We took the F train to Fourteenth Street and walked through the long uriney tunnel that passed from Sixth to Seventh Avenue. There, we took the IRT up to Columbia-land, 116th and Broadway. It was the winter intercession for most schools. This particular party was a graduate affair filled with doctoral candidates, master’s students, all affiliated with Columbia’s anthropology department—enthusiasts of mal-developed skull fragments found around Kenyan lakes.
At first I tried. I found girls who reminded me the most of Sarah personalitywise and tried to joke around comfortably with them. I panicked about the shaggy dog appeal, matted down my hair and small-talked with one young protégée of Margaret Meade who, when she asked me about myself, I provided a thickly veiled description of the truth. “I was just transferred”—instead of fired—“from my job at a corporate law firm”—instead of stinking movie theater—and had “recently moved into my own apartment”—instead of being dumped by my girlfriend…and so on. She quickly dusted around the old bones of truth and realized that my tale of mediocrity was actually of woe. Instead of a safe bet I was a loser.
I drank some alcohol and looked for prospective girls while considering a new approach. Tolstoy—Helmsley had informed me—before marrying his wife, Sophia, had let her read his hold-nothing-back journals to show her that he was just another slime bag. It was a deliberate effort to destroy any romantic notions his eighteen-year-old bride might have of him. This was my next strategy my new approach. I sat down alongside my next victim, who was standing innocently alone by a partly opened window, unprotected. I quickly introduced myself and launched into the new approach, “Isn’t this something?”
“What?”
“My girlfriend dumps me, I lose my job and apartment, and it’s the third anniversary of my being an orphan.”
“Poor you,” she replied sympathetically. It was working.
“I tried to sleep with another girl, but that’s another story. See here,” I pointed to my raw gums that I overbrushed earlier, “and here.” I pointed to the barely visible cracks in my facial flesh. “I felt so bad last night about her leaving me that I got drunk this morning and then I woke up and did this to myself.”
“Oh,” she replied.
“My father died in a plane crash, but don’t feel sorry for me,” I remarked.Some guy wearing a turban heard me. He joined us uninvited, holding two drinks.
“A plane crash?” he said, “Oh, my!” He handed his girlfriend one drink, and she pointed to my gums and jowls and informed him about my recent misfortunes. I excused myself as they continued their conversation about me. I drank some more, but I didn’t really try socializing. I think stories started circulating about me. I think someone pointed at me. Eventually a bevy of cute girls entered together. They couldn’t have heard about me yet. They were dressed to the hilt, hair cut and colored like tropical birds, with the smells of perfumes named after TV stars. I shagged up my hair again and introduced myself to the most extreme of them. She was a delightfully perfumed pet who said she was in her last year at FIT, and then she asked me what I did. Confident that the new approach was working, I replied truthfully, “Unemployed, unconnected and unmotivated.” She was uninterested and vanished. With that strike, I was out. I promised Helmsley I wouldn’t pull a Jim Morrison in his bathtub and left.
THREE
The next day, I wrote a deliberately nebulous resume, a resume Helmsley later referred to as my greatest piece of fiction. It might have qualified me for everything from a shoeshine boy to an astronaut and off to the Goya Plant I went. They found me overqualified. Intelligence had become a liability; education, a hindrance.
I borrowed Helmsley’s suit, bought the New York Times and took the little resume on a walk. We went to endless job agencies. But it was the same thing every time. After a flash interview by a variety of look-alike agents, they’d say more or less the same thing, “You’re just the right man for something that should emerge any day now.” None of them ever called me back.
By the end of the second week, I stopped getting up before noon, and by the middle of the third week I stopped shaving altogether. I’d lie around in bed watching daytime TV, which is the first sign of nervous breakdown in an enlightened culture. First, I watched the noon news and talk shows, then the game shows, onto the late-afternoon talk shows, and finally I was glued to the soaps. After that TV-mangled period, I stopped watching and just slept a lot. Helmsley realized I needed solitude and went out frequently.
As the components of your life are stripped away, after all the ambitions and hopes vaporize, you reach a self-reflective starkness—the repetitious plucking of a single overwound string. I was too poor to even have an etherizing vice like drugs or alcohol. Slowly I became a Peeping Tom of finer days, a vicarious liver through my own past. Years ago, forecasting the quality of my life to come was a cinch. By five years’ time—which would have been five years ago—I would’ve graduated with a degree in architecture, and with a guaranteed job in my father’s growing real estate development firm. In sum, I’d be kept in clover. Envisioning my future was like watching a lucky contestant on a game show, whose winnings increased with each spin of the wheel.
That’s not the way things worked out; my life changed viciously. But it happened in a kind of aloof suddenness that someone might possess when pushing an elevator button or hitting a light switch. Five years had passed since the switch was thrown, and I was lying on an old couch in Brooklyn, considering the variety of ways in which my life was miserable. My mother had died when I was young. When my father was killed, my sister went off to live with relatives, and I was alone.
By the fourth week of my stay at Helmsley’s, I was leaning as much over the edge as possible without tumbling over. I hadn’t eaten in two days and I hadn’t slept in three. I wasn’t really in pain, in fact I was undergoing this bizarre type of euphoria, the kind of numb yet heightened elation an anorectic might feel in denying oneself that final crumb. Everything was dreamily wonderful, a preview of what was to come. I only got out of bed to go to the bathroom, and though I was wide awake I had neither thoughts nor moods.
I felt like a television camera just tracking and panning and registering responses. I knew my legs were very cold but was not bothered in the slightest. Helmsley finally came in the room and asked, “How are you?”
I waited along with him to hear how I would respond, and I was glad when I finally heard myself say, “Fine.”
He put his hand on my forehead and it felt strangely soothing. He mumbled, “You’re sick. When was the last time you ate?”
“Yesterday, I think.” Time was flat. Everything seemed to have occurred a yesterday ago. He led me into the kitchen and prepared a meal for me that made me realize how hungry I was. Recalling the recuperative weeks that followed, remembering Helmsley’s concern and affection, my Adam’s apple suspends like a pendulum. He fussed over me like a mother. He woke me in the mornings and would prepare breakfast for both of us. Then he made sure I had showered and brushed my teeth; he nagged me into laundering my clothes. We would go on brief walks, full of optimism and esteem- building conversation. Up until then, I had always admired Helmsley’s lofty knowledge, but I categorized him as a lover of mankind while ambivalent about man in any specific sense. He was unsympathetic to ghettos, passing them all by with the usual blindness that most New York natives seem to have.
During the chilly January days, the coldest days of winter, after the weeks of being indoors, I was stir crazy and spent as much time outdoors as my circulatory system allowed. In the mornings I would take the train back to the East Village and wander around. All those air-conditioned stores that I would cool off in during the previous summer’s swelter were the same stores that I warmed up in during those frosty days of winter.