vice-consul at an American jazz bar.

family relations

T
he roots falling out of my family had commenced years before my not talking to my brother Sam and Dad disinheriting him. First, Sam got into an argument with Dad when Dad visited him and tried to smoke marijuana. Sam asked him to please smoke it outside since he had terrible allergies and the smoke bothered him, and this pissed off my father.

In my mother's case, the rift with Sam's wife began when my mom called to thank Sam and Veronica for a Mother's Day present they had sent. According to my mother, Veronica picked up the phone and said angrily, “You should thank your son, don't thank me!” Then she launched into a shrill diatribe of complaints against Mom. It was out of context and vicious, too. I was not privy to hearing this because I was not there at the time. I myself had long ceased calling my brother, knowing that his wife was right there, listening to every word on speakerphone—or extension—but never saying anything.