*
Twenty minutes later, we are atop the Empire State Building. Tall, impassable nets have been installed to prevent suicides from doing their job. The wind is very strong, but there are still visitors. Boats are sailing on the Hudson River. The city, from this height, looks like a poster of a city. Suddenly, out of the dark, a black pigeon flutters and lands on the net next to me. I look into its eyes. I can’t be sure, but I think the pigeon looks me in the eye as well. A cell phone rings. Danny takes off his gloves and digs out his cell from the depths of his parka. He turns aside and talks, shouting over the wind. I understand that it is getting late. I realize that we are late already. Danny sneaks a peek at me, then turns his back, says something else into the phone, and hangs up. I help him put the bag over his shoulder and we leave. We needed to hurry. We would go to this place, we’d leave the bag, it would be over in a minute, and everything would be OK. I would stay in New York until I pulled myself together.
The numbers in the elevator melt down to one and the doors glide open. We are in the spacious lobby. We get out on Fifth Avenue.
People, people, people, people, masks, masks, masks, masks, costumes, costumes, costumes, Halloween, Halloween, Halloween . . . Blue, green, red, yellow balloons float over Fifth Avenue. In the distance, amidst skyscrapers, a piece of building with the letters 666 on it pierces the light-polluted sky above Manhattan. In front of Rockefeller center, a fat vendor woman with green glasses is selling something. She has a live iguana on her head, actually there are two live iguanas balanced on her head, fucking. A toy store with horribly bright colors and countless Mickey Mouses, Bambies, Donald Ducks, Simbas, Tarzans, Sleeping Beauties, dwarfs, King Kongs, Pocahontases, penguins . . . GOTHAM.
The end is near, my friends, the end is near.
Danny is holding my hand and we are threading our way through crowds of people in masks, masks, masks on this last Halloween night, which doesn’t matter to me in the slightest, which doesn’t matter to me at all. Broadway—Cats, Rent, Chicago, Mamma Mia, Les Miserables, Mary Poppins—musicals, musicals, musicals . . .
The wail of ambulances; the rising underground steam; a Buddhist masseuse; a horrifying mime, painted in white; a guitarist wearing a bandana; a clown; a man-statue; a saxophone player; the lights of Manhattan in and out of focus.
We turn onto a side street. I stumble over the cardboard boxes of a homeless man, he curses, lights a flashlight, stares at me viciously, and spits at me. I understand, I’d spit if I were him, too.
We go down a few steps. We ring a doorbell. A six-foot-something black man, dressed as a Russian butler in a Gogol play, opens the door. We go down a narrow red corridor which turns into a narrower, dark-red corridor. We climb a few steps and enter something like a bar with normal-looking people who are drinking. No one is wearing costumes, of course. Costumes are for the idiots outside. This here is a hideout from the street masquerade.
We sit down. The black butler turns to leave, but I pull him by the sleeve. I want to drink. The man gives me a look. Then, with a hand like pliers, he frees his jacket from my grip and pushes me back into my seat. Through a smile, he hisses that someone will take our order while he is relieving us of our baggage. I hold tight to the bag. I don’t let it go. I’ve dragged it across the whole fucking continent; I can’t just give it to some black Russian butler, I just can’t. Not without a fight. The black man grins at my friend. Danny shakes his head apologetically and whispers in my ear not to worry. This man will take the stash to the Boss. I clutch the bag even more tightly. I press my cheek to it—we have a past together, you big old bag. We have a history, you and I.
Danny rests his arm on my shoulder—I don’t have to make a fool of myself. I sniffle, force a smile, and leave the bag in the black hands of the butler.
A waitress comes—a beautiful girl with short, platinum blond hair, bright red lips, perky breasts, and slender thighs—what would we like while we wait?
Danny wants a cappuccino.
I want a martini. A dirty martini with three olives. I actually want two dirty martinis.
The girl smiles and leaves. I want to embrace her and sleep with her. I want to kiss her, kiss her, and caress her, and fill her up with myself. I want to sink and dissolve in this beautiful girl with her short platinum hair, expressive red lips, perky breasts, and slender thighs. This girl who will kiss me, will kiss me, will kiss me with tobacco kisses and will fall asleep on my chest, listening to my mad, barbarian heart.
I look around and lean back. In the booth behind me, a gentleman in a short, striped blazer with short hennaed hair and a small earring leans across the table toward a young girl, smiles, lifts a bottle of champagne from an ice bucket, tops off her flute, and then refills his own. I hear him start in, “Love is . . .” and jerk away as if stung. I feel sick to my stomach and cover my ears so I don’t hear what follows. Any sentence that begins with “Love is” does not deserve to be heard out.
The two martinis arrive. I finish the first while the girl is transporting the second from the tray to the table. I drink the second one before the cappuccino reaches Danny. I smile broadly and charmingly. I can smile very charmingly when I want to. The girl answers with a smile. I love smiling strangers and waitresses. I love stranger-waitresses, pretty stranger-waitresses. Love is a stranger-waitress. Two more martinis have been ordered and things are already looking up. Danny tries to tell me something. I stop him with a finger. No one can tell me things now. I, I, I want to tell things to Danny. To people, to mankind. I hear the soundtrack of an un-started film in my head. It’s beautiful in my head. The stranger-waitress with the perky breasts and slender thighs is beautiful, too. I drink two more martinis before going to the bathroom.
