The 25th Hour (4 page)

‘Your grade will be fine. Look, Mary, why—;’

‘See, I don’t want fine. I’m the best writer in this class. And I deserve the best grade in the class. And this, what is this? B-plus? Everyone else is writing about their fucking Christmas vacation, and you give me a B-plus?’

Mary’s hazel eyes drown in pools of painted shadow, pennies just visible at the bottom of the wishing well. Jakob wonders why she and her friends favor such a morbid style, as if their models were not chosen from the covers of slick magazines but the refrigerators of the city morgue. And her hair. When was the last time she washed her hair?

‘Listen,’ he says, ‘the point is, I’m basing the grade on your own potential. Other things you’ve written were more carefully constructed. This one – I’m not sure it quite works.’

‘So what you’re saying is, don’t try anything new, don’t experiment.’

‘No—;’

‘Because if I write something different from what you expect, I’ll be punished.’ She rakes the blue vinyl binder cover with her glossy black nails. For one second Jakob imagines the skin of his back transposed with the vinyl.

‘Punished?’ He smiles. ‘I wouldn’t call a B-plus punishment.’

‘Vince Miskella writes a story about his grandmother dying and you give him an A. I mean – what, you feel sorry for him, is that it? Was that a charity A? Everyone’s always writing about their grandmothers dying. You know why? Not because it’s so fucking traumatic. Because it’s a guaranteed A. Meanwhile, the night of his grandmother’s funeral, you know where Vince is? Getting drunk at a football party and slapping girls’ asses. And you’re all sentimental, like, “Oh, Vince, that was very powerful, very moving.” No, it wasn’t. I didn’t care, you didn’t care, nobody cared. That’s what grandmothers do, they die. And then their grandkids write about it for school, and the teachers are forced to give them an A.’

‘Maybe that was Vince’s way of grieving,’ says Jakob, trying to avoid staring at the holes in her torn jeans, at her pale knees peeking through white threading. ‘Sometimes guys have a hard time showing their – you know, their emotions.’ What am I babbling about? wonders Jakob.

‘So slapping my ass, that’s Vince’s way of mourning his grandmother?’

Jakob glances at the open door of the classroom. All this talk of ass-slapping is making him nervous. Mostly he wants to escape – he knows he will never touch her, but he feels dirty anyway, an old pervert lusting after schoolgirls. Already an old pervert at twenty-six.

‘Sometimes people get drunk because they don’t want to think about things. But,’ he adds, anxious not to sound like an advocate of alcoholism, ‘it doesn’t work. The thing you didn’t want to think about ends up being the only thing you
can
think about, and your thoughts about it get stupider and stupider.’ Jakob nods twice to affirm the logic of his comment and then tries to remember what he just said.

‘Whatever,’ says Mary. ‘The point is, this story is good. Maybe it’s not perfect, but it’s better than anything anyone else handed in.’

Jakob looks down at Mary’s fragile wrists, one of them encircled by a tattooed garland of roses. ‘What did your mother say when you got that?’

‘Got what?’

‘Your tattoo,’ says Jakob, pointing.

Mary studies her wrist for a moment. ‘She said, “Where’d you get the money for that?”’

‘Oh. And?’

‘And what did I say or where did I get the money?’

‘Well, what did you say, I guess.’

‘I said the guy did it for free.’

‘Did he?’

‘No. Why do you care so much?’ she asks, more surly than suspicious.

‘Just curious.’

‘So you’re not going to change the grade?’

Jakob shakes his head. ‘No, I’m not changing the grade.’

‘Great.’ She rises from her chair and pushes a lock of limp hair away from her forehead. ‘That was a big waste of time.’

‘Look, instead of worrying about the grade so much, why don’t we talk about the actual story, okay? Do you have it here? I’ll show you what I thought didn’t work and you can—;’

‘I’ve got rehearsal,’ she says, stomping out of the classroom. Jakob listens to her combat boots thumping down the hallway.

What that girl needs, thinks Jakob, staring at his own awkward scrawls on the blackboard, is a good spanking. He grins at the illegal thought.

An hour later he sits on a bar stool next to LoBianco, blowing on the head surfacing his glass of beer. It’s one of the last of the vintage saloons on Amsterdam Avenue, complete with a stamped-tin ceiling, wood paneling sooted from decades of cigarette smoke, and frosted windows. Women rarely make an appearance here. Jakob supposes that the old men lounging about the room are gay, but this place is far from a pickup joint. More like a waiting room, except Jakob’s not sure what they’re waiting for.

‘What’s today,’ he asks, ‘Thursday? January’s almost over. Four more months till June.’ Jakob wears a scuffed Yankees cap and continually tugs on the brim, like a third-base coach signaling for a hit-and-run.

