Debasements of Brooklyn

by Ira Gold

  “Let’s get off on Eighty-First Street and walk across the park,” Ariel suggests.

  I nod but wonder if a stroll across Central Park may be a little too romantic for a first meeting.

  11

  Confessions

  For the past two years, I have not pursued pussy.

  This after spending most of my adulthood as a horndog. The club scene in Bay Ridge attracted me from the time I was sixteen. I sometimes went into Manhattan, but mostly I stayed in Brooklyn and hooked up with local talent.

  I’m thirty-two but never dated a woman for more than six months.

  The girls, for the most part, were not sorry to see me go, especially after the initial excitement wore off. Some complained that I never expressed a single emotion, that I was inarticulate to the point of muteness.

  To this charge I said nothing.

  Some criticized my strange hours, disparaged my unsavory friends, noted my ambivalent allegiances. Each one pointed out my poverty and lack of both prospects and ambition.

  One girl, Gina, offered to facilitate my entry into the civil service, into a much-coveted job with the sanitation department where her father worked as a supervisor. Though tempting—union job, good wages, great benefits—I decided against a garbage-collecting career. This I consider one of the biggest mistakes of my life.

  The truth is I never cared deeply for anyone.

  I’d often assure the girls that I lacked a gene for love and that they’d be better off with almost anyone else. Not a one argued with me. During the last years I believed this to be true.

  Celibacy, meanwhile, fed on itself, devouring the rest of my libido. I don’t know why. My drinking and drug use remained stable. I avoided tobacco but smoked organically grown, hothouse weed from my own inventory. The more my sex drive diminished, the more healthfully I lived. I practiced aikido for business and pleasure. I checked full-length mirrors for accumulating fat or for muscle deterioration. I delved deeply into my late father’s library. Yet, nearly overnight, I stopped trolling for pussy. The lassitude that characterized my career aspirations spread to the one area in life in which I previously exhibited significant initiative.

  Other than her well-maintained body, Ariel is not typical of my past paramours. She doesn’t tease her hair. She goes easy on the makeup. She finished high school, had done graduate work. If she is to be believed, she owns an apartment in the city, had lived there for years. She visits museums for fun. She reads books. The last woman who I definitively knew read a book was my fourth-grade teacher who enjoyed reciting Tom Sawyer in a cornpone accent.

  Ariel could become more than a lover. But I tell myself to just try and get laid so as not to scare her off. But could I frighten her? There’s something strange in the way this girl so fearlessly embraces me and my bullshit. Actually, I think she’s buzzed, drunk.

  “I once tried to kill myself,” I blurt, apropos of nothing as the train pulls into Seventy-Ninth Street. “Right here at this station.”

  Ariel suddenly clams up.

  We emerge from the underground and enter the park. An intimacy rises between us as we walk down the path. I imagine that for a moment we commune over shared anguish.

  But the comfortable silence stretches into awkwardness. Shit, why open with the suicide attempt? Some girls will hold it against me. I try to put it in context. “My father had died and I got really fucked up at this club. It was three in the morning. You know, when the trains come once an hour. Even the cops laughed when they dragged my ass back onto the platform.”

  This sort of suicide, they claimed, must be done at rush hour.

  “Were you so drunk that you just fell on the tracks? I hear that happens a lot.”

  I tense, then breathe out. “Maybe.”

  She probably thinks I never had enough of an inner life to experience hopelessness. But I always had difficulty finding intrinsic value in existence, or in my own existence. After being kept under observation, they diagnosed alcoholism and agitated depression and let me go on the condition I take Seroquel. Agitated depression my ass. I had even lacked the energy to argue.

  “What about love?” Ariel asks.

  Has Ariel ever attempted to off her own self? “What about

  it?”

  “Love is an absolute good. All you can think about is someone else, how to make them happy. You get out of yourself. When I get really down, I remember the people I love.”

  While easily admitting my suicide attempt, I am ashamed to say that I have never been in love. When I don’t respond, Ariel murmurs, “Yeah, the deepest feelings are not always reciprocated.”

  I fill in the blanks. Breakup, job loss, depression, Brooklyn. My situation mirrors hers except for the breakup and job loss.

