20- James Spader and the Sensory Depravation Tank

            I was laying in bed, watching a movie on TV.  I was on about five Xanax and a half a bottle of Nyquil, and I was trying to follow the plot, but it was a little too heavy for me.  James Spader was a doctor or a medical student, and he happened across the murder of some old girlfriend or something, some chick that looked like a hooker.  I think it was James Spader, anyway.

            This guy, this big, tough-looking guy wrapped a fucking rope around Spader’s neck and strung him up, killing the fucking star of the movie like, twenty minutes in.  The only thing is that then Spader woke up and I didn’t know if it was a dream or what the fuck was going on.  All of this had something to do with some fairly standard Jack the Ripper type who was killing prostitutes in L.A.

            I don’t know.  Like I said: Xanax and Doxylamine Succinate, the active ingredient in Nyquil.  The effect was, lay down on a bed, or a couch, which was where I was, and float.  I was watching James Spader stalk around with a little bit of menace, a little bit of nice guy, a mop of sweaty straw-colored hair hanging all over his brow.  I had a vague notion of what my name was when Vermin called me.

            “Laird,” he said.

            “Who?”

            “Laird,” he said.  “Fuck, I don’t know your first name.  Is that you?”

            “What?” I said.

            “It’s Verm,” he said.  “What are you up to, man?”  There was music playing in the background, something bluesy.

            “I’m on cough medicine and Xanax and watching James Spader have a beer with some chick, but I think he’s already dead.  Why?”

            “Man, I’m at the Tank, and the music here is just…just fucking killing.  Do you know this place?”

            “Verm…”

            “Laird, man, there’s Jimi on the box, and there’s a band playing everything from Otis Redding to James Brown.”

            I looked at the clock, but I couldn’t even see it.  I looked at James Spader and he was starting to give me the creeps.  “Verm,” I said, “it’s late.”  I guessed.

            “It’s not even nine-thirty, man.  The singer looks like Denzel Washington, and he’s got a set of pipes like Otis, man.  I’m telling you.  This is the place to be, man.  Aqueduct, man, near the baseball fields.  There’s a big neon sign that says Live Blues and R&B Shows Every Night.  Call a fucking cab…”

            “I can’t afford a cab.”

“Then steal a fucking car.  You cannot miss this place.”

            I considered my options.  I looked at the clock and it still didn’t tell me anything.  I looked at James Spader, and he was looking right at me.  “What are you waiting for,” he said.  He lit a cigarette and stared at me, big blue eyes.

            “Otis, man,” Verm said.  “I’m sitting on the dock of the bay here, and you’re watching James Fucking Spader.”

            “Do it,” James Spader said.  Everything around him had stopped.  The music, the cigarette smoke, the whole bar.  Every single person was caught in a freeze frame, except for the girl he was sitting in the bar with, a cute little 80s number I’d long since forgotten the name of.  She was looking at Spader, expectantly.  He was looking at me.  “Well do something.  You know, I’m not sure how much longer I can stand the sight of you.”

            I put on a pair of shoes, Chuck Taylor's with holes in the canvas.  I put on my fatigue jacket.  I picked up the shitty little remote control that came with my shitty little TV and I looked at Spader and he looked at me.

            We looked at each other.

            “And I didn’t die, you fucking retard.  That was my twin brother.  It’s a fucking plot device.”

            I was already out the door.

***

            A half an hour later, I was walking past the baseball fields near the aqueduct, and way on up the street I saw a little sign that said Live Blues Music Nightly in bright blue neon.  Ozone Park at night.  Shops were closed up, boarded up with big metal gates covered with spray-painted tags that said things like “Street Thunder is Alive” and “Turk 182” and I hadn’t known that the film students from NYU ever left the big island.  These were covered with padlocked gates.  There were dirty men lurking around in the darkness, huddled against the chill in the air, drinking away the day’s profits and not paying income tax.

As I got closer, I saw the name of the bar, The Sensory Depravation Tank.  It said that Clive “Otis” Owens and the Love Makers were playing all this week.

            I went inside and it was all smoke and mood-lighting.  There were pretty, white waitresses, and a smiling, old, black barkeep, who looked in charge.  At tables, patrons were sitting, smoking, talking, drinking black label scotch and tapping their feet while the band was flying and “Otis” and two back-up singers were singing “I Second That Emotion” by Smokey and the Miracles.

            Otis looked more like Richard Pryor than Denzel Washington…Prior after setting his face on fire freebasing, as opposed to before.  He did sound like Otis though. His back up singers both oddly resembled Grace Jones and I thought for a moment how weird that was because I’d never seen anyone who looked like Grace Jones, not one single person- ever, and this guy has two Grace Jones’ backing him up on the mic.

            I said hello to a waitress and looked around the room.  Otis was trying to tell me that if I felt like loving him, he’d second that emotion, and I saw Vermin sitting in the front row.