The tiles are white and beautiful. I like white tiles, no matter what they say. I love white porcelain tiles—they’ve suffered so much abuse from mankind. White porcelain should be placed on a pedestal, a pedestal made of gold. Gold? Forget gold, my dear mankind. What has gold endured?! What has gold endured besides a few eccentricities of kings, tsars, and khans—a tray for the head of John the Baptist, the skull of Nikephoros Logothetes, and so on. But now porcelain . . . porcelain takes the everyday abuse of millions—pissing, shitting, puking, ejaculating . . . I need to pee so badly, yet I can’t start. I feel stiff, as if someone has kicked me in the ass. My neck is limp. I look up at the ceiling trying to think about something other than porcelain, I’m sick of it already. What can I think about besides Stella?
All of a sudden in the stainless steel flush handle in front of me, two mutants appear in black blazers, black shades, and heads that distort depending which direction I move. I start shaking it even before I manage to pee. I watch them exchange glances.
I zip up my pants, turn around, pass between them, heading out—and almost make it.
“Tsk, tsk, tsk, who didn’t wash their hands?” I hear one of them say, while reaching for the door handle.
“I didn’t touch anything dirty.”
“We all have to wash our hands after using the bathroom.”
“Oh, OK. I gotta write that down.”
“Come back here and wash your hands!”
I look around demonstratively. Where’s the hidden camera, you faggots? I decide to fight to the death—the key word here is death—with two dumbfucks in shades who think they can give me private lessons in hygiene.
“Before you do anything stupid, you better wash up, because you’ll have to shake hands with the Boss and he’s kind of squeamish.”
*
The mutants and I pass through the bar. Danny gestures that he’ll wait for me here. They usher me through a corridor toward an elevator located in a cold storage space. We get into the elevator. One of them pushes the top button and we rise up high into the New York night. The doors slide open and we find ourselves in a loft with at least a 260 degree view of Manhattan, literally a multimillion-dollar view. A view of everything that deserves to be viewed. The loft is minimalistically furnished and wa
rmly lit. The fireplace is burning. Among the many pieces of art, I see some which I would love to own if I could afford them. Then the mutants step back. I am alone and so vulnerable now. I have the feeling that the building is swaying and am not sure if it’s from the strong winds outside or the martinis in my head.
“It’s the wind.” I hear a low, soft voice and then I see where it’s coming from. The Boss is sitting in a small, dark-brown leather love-seat with his back to me. He is looking outside. I see his reflection in the window—a normal, middle-aged man with gray hair, a glass in his hand. In front of him, on the table, is a crystal, unlabeled bottle. A decanter, rather, full of—guessing by the color—scotch, single malt. “Single malt?” I nod.
The Boss smiles and suddenly his reflection turns its back in me. He pours some scotch into the empty glass.
“Do you want ice?”
“No, thank you.”
“Macallan, special order, aged twenty-four years in cherry barrels. Who in their right mind would dilute it with ice made of tap water filtered in New Jersey?” The Boss raises his glass in a toast. I take a sip. If I have to compare the liquid to something, it is ambrosia. Not that I have ever had ambrosia, I just think it should taste like this.
“You’ll be richer in a few minutes.” he says.
“It’s about time,” I say.
“My associates are testing the quality of the stuff at the moment.” I don’t know what to say, that’s why I drink whatever is in my glass at once. The Boss pours me some more. I drink it up, too, and blurt out: “Happy Halloween!”
The Boss smiles slightly and stares out into the darkness. The door opens and, who knows why, a wheelchair rolls in with a bandaged soldier, or perhaps someone dressed up as the Invisible Man.
“Nice costume!” I exclaim. “Very impressive.” The person in the wheelchair looks at me for a long moment without moving. “Very authentic, very. Bravo.” The Invisible Man doesn’t shift his eyes from me, but doesn’t say a word, either. Then he looks at Victor Boss and nods. I shrug and turn toward the Hudson River, where at least I see ships sailing.