  In the end, we agree that everyone is entitled to one suicide attempt. The wolf of despair sits on your chest, holding you in place while the world spins faster and faster. When let up, disoriented, one’s neighbors, school friends, coworkers have sprinted off. No amount of running allows you to catch up. Once in a while you amble by one of these runners, injured at the side of the road—divorced, estranged, unemployed, ill—and go a ways together before one leaves the other behind.

  Our pace slackens further. The sun causes the grass to glow green. The breeze shakes the leaves on the trees. We see no reason to rush. Art is forever, the day is short.

  The hands at our sides sometimes touch.

  “In high school,” Ariel continues our conversation with another non sequitur, “I played the lead in an adaptation of Jane Eyre. During the production I floated a hundred miles above the earth. I had one other big role, as Anne Frank’s mother. But the girl who played Anne forgot her lines and the first time the Nazis entered, some clown in the audience yelled, ‘She’s in the attic!’”

  Ariel sounds still mortified. “After that, the cast quit, and we didn’t mount another production. The rest of high school was just unbearable. I wish I kept going with the acting.”

  For some people, the four years of high school loom as large as a stay in a concentration camp. But because of my detached intellectual interests and eagerness to punch people in the face, no one bothered me much. No. My troubles, along with my education, came later.

  “These days I feel like I just graduated college,” Ariel says. “At loose ends. With nowhere to go. At a crossroads.”

  I offer, “In my business, we’re at a crossroads every ten minutes.”

  Ariel shoots me a puzzled look, as if those words should not have come out of my mouth.

  12

  Chance Encounter

  Right before the park’s Eighty-First Street exit, a fat man, huge, blocks the path.

  We both stop, confused, wondering if we are about to be mugged by a guy who would find it difficult to make a speedy getaway.

  “Wassup, homie?” A rubber band holds his brown hair in a topknot.

  Just as the adrenaline hits my brain, I recognize the guy. He’s a fence and a contract killer. Once, in the Dunkin’ Donuts on Avenue U, we had discussed the cinnamon cruller special.

  “Hey.” After this initial burst of greeting, the conversation flags. Without the reassuring presence of pastry, we find little common ground.

  “How’s the old neighborhood?” he asks. “Find any more headless torsos?” He laughs a deep unhealthy laugh that ends in a hacking fit. His hands pat a black tracksuit that billows around him and he pulls out a pack of cigarettes. He recovers himself after he inhales. Waving the cigarette, he growls, “This is the only thing that helps my cough.”

  The fat man is Frankie Hog, who works for Vinnie Five-Five as an all-around dangerous muffin who enjoys ripping off burglars fencing their goods. A long time ago we did a few jobs together—busting into a jewelry store, hijacking a tractor trailer loaded with stereo equipment. He’s a cool cat, missing the neurotransmitters necessary for satiation and fear. I never expected to find him strolling around Central Park.

  Then again he too requires the anonymity
of the city. He must lay as low as his spongy blubber allows. The park is the only spot large enough to contain his bulk.

  He wheezes before he chokes out, “Vlad got the contract on Vinnie Five-Five. Take my word for it. The average Russian is crazier than the craziest Italian. Hug the ground, bro. My problem is, I always get noticed.” And he pats his giant stomach as if it were the world itself. “Vlad’s boy, Dmitri, that bullet-headed fuck, told me he was going to make sausage out of my guts and sell it in Primorski’s delicatessen. Those animals are fucking cannibals.”

  A lot of punks like to think they have a contract stuck to their ass when all they have there is a piece of shitty toilet paper. But I can see that Frankie Hog might piss off the wrong people. He boosts shit off bad guys. He kills people. He’s sarcastic.

  I turn to see what Ariel thinks of my friend. She gives nothing away. Or just those semaphore spots of blush high on her cheeks.

  I advise Frankie Hog without caring one way or another, “So get out of the city. Hide in the Himalayas. Take the train to Long Island.”