            He was clapping his hands and tapping his feet.  He was wearing a dirty sweater, but with a gleaming white shirt and a tie with a half Windsor knot.  That, and an ugly pink bathrobe.  Nobody was staring at him.  He had a Kool dangling from his lips.  There was a pack on the table next to his drink and a lighter emblazoned with a single playing card- a Joker.

            Verm nodded at me and I sat down.  I took a smoke from his pack without asking, and I used his lighter to light it.  “What took you so long?” he asked.

            “I had to talk things over with James Spader,” I said.  “That and I couldn’t find my way off my block.”  I smoked and he smiled.  The song was upbeat and so was the mood in the place.  Everybody was wearing a smile.  “You gonna buy me a drink?” I asked him.

            “Jack,” he yelled to the white-bearded man behind the counter, “get my man here a double of black label.”  Verm was all smiles.  He took a short drag from his cigarette and spit out a chimney of smoke.

            There was a beat then, a few moments of Verm looking at me and me looking at him, both of us were waiting for the other to say something.  Right about then, I noticed that Vermin had a bruise on the right side of his face, down around his jaw and his cheek.  It was about the size and shape, well, at least the shape of New Jersey.

            “Otis” started singing Brownie McGhee’s “Rainy, Rainy Day” while playing an old acoustic guitar; and Verm was all smiles.  “I wanted to talk to you about your boy Kevin.”

            I smoked.  Jack brought me my double of black label and I took a little swallow.  “He used to fuck Pink and he doesn’t live around here anymore,” I said.  “How’s that?”

            “Where did he go?” Verm asked, his hands intertwined with a cigarette burning in there somewhere.  “Did he tell you anything?”

            “No,” I said.  “Why are you asking me this?”

            “No reason,” he said.  “I just figured I could offer you some good shit at an affordable cost if you had some good info.”

            “I haven’t seen him,” I said.  “Why does everyone ask me about Kevin?”

            He shrugged.  “My man Getch is in the way of needing to talk to your boy Kevin, and I just figured it would score me a few points with his crazy ass if I could tell him.”

            “Getch the one that did that to you?” I asked, not really liking my cigarette.

            Verm shook his head.  “Nah,” he said.  “It was those aromatic bodyguards he’s always rolling around with.  Those motherfuckers wear too much cologne.  Shit, I can still smell it.  I asked him if he’d heard anything about Kevin and he had one of ‘em crack me across the face with his gun.”  He felt around his jaw.  “It could be worse.  I think he loosened a tooth or two though.  I guess I shouldn’t have asked.”

I told him that I was sorry.  “I don’t know anymore than anybody else, man.  You try Pink?  They were fucking for like…years.”
            He smiled.  “She told me that he wasn’t circumcised.  That wasn’t really the kind of information I was looking for, but, well, at least it was information.”  I tapped off some of my ashes and I noticed that there were at least a dozen butts in the tray.  I also noticed that Vermin’s hands were shaking.

“You okay, Verm?”

“Yeah, man, I’m cool,” he said.  “You want some coke?”

            Next thing, the two of us were standing in the men’s room, which was all imitation marble countertops and blue tile and creepy fluorescent lights, the kind that stutter like Daffy Duck when the bulb is a little loose.  Verm put a three by five vanity mirror on the sink with four lines of really good coke and he took down two of them with a rolled up twenty dollar bill. All very cheesy 1980’s all very cheesy Verm. And I snickered and he shot me a “look”.

            “You know,” he started to say as I snorted one line of coke, followed by another, “some day soon, someone’s gonna mention that fuck’s name to Getch and get his fucking skull cracked open.  I just hope it isn’t me.”

            “How much does Kevin owe him?” I asked.

            “Dude,” he said, “I don’t know.”  Outside, “Otis” was playing something by Aretha, and Verm’s feet were dancing underneath him even as he looked so damn serious.  “I think if he woke up with my dick in his ass he’d hate me only a little bit less than he hates Kevin, man.  So I’m thinking it’s a fucking lot.”

            I reached into his breast pocket and I took another of his cigarettes and I lit it and blew smoke at my reflection in the mirror.  “I’m not exactly a big fan myself,” I said. 

            “Dude,” he said, “this whole thing has been going down hill since Kevin left town.”  He looked over his own face in the mirror, checked his teeth with his finger and looked up his nose, clearing a few grains out from under.  “You may not want to listen to that, but it’s true.  Ever since he split with all that debt, Getch is getting crazier and crazier. Like weird fucking crazy. Not even the good kind of crazy. I’m talking dark ages crazy. You hear about that shit he did to Nicky Divine?”

            I said that I had.

