The only affection I could offer Sarah seemed generated from my hostility to Eunice. At one organic moment I hugged and kissed Sarah, but she remained distant and finally she lapsed into silence. I attributed it to her being worn thin by the parents. She needed to be left alone a while. It was already five o’clock, the sun had set—a cold day was now bleak. I was scheduled to work that night. I kissed her, changed my clothes, and went off to the theater.
When I got there, everyone seemed unusually kind. The candy girl couldn’t offer me enough popcorn. The manager on duty a new guy with whom I got along well, realized that I was tired and allowed me to sit in the lobby and relax. I wasn’t curious about the kindness; I assumed that it was fate’s compensation for all the recent misdealings. I didn’t anticipate that it was all just pity for what was to come. After the movie, I went into Pepe’s office, where he sat like a fat cat eyeing me.
The evening’s intake of cash was in the box on the desk between us. He put the box in a desk drawer. I figured I had been working here for a year now and perhaps he felt it was time to offer me a manager’s position. Staring down at other items that were sprawled along his desktop, he started speaking. “This isn’t easy, because you were here longer than just about anyone else, but I’m going to have to release you.”
“Huh?”
“One of the patrons complained that you were… duplicitous.”
“Duplicitous?!!”
“Uhhh, yeah.”
“Spare me that S.A.T. crap! I went to college!”
“Fine, the fact is I don’t like you.”
“Why?”
“You started a bad habit. People are asking for raises. Whenever I turn someone down, they bring up your name. I’ve got to put an end to this. Simple as that.”
“You can’t do this. I’ll take you to the fucking labor relations board.”
“Go ahead, you don’t belong to a union; this is only a minimum wage job.”
“I gave you a year of my life. I’ve always been on time, courteous. What kind of a person are you!”
Silently he ushered me to his office door where he handed me an envelope. “This is what we owe you.”
Canned! It was the second job that I had been fired from and I felt guilty.
As I walked home, I pieced together details and realized that he had waited until after the holidays to fire me because he knew that nobody else would work on Christmas day for just minimum wage.
When I arrived home, Sarah wasn’t there. By the time I finished soaking in a bath while watching TV, it was midnight. Sarah still wasn’t home. Since I was wide awake and was mulling over being fired, I dressed and decided to go out for a beer. In the East Village most of the bars had started out as Eastern European hangouts, but more and more they became alcoholic cafeterias due to the growing influx of students. By the mid-eighties, the last of the Iron Curtain refugees in most of these neighborhood pubs were just the bartenders.
As I peeked into the many area bars like the Verkhovina and the Blue and Gold looking for a familiar face, it struck me how time had passed. All of the old crowd had moved on. After stopping here and there, I arrived at the Holiday Lounge on Saint Mark’s Place. It was brimming with children who paid for overpriced drinks with their parent’s money. By the time I had shoved through them to the rear, I felt ancient. Just as I was about to head back home, I caught sight of a chunky punk in a leather jacket. He was sitting in a booth kissing some girl who was lying horizontally along the bench with her head lying idly across his fat lap. When I positioned around to look at her, my heart quit—it was Sarah! I grabbed his collar and yanked him up.
“What the fuck is your problem?” he yelled.
“I’m her husband!” I hollered. When I tried to pull her upright, she remained drunk and limp.
“What the fuck are you doing?” I shouted, shaking her to gain some degree of sobriety.
“What the fuck am I doing?” She leered. “The same thing you’ve been doing for the past month.”
“What?”
“Humping that candy girl, you fucker.” And she slapped me full in the face and stormed out. I felt my skin turn into goose pimples and walked past the prepubescents, who looked back at me, the twenty-three-year-old cuck-old. I slowly walked home, chewing my bottom lip to a pulp as I juggled half-lies and half-truths seeking a plausible reconciliation.
When I got home, Sarah had heaped all my clothes in the hall and left a sign taped to the outside of the door: “If you try to come in, I’ll call the police.”
I collected everything off the floor: some books, three T-shirts, five pairs of underpants, an out-of-style suit and a pair of polished dress shoes. With that big ball in my arms, I headed down First Avenue to the F train on Houston Street.
TWO
The F train stopped at the Carroll Street station in Brooklyn. Once again, I was off to stay with Helmsley. His apartment was the only place I could go without having to ask permission; I had his key. Neither of us had any immediate family, so we were brother orphans.
He also happened to be one of the most intelligent and determined people I had ever known: he was one of the youngest people ever to attain a professorship at Bryn Mawr. I later learned that he was also one of the youngest professors ever dismissed from Bryn Mawr. Helmsley said they found him a threat to convention; an old colleague quietly confided that it was psychological instability.
I had met him on the F train two years earlier. He was reading Ulick Varange’s book Imperium. It was a very hard book to find and few knew about it. Whether it was worth getting or knowing about was another question. He claimed that it was a mild poly-philosophical work but it was wonderful prose satire. When I asked him how he could dismiss a poly-philosophical work as satirical prose, he explained that he viewed our present era as nothing more than a retrenched “Age of Reason.” He showed a preference toward the animist perspective, which preserved the life-force, to man’s harnessing perspective, which was simply a castrating method analysis.
And we spent the night riding around on the F train with him usually talking and me usually listening. I had a lot more patience back then and was easily dazzled by bullshit.
Beyond maintaining his life functions, Helmsley spent almost all his time on two activities: writing and reading. He explained to me that he used to write more than he read but lately the scale had been tipping the other way. He had had two thick and confusing books of poetry published in an extremely limited and costly edition by the now-defunct Necro Publications.
Helmsley claimed that the two works quelled all further desires to be published. But occasionally I’d find form rejections in the garbage can, and I strongly suspected him of being a closet submitter. He actually had a decent reputation as a reviewer and had a growing reputation as a translator. Inexplicably he regarded this as hack work, published under a pseudonym, and never boasted about a publication.
He still wrote and wasn’t shy about the creative process. When he was working on a project, you knew it. He would completely immerse himself in the subject. Although everything was poetic in form, he was paying more and more attention to different cultures through history. He would frequent the museums, attend seminars, study languages, and although he never did, he always longed to visit the subject country. Usually he tried the next best thing, which was re-creating the psycho/eco/politico/-environment and wrestling with the questions that might occupy one of his poetic foils.
He took this study to all ends. One time, while he was studying revolutionary France, he spent a week attempting to re-create the heartburn and gastritis of the time. Could a mushy crepe significantly contribute enough fury to provoke a revolution? I did my own cooking that week.