‘Cheers to that,’ says LoBianco, drinking deeply from his iced vodka. ‘Counting the days till summer, hmm?’

Maybe LoBianco was handsome once, but it’s gone now, lost to alcohol and the pallor of a lifetime lit by fluorescent bulbs. His face rarely changes from an expression of weary disdain, as if he had just finished sneering, or was about to start sneering, or had decided that a sneer was simply too much effort to waste on the cretins surrounding him. Jakob believes the old man might have auditioned a variety of looks years ago, standing before the mirror – Withering Contempt, Half-Concealed Irritation, Condescending Amusement – and finally settled on Weary Disdain as the best of the lot.

As a former student of LoBianco’s, Jakob knows how intimidating the expression can be. Students in LoBianco’s classes fall into two camps: the silent masses, too fearful of mockery to speak aloud, and the courageous few, who raise their hands and daringly venture their views on the current text. The greatest reward offered to this latter group consists of LoBianco’s observing the speaker for a moment, examining the ceiling, and then granting a quick nod of approval and sometimes – rarely – murmuring, ‘Yes, there’s something to that. Interesting.’ Such an endorsement would make the young Jakob froth with excitement, and he would carefully transcribe his own comment into his notebook, marking it with a star to denote particular brilliance.

Jesus, what a geek, he thinks now, appraising his reflection in the mirror behind the stacked bottles of liquor, his small pointed face peering out between bars of whiskey. His own expression, he notes unhappily, suggests Nervous Agitation. I look like a ferret, he decides, a prepubescent ferret in a Yankees cap. He wrinkles his nose and bares his teeth. A definite rodent.

‘Are ferrets rodents?’ he asks.

‘Are ferrets rodents? How did we get from June to ferrets?’

‘Do you think I look like a ferret?’

LoBianco studies Jakob’s face and nods. ‘A bit.’

‘A bit like a ferret. Great. Thank you.’ Jakob leans over the bar and picks a red plastic sword from the tray of cocktail garnishes. ‘So, D’Annunzio,’ he says, stabbing his thumb thoughtfully. ‘What do you think of her?’

LoBianco smiles. ‘What do
you
think of her, Jakob?’

‘You know what? I really believe someday – I mean, maybe years from now – we’ll be sitting around saying, “I had
the
Mary D’Annunzio in my English class.”’

LoBianco is silent for a moment, tumbling ice cubes with his tongue. He demolishes them with his molars and wipes his lips. ‘Do you know what a man must never ask in a Victoria’s Secret shop?’

‘No, what?’

‘“Does this come in children’s sizes?”’

Jakob feels a sudden clenching deep in his belly. ‘What’s that supposed to mean?’

‘It doesn’t mean anything. It’s a joke.’

‘What kind of joke is that?’

LoBianco reaches for his own cocktail sword and brandishes it in Jakob’s face. ‘Have I offended your honor? You demand satisfaction? Eh? Shall we duel?’

‘There’s nothing going on between me and Mary D’Annunzio.’

LoBianco is not paying attention. He stabs Jakob in the leg, and the sword snaps in half.

‘Ow! Ow, you bastard!’

‘Shut up. Another vodka, please,’ LoBianco calls to the bartender, ‘and another light beer for our friend with the girlish figure.’

‘I’m bleeding,’ says Jakob, examining the tiny hole in his pant leg.

‘Yes, well, drink your beer and shut up.’ LoBianco stares at his broken sword and sighs. ‘We all have our problems, you know. All of us,’ he adds portentously.

‘I guess so,’ mumbles Jakob. He’s feeling guilty now, worrying about himself. In the morning Monty goes to prison; Jakob tries to imagine it. A judge in black robes passes sentence, and seven years are severed from a life.

‘For example, wasn’t today my big meeting with Deering?’

Jakob looks up. ‘Wasn’t today your big meeting with Deering?’

LoBianco smiles. ‘Today was my big meeting with Deering. Do you know what he told me?’ LoBianco waits, glancing at Jakob, whose attention has already wandered. ‘Do you?’

Jakob lowers his face to the bar, then raises it, a paper napkin stuck to his lips. He exhales and the napkin flutters to the floor.

‘What?’

‘He told me if I had played my cards right, I could have been head of the department. Little me. Imagine that. Missed my true calling. All the power, the sheer responsibility. I could be head of the English Department – were it not that I have bad dreams.’

Jakob raises his hand. ‘Macbeth?’