            “A fucking shin-vice, man?” he asked.  “Back in the day, Getch’d have one of his cologne motherfuckers put two in Nick’s head and have done with it.  Business, you know?  Two in the head, and a lonely grave, and it was ice cold and a good kind of crazy for that line of work was left in the wake of the event- as a reputation type thing.  That, or break his hand or something.  Business.  He got mean, you know?  Real mean. Like wacky fuckin’ sixteenth century mean, since your boy Kevin fucked him, man he’s been Googling new and interesting ways to fuck people up on the dark side of bizarre…”  Verm shook his head, and he took the cigarette from my mouth and took a puff and gave it back to me.

            “The television keeps telling me that these things are bad for you, you know?”  He smiled and I smiled.

            I thought about James Spader, watching me make decisions, being the nice guy one minute and menacing the next.  I thought about my TV talking to me.  “Shit must be true,” I said.

“There’s a whole lot of check yourself before you wreck yourself going on right here, and I’m telling you Getch is ready to wreck shit.” Verm said, pushing his finger into the center of my chest.

“And?”

“And watch your shit. Getch is a mad dog. He isn’t having anyone else do the dirty work here. He’s gotten very hands-on. He’s boiling. He’ll pop off soon enough, like Krakatoa, all nasty and dirty. And do you want to be in the blast radius of his shit?”

“Well, I can’t just not be. I do what I do. I’m not hiding. I have to make money Verm, you know that more than anyone.”

“I know you’re not hiding. I’m just saying, game is changing- be prepared for change.”

“You know man, “change”, fuck, if you knew half the shit that was going on right now, in my head, you’d understand that I understand change more than any motherfucker you know.”

Verm threw me a quizzical look, “What’s that supposed to mean?”

“What?” I said.

“In your head, what are you plotting something?”

“What- No.”

“C’mon man, don’t be fucking around here. Don’t think stupid shit. These are stupid times. Getch has a hard-on, a fucking blood lust. If you’re plotting some bullshit, just deep six it, right now.”

“That’s not what I meant.”

White lines…blue paper…and a searing pain right through the center of my skull.

“Then what the fuck is it man?” Vermin asked, and it was genuine too, as genuine Verm could be full of coke and standing in the here and now. He was asking me, as of all things, a friend. And I was taken back a little bit and I threw him the same quizzical look he’d just given me and thought about revealing everything that was going on in my mind, all the details. Thinking about just serving it up to him on a platter. Really giving it to him, the hallucinations. The Aurora Project. All of it. Not knowing if he’d actually buy it, but feeling almost comfortable enough to talk about it because I really didn’t give a shit about his perspective on me, or him, or anything. And I know this fleeting moment of Verm actually giving a fuck was fueled more so by drugs rather than any real concern on my fucking behalf.

“Well, what the fuck is it?” Verm asked.

And now he’s prying. Is this genuine concern? Or was the coke too good to make a rational read on Vermin.

“It doesn’t matter.” I back pedal, because this isn’t the time or the place to get into anything in my head, especially with this guy. Vermin may be being real right now. But in all actuality, fuck him he’s a piece of shit, even more than I am. He’d sell me down the river in a nanosecond, and just like Pink, if I furnish him any information, I’m giving him the means to the end of a transaction and I’ll get fucked for this- some how some way. Plus, he wouldn’t understand it, because he’s just plain old fucking dumb.

“All right then, man. Just have your shit on lockdown. Because Getch is pissed- and you and Kevin are tight.” Verm gives me the eyes of serious.

“Were tight.” I say, deadpanned.

“Ok, “were tight.”

There’s a pause here, the kind of awkward pause that happens when two men are doing pretty decent cocaine in a bathroom and things take a turn from warning your sometimes hustling pal Laird about some kind of impending doom, to the kind of heart to heart you’d have on a camping trip with your father.

White lines…blue paper.

“What now?” Verm says; he feels it’s awkward, too.

“Now, I just want to get the fuck out of this bathroom, enjoy your cocaine.”

19- The Girl with the Bottle of Cough Syrup

           

          “What do you do?” I ask her.  We’re sitting in some bar in the village called Fin du Monde, which is, I think, French for ‘men who pierce their lower lip.’  All around us are these people.  The ones who slap paint across a canvas and stick an old, yellow toenail into it and pretend that they’re Jackson Pollack.  She’s sitting across from me, Julie.

            I had been buying Nyquil at an all night druggist a few blocks down.  Doxylamine Succinate, the active ingredient in Nyquil, is also commonly found in sleeping pills.  At about $5.00 for the biggest bottle they had, it was the cheapest bender I could find.  Fingering the Hamilton in my pocket, I thought about buying Nyquil gel caps to wash down with it when I heard this polite little gasp of a sneeze.

            Walking up the aisle was this slinky little brunette, with long, long legs and a mop of thick, dark hair.  She had walked right up to me, pulled a bottle of the Doxylamine Succinate-flavored beverage, and asked if I was sick too.

            “Huh?”

            “You know, sick.”  She shook the Nyquil bottle at me.  “You must have a cold.”

            “Yeah,” I said.  “In a way, yeah.”

