The suitcase was too heavy to carry all the way to Penn Station, so I went down into the subway and took the shuttle to Times Square and then the number one to Thirty-fourth Street. I didn’t want to take a taxi for two reasons. First, I had to conserve my funds and couldn’t afford any unnecessary expenses. Second, I didn’t want any record of my movements.
I emerged from the subway and climbed the stairs into Penn Station. I even went so far as to walk over to the Amtrak terminal and scan the board for the train to Cleveland. Up to this point, I had done nothing suspicious or unusual. Now was the precise moment of my transformation.
At this moment, I became a new man.
I was no longer who I had been before. Sure, I was still frightened. But there was a delicious sense of anticipation that sent a chill up my spine. I knew now how Columbus must have felt when he spied that lush island on the horizon.
I turned and walked out of the terminal. A light drizzle greeted me as I stepped out onto the sidewalk in front of Madison Square Garden. The symbolic baptism was probably a little too obvious. The Seventh Avenue bus was just slowing down at the bus stop. I climbed on and rode downtown to Twenty-third Street, a nondescript passenger among the strangers on the bus. No one knew me. No one would make any demands upon me.
The Hotel Lapham was old and seedy and rundown. It was as nondescript as me. The lobby was dark. The rugs in the lobby were well worn and the cushions on the couches had deep depressions in them where men had sat for decades reading newspapers that promised us that the human condition would improve while contradicting that assertion with endless stories of unspeakable atrocities.
I checked into the hotel and asked for the cheapest single and gave them a transitional name. On the guest card, I signed my name as N. Passant of Waycross, Georgia. That may have been too clever by half, but it afforded me a certain degree of satisfaction. The clerk didn’t ask for any identification and I didn’t give him any. I wasn’t Tony Mendes yet. I was on the way to becoming Tony Mendes. I said I would be staying one night and paid in cash.
I carried my bag up to the room by myself. The room was even seedier than the lobby but I was so enthralled that, to me, the room was more spectacular than the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles. It was the first room of my new identity. A way station on my road to becoming. I put the suitcase on the bed and went over to the window.
The view looked out over Twenty-third Street. The pavement was damp from the drizzle, which had become a thin mist. From the third floor, you could see into the stores across the street. There was a Chinese restaurant, a dry cleaners and a Korean grocery store. It was my guess that the dry cleaner was Korean also.
I felt like the emperor surveying his world. Mercator’s meridians, latitude and longitude, everything south of Twenty-third Street would be mine. It was a big world, big enough for a nondescript man to disappear into. It was a polyglot world, boiled down and condensed into a few square miles. Like a fish swimming in the sea, I would leave no tracks.
There was no need to unpack. I would simply perform the few sleight of hand tricks necessary to change the appearance of a certain pathetic human being from that of a corporate man in a suburban format, driven beyond despair, to that of an adventurer with a new and bright prospect. Then I would sleep for one untroubled night and be gone from the hotel before first light.
My first stop was the Duane Reade drugstore on the corner of Twenty-third and Lexington. I went in and bought a scissors, a MACH3 razor, a can of shaving cream and a package of hair dye in a shade of brown that was as close to the color of my hair without the gray as I could match it. I didn’t want to call attention to myself. I wanted to be as invisible as a husband of many years was to his wife.
Before I returned to the hotel, I picked up a copy of the Village Voice from a newly-delivered pile on the sidewalk in front of an electronics store. This newspaper would be my passport to a world I didn’t yet know.
As I walked through the hotel lobby to the elevator, I smiled and nodded to the desk clerk.
“Good morning, Mr. Passant,” he said to me in passing. He was young and blond and probably an actor waiting in vain for the role that would pluck him out of his well-deserved obscurity. I hoped he would go off duty soon, because I didn’t want him to see me again.
The lobby had a musty smell that reminded me of an old theater or library. The hotel budget probably didn’t have a large allocation for cleaning and maintenance from the way it looked. It would have been the perfect set for a gothic horror movie or the staging of a production of Phantom of the Opera.
Back in my room, I prepared myself for the transformation. This was going to be better than Madonna’s transmogrifying into a loving mother in a final perfect embodiment of the name . I went into the bathroom and stared at my beard in the mirror for a long time. I couldn’t remember my face without hair on it. All I could bring to mind was a photo of a boy of six or seven staring into the camera with a frightened look on his face. The boy was wearing a sailor suit, which he was probably too old to be wearing, and which was too small for him. In one hand he held a violin awkwardly while, in the other hand, he held a half-empty bottle of Coke with a straw. The violin bow was nowhere in sight.
That picture had stood on my parents’ night table for years. It was the only photograph on display in the house. Maybe it was a tribute to their only child, but it wasn’t the best picture they had of me. I never understood the significance of it.
For the last time, I took off my suit. But it was hard to break old habits. I folded it neatly and put it in the suitcase. You never knew when it might be needed again.
