I went to a Mets game one night, watched Al Leiter toss a two hit shutout at the Dodgers. I don’t even like the Mets. It’s all about time-killing, killing time. I invited Tim Tim but he said he had to work, and he didn’t like baseball. By the time I got out of Shea, it was dark, maybe ten-thirty. People were leaving the park, families, couples, drunken groups of local meat-heads. Four fat guys with an M, an E, a T and an S painted on each one of their flabby chests.
I found myself standing in a phone booth a few blocks away from the stadium, with the receiver in my hand, and my index finger poised above the keys. The sky was lit just a little by the bald, pock-marked face of the moon. I wanted to call her. I needed to call her. It’d been three days since I’d spoken to her, three days since I’d heard that voice that kept me awake when I closed my eyes in the dark, and it felt like three weeks. Christ, it felt like three years. Shit, maybe it was three years.
I didn’t remember what year it was.
Still, the receiver on my ear as I lightly fingered, but never quite pressed the four button (the first of her number), I couldn’t find it within me to dial. I let out a long sigh, which seemed to take near forever, and I placed the receiver back into its cradle.
“She doesn’t want you to call,” I said to myself as I pressed my forehead against the filthy glass. It was one of those old-time booths, a tower of dirty Plexiglas with the flimsy, fold-up door. There was a torn to fuck phone book hanging down from the box by a thick metal cable. There weren’t fifteen pages left in the entire phone book. All of New York narrowed down to Althea Aaron to Michael Addams. Either random vandalism, or someone’s fantasy of population control. I tore out a page, doing my part, and crumpled it into a tiny little ball and I dropped it on the ground. I stood inside that booth for a good ten minutes just reading the walls.
Some of it was advertisement.
WILL SUCK U OFF 4 FOOD, one screamed in black ink, adding a phone number.
“She doesn’t want to hear from you,” I said again, this time louder.
Some of it was public service.
KEEP YO DICK OUTTA JUANITA RUIZ, this one hollered in thick magic marker, SHIT’S GONNA START TO ROT OFF!!!!!!!!
Some of it was poetry.
Scrawled in barely legible, tiny letters of blue, Gat, gat goes the nine of Willie Pimp when a nigga tries to skimp a hoe.
“She doesn’t want to fucking talk to you,” I said.
Finally, and maybe even more relevantly, there was one message directly above the payphone itself in blatant red ink, in tight, flawless print: Keep calling, bro. The bitch can’t answer ‘cause she’s got her mouth around my meat.
I stood there and, in spite of my mood, I let out a bit of a laugh. I could feel warmth on my cheeks in spite of how cold it was outside. I was crying. Not a lot, just a few drops slipping down to my cheeks while I tried to fight off the rest, but I was crying. Still, laughing made me feel a little better, even if it made the tears come a little faster than they’d been coming.
I dialed Pink’s number, my forehead pressed against the dirty glass. The booth smelled like piss or body odor, or maybe both. Outside was the city, or Queens, anyway. There was dirty water running down the gutters from an afternoon rain and there was steam rising visibly from a manhole up the street. There was a woman, probably a whore, slamming down hard on top of some paying customer in an old brown Ford parked between a Korean grocery and a locksmith’s shop. I was still close enough to see the cheesy neon figures on the outside of Shea, and that they were going to be playing the Padres next. The phone was ringing on the other side, one, two, five times. No answer. Pink didn’t have an answering machine. She didn’t believe in them. I kept on the line.
Be in this booth at 2:45 a.m. on July 18th, 2002, somebody had written, very, very tiny on the plexi-wall, and I’ll suck you into a fucking coma. For a moment, I could still smell the encounter. It seemed to me like half of New York had either taken a piss or fucked on that corner, or in that booth in particular. Across the street, in the alleyway, the hooker silhouette screamed like mad and it made me think about Tim Tim, about sweaty middle-aged men and blood and semen and my ass filled with coiled barbed wire.
“Who the fuck is this?” Pink’s angry, out of breath voice growled in my ear. I tried to say something, but nothing came to me. I called her before the game and I didn’t get an answer. I called her three hours before that and got no answer. At least at that point I knew she wasn’t across the street in the Ford getting a very public cock skewering. “Hello,” she said. “I’m fucking busy, and if you’re calling for an appointment…”
I hung up.
I wound up walking to some tavern in Ozone Park, the kind of place where Bruce is on the juke box, and a group of beer-swilling regulars wear bad T-shirts with nicknames and numbers on them and play softball against similar regulars from similar bars all over Queens. Bruce and the E-Street Band were playing “Glory Days” and I was drinking a beer that tasted old and stale. I had a headache, and I’d already done a shot of tequila and chased it with another stale shitty beer, thinking that it’d help. It hadn’t done much yet except irritate my stomach.
I scratched at the fold of my arm, at old, scabbed-over battle scars. I wanted small, cheap hit of black tar. I wanted a fistful of my mother’s valium. I remembered my mother for the first time in months and I took another drink of stale beer.
“So, I did what you said,” one meathead said to another in one of the booths. They were wearing Queens College sweatshirts but looked more like bricklayers than students. They had broad shoulders and thick necks and had about fifteen empty bottles in front of them and two empty baskets of chicken fingers and fries. Tow-headed and probably blue-eyed, they looked, between the two of them, like an Army recruiting poster.
“I told her,” the first meathead said, “I told her how I felt about her.”
“What did you say?” the second asked.