            She looked me up and down.  Her in her designer jeans ripped at the knees, her in her skimpy black top and worn-at-the-shoulders leather jacket.  Suddenly I felt bad that my clothes were dirty and that I had five days of beard on my face.  “Do you live around here?” she asked.

            “Queens.”

            “I live in Queens, too.  I was just about to hit the subway, but I figured I needed some cough syrup.”

            “You know that Doxylamine Succinate is the active ingredient in Nyquil?”

            She smiled.  Her teeth were white like an unused bar of soap, and they were unnaturally straight.  Except for one.  In her mouth, I could see one tiny incisor, lower right hand corner of her mouth, which came to this tiny little point, and sat crooked amidst her row of perfect teeth like a kicked-over grave stone.  “Do you want to get a drink?”

            I wanted to run my tongue over her crooked tooth.

            “Isn’t that what we’re doing right now?”

            “I mean a real drink.”

            “I can’t afford too many real drinks.”

            “What if I pay?”

            “Maybe I’ll let you,” I said, smiling.  There was a single clerk behind the counter up front, Indian or Pakistani.  The druggist had gone home for the night.  The place was going to close soon enough.  We were both wearing dirty clothes and had greasy hair, and between us, we were holding enough liquid sleeping pill to snuff out a thoroughbred.  I think the guy was getting nervous.

            “So it’s a date?” I asked.

            “I don’t go on dates,” she said.

            “Then it’s a drink with a pretty girl.”

            “Do you think I’m pretty?”

            “Do you still want to buy me some booze?”

            An hour and a half later, we’re sitting in this shitty village bar with all of these leather jackets and cigarette smoke and Beck on the juke, drinking cheap beer and eating complimentary pretzels, the most I’d eaten in two or three days.

            “I’m a filmmaker,” she says.  “Sort of.”

            I pretend that I’m interested.  “What kind of films do you make?”
            “None yet,” she says, sipping her beer.  She has this small face, and with each sip it all just sort of contracts together in a squint at the taste of it.  Still, she drinks eagerly.  “I haven’t done any yet.  But I’ve made a few short films.”

            “What kind?”

            “What do you mean?”

            “I don’t know.  What kind?”

            “I think…gosh, I don’t even know.  Just…nothing…something different, you know?  I want to make movies that break down genres, you know?  Like…like fucking Jim Jarmusch, you know, like Ghost Dog.  Did you ever see that?”

            “Never heard of it.”

            “It’s like this fusion of gangster movies and hip hop and samurai culture…just fucking bizarre.  And that’s what I want to do,” she says.  “I want to make a gangster film with vampires in it, or a family drama with an action movie inside it.  I just…a sci-fi movie set in the past…and yet at the same time, have it be set in the future.  Do you know what I mean?”

            Actually, I don’t.  I think about sedatives.  I think about Nyquil, about Doxylamine Succinate and about spiking my beer with absinthe.  I think about Hemingway and “Hills Like White Elephants.”  I think about high school and remember why I forgot it in the first place.  I think about that story and a couple talking about an abortion.  I think about what absinthe can potentially do to an unborn fetus, and I wonder exactly what it could do for me. I think about white lines on blue paper and I get scared, but I reel myself in, because I really want this moment to be something outside of that shit.

“I just want to blend different genres together.  I want to create something completely new and different.  I want to make important movies, movies that really matter.”

“Do you have an agent?”

“No.”

“Do you know anyone in the industry?”

“I served a drink to Robert DeNiro once.  He likes scotch.  I hate scotch.”

She runs the tip of her finger, affixed with a long, sharp, black nail and runs it along the neck and the mouth of her beer bottle.  She smiles at me flashing her white teeth. They have that vacuum cleaner commercial, just greased with Vaseline look.  “What do you do?”

I take and sell drugs, and that seems to take up most of my time.  Sometimes I have sex with men for money. I’m a two bit hustler on the brink of popping a paranoid aneurysm. I may or may not be in tune with some kind of signal from a future, past, present, unknown “something”. I think about how my rent is due in three days and how I already owe twenty to Tim Tim.  “I’m between jobs right now.  That kind of thing.”

She laughs, she thinks I am joking.

We talk about the beer, how she thinks the tap is busted because the beer doesn’t taste right.  “It tastes like copper,” she says.  We talk about her favorite movies.  She thinks Bartolucci is underrated, and I nod and don’t tell her that I don’t know who he is.  She says that Tarantino is overrated, and I nod and don’t tell her that she’s wrong.

Three hours later we’re in her apartment, listening to Radiohead, and I don’t understand a word of it.  I take off her shirt.  I haven’t had sex in months.  Maybe years.  Not without getting paid.  The swell of her breasts under my fingers, the feeling of the hard nipple brushing against my palm.  Twenty minutes later, she’s completely nude, her lean, thin body, smooth and hairless all over.