I took the scissors and began to cut off my beard. To me, it was as painful an operation as a circumcision. It was a slow process. I cut painstakingly, methodically, until there was just a patchwork of long stubble on my face. Then I washed my face with soap and water and applied the shaving cream. I studied the directions on the MACH3 package as if I were learning Sanskrit because, in truth, I didn’t know how to shave. In all my adult years, I had never actually shaved. This daily ritual of self-immolation as practiced by Western man had never entered my vocabulary. This scraping of the chin and cheeks. This kneeling before the God of clean-shaven probity.
Then I actually began to pull the razor over my skin. I didn’t know how hard or how soft to do it. I just knew that a razor was sharp so I passed it over my cheek very tentatively. Gradually, I began to get the feel for shaving. But it felt awkward, like a foreign process. Like learning how to walk for the first time as an adult. I wasn’t sure I was going to enjoy the procedure of shaving every day.
It took me more than a half hour to finish shaving. When I was finally done, I rinsed off my face and ran my fingertips over my smooth skin. It was hard to believe how soft my skin felt. It was too smooth, too soft. My beard had always been so rough. My skin now felt almost like a woman’s. It was very disconcerting. I couldn’t stop running my fingers over my face. My face felt so bizarre, almost as if it belonged to someone else.
I inspected my skin in the mirror. There were almost no wrinkles. Maybe the beard had sheltered the skin over the years and protected it from weathering by the elements. It was a deceptively unlined, untroubled visage, more suitable for a beatific cleric than a man on the run from his life. It almost seemed as if this face didn’t belong to me. It belonged to a man in a medieval painting, one of those large canvases of a saint in robes and sandals with a shepherd’s crook in his hand and a simple smirk on his face, blissfully unaware of the horribly painful fate that awaited him.
I stepped back and took a long look at the stranger in the mirror. He stared back at me. Then he winked at me and snapped off a sharp military salute.
CHAPTER XIV
The next step was a haircut. There was a cheap barbershop a block south of the hotel on Twenty-Second Street. The window of the barbershop was covered with posters promoting local theater productions that only the friends and families of the participants would ever go to see. A
sign in the window said a haircut would cost me eight dollars. That seemed reasonable compared to the thirty dollars I was accustomed to paying for a haircut.
I entered the shop with my new smooth face and sat in the first available chair. I was wearing jeans and a white T-shirt without any sort of legend or advertisement or message whatsoever. The world had enough messages already. I wasn’t going to assault it with yet another one. A dark, burly Italian barber got up sluggishly from the chair he was sitting in and nodded to me. I knew he was Italian because the name Antonio was embroidered on his tunic in bright red letters.
“You wanna haircut?” he said.
“Sure. An eight buck haircut.”
“You got it,” he said. He raised his hand and ran his fingers softly through my hair as if he wanted to feel the texture. My old barber, or should I call him hairstylist, never did this. It was like a sculptor feeling the texture of a block of marble before he started working on it.
“Nice hair you got,” he said.
“I never really thought about it.”
“I’m a barber. I know hair.”
“I’m sure you do.” What the hell could I say?
He came around to the front of the chair and looked me directly in the eye. “You wanna trim?”
“No, I want you to cut it as short as possible. A crew cut, a buzz cut, whatever you call it.”
He took a step back. “Wassamatter you? You crazy? You gotta beautiful hair. You wanna cut it short?”
“Sure,” I said. “I want you to cut it short. I mean, I don’t want it so short that my skull shines through, but just short enough that it doesn’t attract any attention…” I stopped talking. This was foolish babble. I had to learn to watch what I was saying and measure out my words carefully, spoonful by spoonful. My words could not give me away.
“You gotta beautiful hair,” he repeated. “It reminds me of my papa’s hair. Why you wanna cut it short?”
He didn’t really care if my hair was long or short, shoulder-length or bald. He was just making conversation, like a bartender in an empty bar at two in the morning. I decided to play his game and take a dry run at becoming familiar with the details of my new identity.
“I’m tired of long hair. It’s too much trouble. I want to make things easier.”
He nodded. “OK, you. I cut it nice and short, if that’sa what you want.” He spun the chair around slowly, inspecting my head as he contemplated how to shear this sheep. When the chair had made a complete three-sixty, he stopped it and stood facing me. “You know, a trim is eight bucks, but a real haircut is twelve. That’sa the rules.”
I was about to say, show me the rules, but I stopped myself. I shrugged and said, “OK, then. A real haircut for twelve dollars.”
He smiled for the first time and revealed a missing canine. He must have left it embedded in the neck of another unsuspecting customer. His breath was sour and stale. It was going to be a distinct pleasure to be finished and out of his barber chair.
In his defense, he took a lot of care cutting my hair. Perhaps it reminded him of the times he cut his father’s hair. He worked slowly, stepping back often to inspect his handiwork and making minute corrections.
“Where are you from?” I asked as he snipped the back of my neck meticulously with his scissors.
“Calabria,” he said. “You know where that is?”
I couldn’t nod, so I said, “I have a vague idea. Southern Italy, right?”
He smiled again, stopped cutting and put his hand with the comb on my shoulder. “That’sa right. You very good.” He scrutinized me. “You from Italia?”
“No. I’m from Troy. Upstate New York. You know where that is?” I held my breath.
He shook his head. “Never heard of it. Troy.” He shook his head again.