“I told her that I loved her, man. I just, you know, just let it all hang out. I told her that when I graduate that I want her to come with me to San Diego, and just, you know, start a life together.”
The second meathead was laughing. “And she said ‘no’, right?”
“Well…yeah.”
“Big mistake, man. You don’t ever tip your cards like that.”
The first kid looked like he’d been punched in the stomach. “You said ‘seize the moment’ and all of that ‘change my destiny’ shit.”
“I didn’t tell you that,” his friend said, sipping his beer.
“Remember,” he said, “all that ‘founding fathers’ stuff, and how they seized the moment and grabbed what was theirs?”
“Dude,” the second kid said, “I flunked Colonial History. If I told you that shit, I was drunk and you should have just ignored me.”
I laughed softly to myself and I took another sip of beer. As always, The Jeffersons were moving on up on a TV above the bar, and I was watching, vaguely, as the neighbors, the mixed couple, whatever the fuck their name was, dropped by to see George, while Wheezy was, apparently, visiting her mother. I guess I wasn’t really watching, as you might say. It was more like I was staring at the screen with my eyes half open, dreaming. I was thinking about Vermin. I was thinking about two twenties, which I had in my pocket, and about a tiny square of junk that I could spike up with. I was thinking that I didn’t have the energy to go to the Bronx. I was thinking about Pink.
Right about then was when I noticed that there were two muscle-bound, probable physical education majors from Queens College standing on either side of me, looking down on what looked to them to be a stain on their fraternity letter sweatshirts. “Hi fellas,” I said. “I think Jesse James is probably greasing up a chopper, and/or some tatted up porn star on 37. Did you want to change the channel?”
One of them, the one who failed Colonial History, grabbed me by the collar of my dirty fatigue jacket and growled at me. “What exactly were you laughing at, faggot?”
I looked up at him, and I felt a soccer ball catch in my throat. The other one had this giant smile on his face. Like his boyfriend had just said or done something very clever. “Sorry guys, just watching the Jeffersons, that’s all.” I smiled. “I’ll try to keep it…”
Before I could blink, a fist the size of a ham crashed into my face. Half of my body went limp and the other half went numb. This guy was holding me up as my chin dropped to my collarbone. I held my breath but felt it forced out of my chest as the other one slammed his meaty paw into my stomach. I tried to reach for my beer bottle but my limp hand only swatted it down, spilling beer onto the counter. The amateur historian picked up the bottle, by the neck, beer pouring all over the floor and all over his hand, and brought the bottle down square onto the top of my head, spilling a few ounces of beer on to my forehead and neck, and littering my hair and shoulders with shattered glass. I could feel blood running down my forehead.
The good Samaritans at the bar, most of whom probably played on whatever softball team toured Queens’ public ball fields under the banner of the bar, cleared a path for the two men to drag me to the door. Bruce was singing “Born in the USA” as I went face first into the pavement, tasting my own blood and without the slightest bit of feeling in my lower torso or below.
“Stay out of this place, you drugged-up faggot,” one of them said. “Or I’ll shove a fucking pool cue up your ass.” He laughed. They laughed. The Samaritans laughed. The door to the bar closed and I was having another great night. I thought about calling Pink. I thought about the quarter and dime in my pocket and a dirty, smelly phone booth in Flushing. I thought about Vermin and begging for something to ease my pain.
I thought about The Aurora Project.
I might have fallen asleep. I didn’t know. But for a moment, maybe two, I wasn’t laying there anymore. I was somewhere. Somewhere different. There was glass and bubbling green fluid, everywhere, like being inside a bottle of 7-Up. Beyond that there were men with baggy white lab coats and clip boards, staring into my eyes, watching my mouth move as I tried to ask them who they were and where I was. “Help me,” I was trying to say. “Help me.”
My mouth was filled with bubbly, sweet-tasting liquid and it didn’t seem to bother me. I couldn’t feel my body, and it didn’t really bother me. The room was all blinking lights and computer displays and a pretty woman with tied up, red hair in John Lennon glasses with a clipboard and a pen, tapping on the glass and mouthing something about auditory response time, whatever the fuck that meant.
Two guys, sitting at a pair of computers and wearing cheap linen suits looked at me and then continued their conversation about how the Cubs still haven’t won a World Series and that they never would. They walked past me, a man in a glass bottle, and didn’t bat an eye. Maybe I was inside a water cooler. Maybe I had become a water cooler. One of the lab coat guys leaned in, close to the glass and said to me, with a stern look on his face, “Don’t come back here, faggot!”
I woke up, covered in puke, but with most of the glass off my face and out of my hair and onto the ground. I was still in Ozone Park. I was still lying in the street. I had no idea what time it was. Maybe it was a dream. Maybe I was going nuts.
I probably just needed some pain killers. I got up and started walking. A few blocks later I was inside a CVS, browsing. I opened a box of Advil and I took four. I opened a bottle of Bayer and took five. I opened a tube of Dramamine and took four of those. I took a few more things I don’t really remember taking, except I remember that one of them, my mistake, treated pre-menstrual cramps.
A man, a customer, middle-forties, fat, with a shiny, balding head stood next to me, staring at me, at the bits of brown beer bottle glass in my hair, at the cuts and bruises on my face. He’d watched me walking up and down the aisle, you know, browsing. “What in the name of God happened to you, man?” he asked.
I smiled at him, and clapped him firmly on the shoulder. “Love is grand, ain’t it, Wally?”
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