We’re listening to Bjork and I don’t understand a word of it.  I have my face between her legs.  Her fingers dig into my hair and my scalp.  Her thighs are lean, and smooth and they brush and bristle against the side of my unshaven face, and she moans soft, and reaches over and she turns up the music.  Her fingernails dig into my shoulders and I can smell and taste her, ripe, pungent, feminine smells surrounding me as my pants slip off and I slip into her.  Slow, rough movements in the dark of her apartment, on her couch.  She has a roommate…she could be home at any second, but I don’t care.  Tingling, sweating sensations.  She tells me not to use a rubber.  “I can’t have children,” she says, and it turns me on.

“I was raped when I was fourteen,” she says, and it turns me on more.  Harder, faster movements, slick, sweat, body fluids.  She moans into my ear.  She smokes Red Apple cigarettes and I can smell them all over her and that turns me on more than anything.  “I had to have a hysterectomy.”

            I think about little tiny rooms filled with people looking at me, studying me.  I think about the phrase “Aurora Project” and about John F. Kennedy Jr.’s accident that might not have been an accident it all flashes thru my mind so quickly with a painful ache.  I think about Kevin Costner drinking his own piss, processed through filters on a raft in Waterworld and try to forget that while I don’t remember what my mother looks like (other than that her hair was a kind of shoe-polish black that people either find attractive or frightening), that I do remember going to see that movie and I hate myself both for having gone to see it and for remembering it.  I try to think about anything but sex, anything but this girl, Julie. I try not to wonder how a guy like me, ended up inside a muff like this.

            Her fingers are digging into my back and I’m thinking about Vermin’s dirty couch.  Her left hand grabs onto my side with force and sharp fury as she lets out an enormous moan and I can feel that I’m bleeding, and I try to focus on the song that’s playing.  The lyrics ricocheting around my brain like a bullet, “You feel it till you’re dry.  You feel it till you’ve had enough.  And you don’t understand.”  I’m counting sheep, gorillas, manatees, fucking unicorns- anything to keep my mind off the sex. I think when her entire body stiffens up, from her crooked little toes to the single crooked tooth in her otherwise perfect smile, it all tenses up.  “This leads into a high pitched scream and her crying, “Oh my God, oh my God,” and her pussy tightening around me until she lay still.  The world is all bright light and ringing bells, and the muscles tighten and spasm, and I close my eyes, and the rush of it, oh God, the rush of it, and when I’ve come, I can feel my life draining out of me, and we collapse together, sweating and panting.

            A half hour later, she’s laying next to me, awake, an arm across my chest and stomach, her face pressed against the flesh of my arm.  “If I fall in love with you, could you pretend to love me back?”

            “What?”  All I want to do is sleep.

            “If I do fall in love with you, which I don’t think is going to happen,” she’s trying to reassure me, “but just in case it does…you don’t have to love me back.  All I want is for you to pretend.”  I don’t feel reassured. Is this some reverse psyche job?

            Her hand is on my chest, twirling the hair with a lone finger.  “I’m not very good at pretending things,” I say.

            She smiles at me.  “Well pretend to pretend.”

            “I’ll see what I can do,” I say.

            This is me meeting and falling in…something… with a girl who only went into a cheap little drug store for some cold and flu relief and came out with me.  I don’t even remember if either of us bought cough syrup.  She kisses me.  This is me catching a touch of the flu from a pretty girl named Julie.

18- Snack Talk

            “Do you know anything?” Pink asked, her mouth full of half-chewed hot dog with the works.  They were sitting on a bench, by the Hudson, eating, and drinking coffee.  She called that morning.  She never called.

            “What are you doing this afternoon?” she’d asked.  “Probably nothing, right?”

            The Park, she said.  Over by the river.  Laird didn’t say no.  She was even paying for lunch, and she wasn’t asking for anything.  Not yet.  For Pink, everything was a transaction.  They talked about Tim Tim, and how he spends money on shaving cream and razor blades even though he’s never shaved.  She talked about how Madonna looked like “waxwork” on TV the other day, and Laird nodded and agreed, even if he had no idea what she meant because Laird gave not fuck one about Madonna.

            They talked about the Yankees, the Mets and, the smoking ban in bars all over the city, and what seemed soon to be world, and they smoked while they talked about it. They chatted about the never ending turmoil in the Middle East to which Laird knew Pink gave not one fuck about. They talked about how print is dying and reality TV is alive and well. Print was not dead to Laird, and he didn't realize Pink even read anything. But he figured she was spot on about Reality TV. 

            Small talk, all of it bullshit small, teeny, tiny talk.

And then, there it was. Finally, she said, “So, what do you know about Kevin?”

           “He’s about five-foot eleven, and he doesn’t live in Queens, anymore.”

            “Laird…”

            “What?” he asked.  “What makes you think that I know anymore than you?”