‘Wrong,’ says LoBianco. ‘Delivers his philosophy lecture, the same speech I’ve been hearing for nineteen years now, from Socrates to William James. He has the ability to speak authoritatively on subjects of which he is entirely ignorant.’ LoBianco pauses, sipping his vodka. ‘I admire that. But his other qualities are less becoming.’

‘There’s not going to be a punch line to this story, is there?’

‘This is
not
a story’ – LoBianco sniffs – ‘this is a rant. And I’ll ask you to remain silent as you listen to it. Where was I?’

‘Socrates. William James. Philosophy lecture.’

‘Launching from his analysis of why I failed to become department head into an unabridged history of Western Philosophy. And I just sat there with a look of polite concentration, nodding periodically and murmuring “I see,” and “Yes, that makes sense.” Deering placed my career stagnation in pleasant perspective. The consolations of philosophy, I suppose.’ LoBianco frowns, curling his fingers backward to inspect the nails, then cleaning them with the broken hilt of his cocktail sword. ‘I never wanted to become a man who posted
New Yorker
cartoons on his office door. But that’s what I’ve become. If that whore Ferlinghetti hadn’t—;’

‘Oh, no, no, no, don’t—;’

‘That thieving bastard!’ roars LoBianco. ‘Sitting in his landmarked bookstore, the sage of San Francisco, the last of the Beatnik poets. Poet? Poet?’

It is the great conceit of Anthony LoBianco’s life that he was robbed of fame by Lawrence Ferlinghetti in 1958 in the White Horse Tavern. As the story goes, the young Anthony and his mates were drinking in that famed establishment when the Word was revealed, and Anthony, in a fever of inspiration, charged through the guzzling literati, seized a pencil and paper napkin from a startled waitress, and scribbled down his epiphany. Returning in triumph to his comrades, he held the napkin in the air and declared, ‘Gentlemen, I have the title for my book.’

A stranger turned from his place at the bar and prodded, a bit mockingly, ‘So let’s hear it.’

‘Sir,’ proclaimed young Anthony proudly, ‘
A Coney Island of the Mind.
’

After informing the stranger of his title, LoBianco remembers nothing of the night; his friends apparently drowned him in whiskey to celebrate his genius. The next day he began writing his verse epic and proceeded in a fury for several months. It’s very cinematic, the way LoBianco describes it, the Poet in his undershirt, unshaven, banging away at his manual typewriter in a fourth-floor walk-up on Avenue A, pausing only for cigarettes on the fire escape, where he nods in time with the saxophone blowing from across the alley, all this in black-and-white. Very Jack Kerouac. One morning the Poet returns to his apartment with a newspaper and a spinach pie from the Greek diner. Climbing up the dusty stairs he reads a headline in the middle pages, a review of a new book of poems. Written by Lawrence Ferlinghetti. Titled A Coney Island of the Mind. The Poet stares at the article (the headline framed nicely in a close-up) and crumples to the second-floor landing. The saxophone wails. The wondrous destiny evaporates.

It is a classical plot line of punished hubris, of gods in disguise, and Jakob enjoys it. Of course, there is one profound problem with the story – it cannot possibly be true. Jakob, investigating, discovered that Ferlinghetti got the title from a Henry Miller novel written years before the drama in the White Horse Tavern. Jakob never lets on that he has spotted the lie, partly because he thinks LoBianco has come to believe the myth and Jakob doesn’t want to be cruel to the older man. But also because Jakob enjoys the secret knowledge. It gives him power over his former teacher. LoBianco, so clever in some regards, is a plain fool in others, a lousy liar, lazy in his fabrications. Jakob envisions the beaten LoBianco, consigned to oblivion, shaking his fist at a towering, deaf statue of Ferlinghetti. Christ, Anthony, you could have picked a better poet.

‘You know what comforts me,’ asks LoBianco, ‘when I think of it?’

Jakob does not know.

‘The man realizes he’s a cheat. Every time he looks in the mirror he sees a plagiarist. Do you think he sleeps easy, that counterfeit poet? Not a chance.’

Jakob thinks Ferlinghetti probably sleeps remarkably easy, but he doesn’t say so.

‘Deering, Deering, Deering . . . What was I on about?’

‘The philosophers,’ says Jakob. ‘We’re still on the philosophers.’

LoBianco raises his vodka and finishes the glass, then bangs it down on the bar. ‘Mr Deering, you blasphemous, righteous mouse of a man; Socrates did not die for you. Oh, there was a fine man for teaching the boys. Sure.’ He staggers to his feet, lifts the bar stool by its legs, mimics anal sex. ‘Bend over, son. Allow me to demonstrate the Socratic method. Educate all the assholes of Athens! Good man, good man. Better a sodomite than a philosopher. More fun for everyone.’