I let out my breath. I wasn’t sure, but I believed I’d passed my first test.
“You born in Troy?” he asked.
I hadn’t considered that question. “Yes,” I said. I supposed I might as well be born in Troy.
He persisted. “What about you Mama and Papa? Where they born?”
“Latin America,” I said, realizing at once that wasn’t a good answer. No one said Latin America in answer to a question like that. Which country? Be more precise. I stumbled over my words. “Uh…uh. Chile, that is.” It was the first country that came to mind.
I couldn’t see his reaction because he was behind me. He raised his gaze and looked at me in the mirror. “I dunno that,” he said. “Dunno that country. Is it beautiful country?”
“My parents said it was a beautiful country, but I don’t know personally because I’ve never been there.” This was working out very well. All I needed was a little practice on the details and I’d be able to make it believable. Most people asked the same dumb questions anyway. How little imagination there was abroad in the land.
“Where you live?” he asked.
I hesitated. “Well, right now I don’t have a home. I’m looking for an apartment.”
He stopped cutting my hair and studied me as if he was evaluating me for a place in his Knights of Columbus glee club. “My brother, he has an apartment,” he said finally. “Eighth Street. You wanna see it?”
“That’s very kind of you. Why don’t you give me his address and phone number? I’ll give him a call.” But I knew I never would because I didn’t want any connection that could possibly be traced. It had to be a clean break each step of the way. Like those spy cells that operated independently of each other, with no links to tie them together. Like the islands of Langerhans.
He finished the haircut and stepped back to admire his work. Then he picked up a hand mirror and displayed it so I could see the back of my head. That was a real shock. I hadn’t seen the back of my neck in years. The skin on the back of my neck was as white as the underside of a flounder. But the haircut was good. It was just the way I wanted it. It was short enough to make me look like a new entrant at a prep school, but not so short as to make me look like a raw recruit at Parris Island.
“Outstanding job,” I said.
He beamed at the compliment. I gave him twelve bucks and not a penny more. His tip was included in the four dollar rip-off surcharge for unsuspecting fools who wander innocently into cheap barber shops.
“You come back again, you,” he ordered.
I gave him a parting smile without showing my teeth. “Certainly,” I said. “In this lifetime or the next, for sure.”
CHAPTER XV
I returned to my room and reviewed the directions on the box of hair dye until I could recite them from memory. It would have been disastrous to make a mistake and have my hair come out looking like one of those teenage freaks who want to give their parents heartburn. The instructions said you had to test for allergic reactions forty-eight hours before coloring your hair, but forty-eight hours was a luxury I didn’t have. I wasn’t a risk-taker by nature, and I invariably followed directions and always read the fine print, but this time I plunged ahead recklessly. My destiny would rest in the hands of the chemists at the consumer products company and my antibodies fighting the antigens.
It was a messy procedure. The hotel towels looked like they had been used to wipe up the aftermath of a bloody multiple murder by an inept butcher. And it stank like the devil’s fundament on the day after he ate a large bowl of beans.
I had to wait twenty-five minutes for the color to develop. While I waited, I picked up The Village Voice and scanned the classified ads for apartments. It was apparent I hadn’t done my homework on this subject. I knew rental prices were high, but the rents listed were more expensive than I expected. The cheapest studios were more than a thousand a month, much more than I wanted to pay. The best strategy, it seemed to me, would be to locate the neighborhood with the lowest rents and take a trip there and wander about in search of a suitable hovel. I wasn’t expecting much. Just a small, clean place where you could live a quiet existence without all the encroachments of the wired and wireless world
. There would be no telephone, cellular or otherwise, no television, no Internet. There would be lots of books and a small stereo to play Mozart, Bach and Beethoven at a moderate level of volume. And there would be blank notebooks, so I could write poetry when I felt like it. The vision was enough to bring me to the frontier of a state of euphoria.
My new philosophy was simple. I would retire from life, or at least the life as I had known it. Jorge Luis Borges said he lived a life of the mind. That’s what I would do. I would retire from the life of the American twenty-first century and travel to the untied states of Borgesylvania where the landscape consisted of synapses and neurons rather than mountains and trees.
Twenty-five minutes had passed. My hair was done. I rinsed it out thoroughly and dried it with a towel. It dried much faster than it ever had before because it was so short. The directions said to put in the conditioner rinse, but I debated whether or not to do it. It seemed very feminine. Finally, I decided it wasn’t necessary because my hair was short enough. I parted and combed my hair neatly and took a step back to view my new appearance.
It was a pleasant surprise. While it was true my hair had an unwelcome reddish hue, it wasn’t as bad as I had feared. My ancestors may have had a hidden dalliance with an Irish woman in some mossy ravine and who would have known, after all? What stared back at me from the mirror was the image of a younger man who reminded me of a person I used to know when the world seemed a more promising place. His face was clear and untroubled. He looked like a character from the Eisenhower years before all the craziness overtook our society and turned day into night and eternal values into obsolete values. He had a serious mien of the kind you see in those old photos of the veterans of World War Two who seemed, at least, to have a purpose. He was my new man.
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