            “Well, you and he were close…”

            “Yeah, but you were closer,” he said.

            “You sound jealous,” she said.

            “Well,” he said. “Things aren’t always how they seem.”

            Laird wolfed down his hot dog, silent, while Pink nibbled at hers.  Boats went by on the river…freighters, cargo boats, and people jogged by in track pants and running shorts, and $50 tank tops and neon-colored jog-bras telegraphing the bouncing tits of yuppie jogging muffin topped house-mommies from 50 yards away. JUST like Pink's anvil dropped to the dick way of getting to the point of why they were really there.

            Laird was wearing an old Rolling Stones T-shirt, and a pair of jeans with rips and tears at the knees and at the ankles and a whole lot of disdain.  He didn’t…think he remembered showering that morning. But right now he felt even dirtier now that the punchline was revealed.  Pink, on the other hand, smelled like some fruit-smelling shampoo, and perfume…something…expensive and tempting.

            “Do you know anything about him or not?” she asked.

            In case of emergency.

            Laird smiled.  “I don’t know.  I don’t know any more than you do.  I know someone he used to hang out with who lives in a rent-controlled apartment in Brooklyn, and is elbow-deep in credit card debt who has a semi-new BLU-Ray player, and a collection of crackerjack prizes that will blow your tits off..”

            A crease ran across her brow, but she quickly deadpanned, “You know, I like you sometimes, Laird.  This ain’t one of them. You’re being a real shit-face”

            Pink threw her hot dog into Laird’s lap, splashing mustard, relish, and god knows what else all over his clothes, and headed back up the side of the river toward the subway.  Laird watched her walk away, shrugged her the “fuck you” shrug and sat for a while, watching clouds form in the sky.  He finished his hot dog, and then he ate hers.  He even drank her coffee.

            Everything with Pink was a “transaction”.

            Laird stood, stretched and began to walk, his tongue jamming back into his molars, fishing out the pieces of hotdog, and still, he looked at the clouds, and thought about how he had just been "almost" used for information. And how he wasn’t willing to give one iota. He had enough bullshit rattling around in his mind. He didn’t need Pink’s head-games, because with Pink, it’s always never about what it’s really about with her. You could be talking to her about blue, but in the end, it’s about red. Or, more accurately, it’s about Pink. She didn’t bring him out there for small-talk time with her good buddy Laird. She brought him out there for information. Because in the end. It’s always about what Pink knows.  It’s always about the transaction and fuck everyone else. Literally and figuratively. She could have asked how he was. Or, why he looked like two day old hammered dog-shit. He'd have fed her a bullshit line. Because telling anyone about a distinct set of crazy-assed blueprints haunting your mind, and the Aurora Project, isn't simple conversation over brunch. And neither was Kevin. .

            Laird finally got the piece of hot dog dislodged from between his teeth. He spit it to the ground still thinking about Pink and looking at the sinewy chunk of hot dog casing on the ground. That was the end of that annoyance: two in a row. Both unstuck from his craw, for the time being, until he takes another bite.

          Transaction closed.

17- This City is Dying

            It’s late one night and I can’t sleep.  Too much coffee.  Too much ecstasy.  Too much airplane glue and fifteen packets of sugar in my coffee. Too much shitty Dubstep dancing the dance magnetic through my brain.  Tim Tim knows a guy in Jackson Heights who sells crappy, herbal rave bullshit hits of the stuff for five bucks a pop to any kid that can recognize a song filled with wobble base, and has a warm willing mouth- and Tim Tim’s an expert on both accounts.

I’m riding high and watching infomercials and it’s got to be four in the morning.  The flow-bee, a fucking vacuum cleaner that cuts your hair. The shake weight. That fucking pseudo sex toy they’re hawking to women who want firmer arms, but we all know in reality, it’s just an excuse to give a hand job over a blow job because the ladies can say they’ve been practicing.  A guy with Mike Brady’s hair-cut tries to sell me a cooking device that chops vegetables, slices fruit, sautés meat, and cleans your kitchen counters until you can shave in front of them.  Only $59.99, Mike Brady tells me.

            “It’s amazing,” he says.

             I’m not all that amazed.

            “You’ll love my nuts,“ he says.

             I’ll love any part of your body you want buddy, if the price is right. And I’m still not all that amazed. So I flip the channel again and MTV’s replaying “Nirvana: Unplugged”, and I swear I can see Cobain’s skull glowing through his skin and long for the days when MTV actually played more music like this

            I flip the channel again and TNT is showing The Matrix.  It’s been on five times tonight.  Keanu Reeves is swinging his arms in slow motion and I’m starting to sweat.  I just took three Dexatrim because I want to stay thin, and because it makes my toes tingle if I chase them with cheap vodka.  I take a long swig from the bottle and I can feel it burning a hole through my stomach.  Keanu is looking right at me and I’m freaking the fuck out.