  Frankie Hog looks this way and that. He takes his hands off the sides of his girth and waves at the trees around us. “This is as deep into the country as I get, paisano. Forget about it. Vinnie will need us. You think he won’t fight? Be available, pussyman. I hear you read books by foreigners, illegal immigrants. Jerkoff. You better be around when Vinnie calls.”

  Frankie Hog may have his good points. He may have talents other than moving stolen laptops and shooting people from behind. But I can’t imagine what they would be. So I like reading in translation. So what? While I don’t give a shit what he thinks, I must respond to the insinuation that questions my loyalty. “Of course I’m available for Vinnie, you fat fuck. And listen, if you’re trying to hide, you might want to wear something less conspicuous.”

  He looks down at his tent-like covering. “What are you talking about?”

  “Lose the elephant suit. Know what I mean?”

  His eyes narrow to murderous slits. Fuck him. What could he do, sit on me? “Sorry about Candi,” he purrs. “I know she used to give you a discount.” Frankie Hog flashes Ariel a rotten-toothed smile. “A small discount for a small . . . Know what I mean?”

  I don’t flinch, nor do I take my eyes off the Hog, a treacherous beast who for no good reason I have riled. I, too, got a big mouth, even if I don’t say much.

  Could his spotting me here, now, with Ariel be pure coincidence? Could Vinnie’s doubts about my dedication have caused him to tell Frankie to keep an eye on me? Is he the one talking shit behind my back to Vinnie? And I really don’t like the way he’s eyeing Ariel.

  Frankie Hog finally waddles toward the wild, northern reaches of the park, but before getting out of earshot he releases a stream of gas that cracks the air like machine gun fire. Ariel’s face first shows surprise and then she begins giggling. She tries to stop herself and puts her hand on my shoulder. “Sorry, sorry,” she’s doubled over. She catches her breath. “Who was that?”

  “A friend,” I say.

  “You keep funny company.” But I can see that this nonsense excites her.

  13

  Rembrandt’s Hat

  We reach Fifth Avenue.

  Here, the elegant buildings with their casement windows, their carved wooden doors, their gargoyle lintels, their marbled foyers, their perfectly proportioned doormen dazzle. Moguls, movie stars, heiresses own these apartments, the cheapest of which could feed a sub-Saharan country for a year. Can an Upper East Side ever exist in an equitable world? Hard to imagine.

  Still, one needn’t reach the topmost sphere of heaven to be satisfied. Like the Athenian philosophers in Dante’s cosmos, the higher levels of hell will do fine, better, because of the more interesting company. Dante himself, exiled from his beloved Florence, never escaped his living hell. But in the hell of his imagination he managed to find happiness by hanging with a proud and defiant crew consisting of those who told Christ to get stuffed. Chatterboxes all. Dante may have rented in heaven, but he would have bought in hell.

  The massive palace finally rises before us. Despite my ambivalence for its content, the Metropolitan Museum impresses at first sight. It is a temple fit for a god, more than one god. Each god has its own wing.

  These, however, are not living gods. The museum mummifies everything it collects, even those artifacts that remain most vital. No artistic movement is allowed to rest in peace.

  I keep this to myself, for I see that Ariel feels at home in this necropolis of cultures. She bounds up the steps like a young doe. Only when she reaches the top does she look back to see me carefully climbing as if the bone-white stairs are a sheer rock face.

  “Come on,” Ariel encourages. “Don’t be scared.” Virgil tells Dante something similar at the portico of Dis. The museum looms in front of me like a huge, hungry animal. I approach the doors as if they contain sharpened teeth. I enter with the dread of one being swallowed forever.

  Who the hell thinks this about a museum? No wonder I daren’t say much to Ariel.

  She waits for the guard to check her bag.

  He barely glances at it, while he glares at me as if I carry chaos in my pockets, the whirlwind in my gym bag. He digs through my clothes. It’s a good thing I left the gun behind.

  I trail Ariel to the coat check, where she checks her gauzy white sweater and I my bag. I keep my leather jacket; if I am going to spend a couple of hours looking at art, I want all the protection I can get. For the Goyas I’ll want a Kevlar vest.

  Ariel joins the line to get a little sticker that marks you off as a retard every time you leave the museum with it still attached to your shirt.

  While waiting behind the tourists who always pay the full suggested price, the dizziness and the nausea that rips into the pit of my stomach every time I come here attack anew.

  I stagger away without alerting Ariel to my distress.

  She finds me a couple of minutes later prostrate on a lobby bench. She pasted her sticker to a lovely spot above her left tit.

  Her smile fades when she intuits that something might be wrong. “Are you okay?”

  “Fine,” I gasp. I can tell that she’s happy. One second she’s drinking tea and wondering how to kill a few hours. The next she’s in the middle of a gang war. How lucky can you get?

  Anyway, the dizziness passes. Before I know it, we are standing in front of the Dutch seventeenth century, a period where everyone seemed to eat well. The peasants’ meager dinners look far more luscious than the cornucopia of processed rubbish that inundates our grocery freezers.

  I let Ariel lead me around. She points out that during the 1600s the Dutch had created neither religious nor secular paintings. Rather they infuse spiritual significance to the most mundane events and objects. “Right here. This is why I come.”

  We are stopped in front of the portrait of an old man with a spiteful, rutted face and a swollen, pocky nose. A hideous beret flattens his head. Wattles of flesh eddy off the neck and disappear into the ether of the background. The eyes glance sideways, as if catching the viewer in an embarrassing act, like staring unashamedly at an ugly, decrepit old man. Look in your own mirror, I can hear him cackle. Though not ancient, the guy has reached the second asexual stage of life, no more gendered than an infant despite the straggly hairs spidering off his chin. Fury, however, fills his eyes as they rail against the pointless, inexplicable suffering that went into the making of such an unpleasant punim. Rembrandt. A self-portrait.

  Ariel says softly, the voice of reason and pity, “Slowly dismantled by time and the destruction of illusions. It’s not pretty, but the honesty gives us courage.”

  I can barely tolerate life with the illusions. Why would such a man want to go on? Then I glance over at Ariel and the painting takes on a less disgusting cast. Pleasure exists too. The painter, for example, takes a great pride in his ugliness. He revels in decay. For example, he didn’t have to wear that hat, a pancake of putrid cloth that threatens to mel
t into his face. In no time or place could that hat have been cool. Its very repulsiveness suggests that broad, universal standards of beauty might exist.

  What I really want to tell Ariel, however, is that the power in the painting lay not in its honesty nor in its technical mastery. Its power lay in its contempt for the viewer. This man did terrible things. He looks like shit. But the portrait declares with a full force of vindictive rage, Fuck youze. I know people like him, free from the manacles of societal pieties and dangerous as chain saws. I’m glad I have my jacket on. Still, I shiver. Should art terrify? Embrace transcendence, it says, but watch your back.

  Ariel moves closer to my side. “You look like you’re about to faint.” She slips her arm into the crook of my elbow. “Maybe we should go up to the roof for some air.”

  It takes awhile to find the right elevator and along the way we pass through medieval Europe, the Roman Empire, and classical Greece—a journey so perfectly backward in time that I think Ariel plans it. A vase depicting Odysseus in Hades talking to the shade of Achilles arrests us. Ariel remembers what Achilles says to the man-skilled-in-all-ways-of-knowing. “Better to be a slave living on bread and water than king of all the exhausted dead.”

  Ariel is trying too hard to impress.

  The elevator opens onto the roof. As we emerge from the dimness of the past, the sun’s rays slice into us like blades. The air smacks us with a rush of pure oxygen. From this height, the glory and horror of New York spreads before us. Looking west, the trees of the park give us a chlorophyll high. Eastward, the jagged towers of glinting glass blind us. We also encounter brightly colored sculptures by someone who thinks blowing up everyday items to gargantuan proportions—paper clips, staples, forks, condoms—constitutes a breakthrough in human consciousness. A half dozen of these pointless monstrosities dot the rooftop.

  Like everyone else we gravitate toward the roof’s edges. The guardrail reaches my neck. With my eyes, I measure the distance I’d need to get a running jump and leap over it. That would be a pretty spectacular way to go. Flying over the Metropolitan Museum, making my own statement about the restorative power of art. But at that moment Ariel asks, “Feeling better?”