            On CNN, Bernard Shaw is telling me that an asteroid might hit the Earth in 2028 and that we’re all going to die, but that it’s okay.  The State Department doesn’t believe the asteroid to be terror-related.  Outside I can hear sirens and screams- probably a domestic dispute.  I can hear shouting and yelling and fifty-thousand people stomping their feet and cheering, and it’s just that they’ve segued to highlights of the Yankees game.  Somebody won the game, somebody broke his leg in a collision at second base in the fifth inning, and a fan fell from the upper deck and broke her neck in the netting behind home plate.  A shot of the fall- skinny, blonde hair, short, tumbling over and over and smacking head-first into the netting until her neck was on a right angle with her shoulders. 

“… terrible accident,” the sportscaster says.  “However, the authorities have not ruled out the possibility that the woman was pushed.”

There’s an open beer on the coffee table, and it’s warm.  I take two big sips and it’s disgusting, but my mouth is dry.  I take another sip.  All the lights are off in my apartment except for that cold blue television glow waving and flickering all over my walls like water.

“However,” old Bernie says, “police do not believe that the fall was terror-related.”

I’m thinking about Pink and her phone number.  I’m thinking about giving her a call.  I’m thinking about Tim Tim and a little aspirin bottle of ex and I’m hoping he’s still alive.  I’m thinking that Vermin never sleeps and that if I want to connect, all I need is to remember his phone number and scrape together a pair of Alexander Hamiltons to help me sleep.

I’m wondering what Vermin’s phone number is.

Another flip of the channel and I’m watching The Breakfast Club on AMC when I fall asleep, and I dream about gloves with the fingers cut out, magenta pubic hair and Molly Ringwald with a mouthful of cock.

            When I wake up in the morning, my back hurts and my head feels like a tennis shoe.  I take the cap off the bottle of vodka and I do a double-shot that lights my stomach on fire and burns my larynx to the ground on the way down.  The TV is still on, and Paul Newman is pointing a gun in a man’s face and snarling and laughing.  He winks at me.  I turn the TV off and I go into the kitchen, which doubles as a dining room, and I look at the table with the broken leg.  It has drawers full of silverware and cabinets full of plates, but as I’m opening doors and slamming drawers, I’m starting to figure out that it’s been a while since I’ve been grocery shopping. I don’t remember the last time I went “Real” grocery shopping; the kind that your mother teaches you about, so that one day, when you’re all grown up, you can be a functioning adult with adult food in the cupboards. She’d teach you about the meats and veggies. The steak, and chicken meals that don’t come in microwaveable boxes; but instead the kind of meat you’d get at a deli or a butcher shop. The last time I remember any meat any one ordered, it was literally attached to my body.

            My memories are getting hazier and hazier, old ones replaced by new ones, filled with white lines on blue paper, numerical sequences I don’t understand and have no recollection of stripping away past memories like a harsh acid. These flashes fill in the slots where old memories used to live with a painful bulging sharp ache. It’s an ache that’s quick and with distinct purpose. A pain that hits me so hard and so fast and with such power it makes me feel as if it’s grooming me, preparing me for something more. The pain saps my strength for a mere instant. Then, when strength returns, it’s so quick and so brisk it’s like feeling the first blast of a cold rush of air on my naked body, it makes the hair on the back of my neck stand up and my arms cover with bumps and I have a memory of blue lines on white paper, stuck in my mind, suffocating me, making me long for a breath of the soft air outside the hard walls of this dying city.

And now, I’m  looking for anything to put in my stomach. There’s a box of powdered donuts in the cupboard that expired a month ago, a can of tuna fish and a big can of Chef Boyardee  take one out and wolf it down- dry and hard but the powder helps it go down.  I feel around in my pocket and I find a five dollar bill, and I decide to take a walk up the road to pick up some bread for the tuna or even a burrito or something.  It has to be Sunday.  Nobody’s around.  I can see Shea in the distance and the sun isn’t quite up yet.  I haven’t been up this early in a year and I think about that soft air way beyond the Stadium.  I figure that I didn’t get very much sleep until I see the lights of a couple of bars and clubs in the neighborhood.  Sonny’s, a place where you can overpay for a girl to sit in your lap while you overpay for a watered-down domestic beer, has its doors open already.  I start to figure out that the sun’s going down instead of up and I don’t know why I’m not really sober yet.

            I see the Waldbaum’s around the block, but I walk right past it and past the video store and a Baskin Robbins and a Hallmark.  I just keep walking.  I don’t stop.  I don’t feel sick or tired or light in the head.  I don’t change my pace or hesitate, not even for traffic.  My feet carry me all the way down to Howard Beach and I’m walking down 148^th avenue.  It’s dark out now.  There’s a pit bull bouncing around inside of a fenced-off lawn and six pre-teeners are playing basketball about five feet from the fence and making fun of the dog and it’s barking, and I’m thinking about my childhood, trying to block out the images in my mind of white lines on blue paper.  One of the boys, short, fat, with crooked teeth looks up at me and asks what the fuck I’m looking at.

            “Exactly,” I say, and I keep on walking and he doesn’t know that I insulted him and that’s probably for the best.  The kid picks up a rock- not a basketball, an actual, honest-to-whatever ten-pound piece of slate and he hands it to a tall kid with red hair before climbing over the fence.  The dog starts to bark and to pull at his chain, the choker digging into the fur around his neck as Red passes the rock to the fat kid, who sidles on up to the dog and smashes it down hard on the dog’s neck as I cross the street with my head turned back over my shoulder.  The six kids, big, tall, skinny, small- all of them- pick up rocks and start to pelt the pit bull bitch and as I pass a little Korean grocery and a video-mart and I can hear the dog barking and whining and the boys howling and hooting and hollering like animals.

            I need another drink.  It’s dark now, has been for a few miles.  As I pass the little video store and head on up the block past 82^nd street, there’s a man coming up the street, bundled up for winter with a heavy coat, a woolen cap, and a heavy, knit scarf.  He’s wearing galoshes.  It was 85 degrees yesterday and today feels, well, similar.  A hot, humid kind of similar.  Holding a steaming cup of coffee, he comes walking down 82^nd and I slow my pace so that I can get a better look at him before I hit 81^st.  His eyes are red and filled with fragmented veins- I think he’s been crying.

            “How’s it going, man?” I ask, passing him.

            He doesn’t say a word.  I stop as he walks past me and I’m not even trying to look uninterested anymore.  I stop right where I am, and I’m standing in the street after dark, watching a man, early forties, gray hair, gray eyes, gray fucking skin and a gray scarf kneel down next to a sewer grate and start to talk to it.

            “God forgive me,” he says.  “God forgive me.”

            I start to walk towards him, because, well, at least he’s talking now, and he takes the lid off his steaming cup of java and he pours it down into the grating in a long, hot pour, taking care to shake out the final drops and getting every little bit down into the sewer and my head fills with pressure as white lines on blue paper flash thru my mind with snapshot quickness.

            He looks up at me and I look at him.  “He’s asleep,” the man says.  “That’s all.  Just sleeping.”

            I turn around, looking around, and I don’t see anybody.  I’m starting to lose my buzz from the Vodka, and the x wore off hours ago, so pretty soon I’m going to grind up, and start bumping that Dexatrim back home and I’m going to see if I can lose weight while I zone out in front of the TV.  My head is killing me and I can barely breathe when I finally speak I take a quick moment to shake off the pain left over from a series of dagger-like strobes of numerical sequences that left my mind a nanosecond ago.

            “What are you looking for?” I ask him.  “You lose someth…”

           “There’s something in there,” he says, his eyes wide open, dilated.  “There’s something in the sewer,” he says.  “I swear to God, I’ve seen it.”

            I’m thinking I should have stayed in bed.  I’m thinking I shouldn’t have taken so many Dexatrim with the x last night.  I’m thinking…I’m thinking I want to wake up. I’m thinking of the supple comfort of the atmosphere beyond the walls of this dying city.

            “It came out of the sewer last week…came right out of the sewer over by the el tracks and I swear to God, I saw it swallow a man whole.”

            I look down into the sewer, and I can still smell the coffee- Hazelnut, two sugars.  It smells pretty good.  “Where’d you get the coffee?”

            The guy grabs me by the lapels of my fatigue jacket and he pulls me so close that I swear he’s going to kiss me.  Only for money, I’m about to tell him.  Only for money.

            “Something,” he says.  “There’s something growing under this city.”

            I shake him loose and I start to walk down the way he came, thinking maybe there’s a Dunkin Donuts or a gas station or something with  a good cup of coffee and a whole serving tray full of sugar and it’ll wake me up and I’ll forget that I ever saw this asshole. Then I think about the white lines on blue paper, and realize, maybe there’s something growing inside of me, too. 

            I’m heading up the street and I can him bawling, bawling.  “Help me!” he screams.  “Help me, God!”

            The sun is a memory and the sky is this huge, purple mass of clouds and darkness and little, peeking glances of stars.  The moon seems as if it’s fallen straight out of  the heavens, and the streetlights make everything orange and blue, a sick, diseased yellow.  I look back over my shoulder, still nobody around but that guy, and he’s got his head sticking down into the sewer.

            I close my eyes and I take a deep breath and I think the Dexatrim is making me sick to my stomach and I have to take a shit.  I think I see somebody walking past and laughing at that old man, giggling into her boyfriend’s shoulder on her way to a bar or a club, or a restaurant or some other nice, normal place where women with high-heeled shoes and high, squealing laughs go to.

            “This city is dying,” the man with his head in the sewer screams and I just keep walking. And as I walk, I think, and as I think, I remember, maybe this city is already dead.