“I heard about your misfortune,” Boss says. I’m quiet. I don’t know which misfortune exactly he’s talking about. “I want to tell you so many things, but I’m not sure whether they’d be enough.” Most likely not, I think to myself. The Boss lifts his glass, whirls it gently, squints with one eye, and looks through the liquid as if aiming at something out there in the dark. “Once upon a time I also had a girl like yours. We were young, innocent, the world was different, I loved her, she kissed me. We were happy. I was so . . . sure about everything then. I had a job like everybody else, I paid my taxes and we made ends meet somehow. We went to the movies, ate apples, woke up in each other’s arms, laughed under the sheets—and for a very long time it seemed like this was enough for both of us. The words ‘success’ and ‘failure’ were like . . . words from a foreign dictionary—I didn’t care about them. And so, I crawled through life doing twenty-five miles per hour. I watched the speed limits, I was careful crossing the street, I picked up the mail, I came home with groceries. And without realizing how and why, I started getting smaller. I was getting small, smaller, very small, very, very small. Big love makes men small.” The Boss gets up, glass in hand, and goes over to the window. Only now do I notice that it’s quiet in the apartment, very quiet. “Then one day something happened. The world turned upside down. I don’t know why, but it happened.” The Boss snaps his fingers. “Like that. One day . . . one November day, like today, I came home and found the house empty. They saw my girl at the subway station—we lived in Brooklyn then—with a winter coat and a suitcase. She left me for someone, I later learned, who knew both the taste of success,” the Boss takes a sip from his glass, “and the smell of failure.” He rubs his eyes with his thumb and index finger. “I cried then. I cried, and cried, and cried, and cried a lot. I lost weight from crying. My clothes hung from my body, I drilled holes in my belt, I was weak. I had no strength to climb the steps to my apartment, I had turned to nothing. She had not simply gone; she had been . . . amputated from me.” He finishes what is left in his glass. “And that is how I learned what failure is, Zack.” After a short pause in which the loft seems to sway even more in the wind, the Boss continues. “Time went by. A long time went by. One evening, it finally dawned on me that she would never come back, so I started throwing away the things that reminded me of her—clothes, pictures, books, records, everything. And I came across a vase that she had bought at a flea market. She kept flowers in it. A pretty, brown vase, made of clay.” With a gesture, he traces the silhouette of a vase resembling a female figure. “I held that vase in my hands and didn’t have the heart to throw it away. I started caressing it, kissing it, whispering to it, and I started crying again. What should I do with it now? And then . . .” The Boss turns his back to me and steps closer to the window, his words steaming up the window glass. “I filled the vase with warm water. I pulled my cock out, stuck it into the narrow throat of the vase and started . . .” The Boss swallows hard, “to . . . make love to it. I fucked that vase, fucked its warm throat and cried. Fucked it and cried, fucked it until I came. I liked it. I felt like a pervert, of course, but I liked it. I did it again the next day, and then the next, and the day after, and after that. I fucked that vase until one day it broke. I can say that I broke that vase . . . from loving it.” He turns toward me again. “But I didn’t need it any more. I knew I could replace it with a new one. Clay and warm liquid—that’s all.” The Boss gazes at his shoes for a moment before continuing. “And something changed in me then. My eyesight seemed to get sharper, I started hearing better, the air around me filled with scents. I stopped being afraid of the dark, the cold, diseases, emotions, enemies, and failures. I was not afraid of anything. My strength started coming back, little by little.” The Boss closes his eyes for a moment and part of him seems to leave the room. “And one day I saw myself as I wanted to be. And I turned into what I am now. And you know what? It was far easier than I expected.” The Boss goes to a shelf, opens a small glass humidor, and picks out a medium-sized cigar. “But I learned something in those years. When we fail, we—men—always find a way to cope with it. We manage. Nature has seen to this. It has programmed us to survive our biggest failures. We have been nurtured with the milk of failure, it’s in our DNA.” He gestures toward the humidor. “Here, pick one. But, think now, Zack, think about how we men cope with success. How we manage the idea of success.” I accept the invitation and choose a seven-and-a-half-inch-long Cohiba. He cuts it, hands it back to me and pulls out a lighter. “Success,” the Boss massages the cigar between his fingers before lighting it, “comes, they say, with lots of hard work, perseverance, education, experience, skills . . . blah-blah-blah-blah-blah-blah-blah. That’s what they say. So you tell yourself—oh, success-shmucksess. Fuck that.” The end of his cigar comes to life with the flame. “Why bother? Fuck it. You might succeed and you might not, and most likely you won’t. Do you know anyone who’s succeeded in anything meaningful? Anything you find remotely meaningful?” I shrug. I light up, draw in the smoke. My mouth goes numb with the unexpectedly strong taste. It’s my first time smoking a cigar. “That’s what I thought.” The Boss keeps the flame burning at the tip of his lighter. “And you tell yourself, I’d better quit fantasizing. I’d better get busy training for the inevitable fiasco.” The flame disappears. “No one prepares us to expect success or tells us how to welcome it, how to deal with it. So if it actually comes, often, despite ourselves, it catches us off-guard. We don’t know what it is. We have been primed to deal with failure. That’s why we do the same things we do if we fail—we drink as if there’s no tomorrow, we eat until our stomachs burst, we smoke cigars, fuck like animals, we go nuts!” The Boss refills his glass with scotch, mine, too. “The truth is,” he takes a sip and glances down, toward the busy streets of the city, “we choose our own failures.” I take another drag. This time, part of the smoke finds its way to my l
ungs. “Because we know, deep down we always know that we can cope with them.” I start coughing. The Boss watches me motionlessly, patiently waiting for my cough attack to pass, then draws away from the window, coming closer to me. He waves away the smoke from his cigar and stares into my pupils. I bet he can’t see anything there. I don’t know where his monologue is going, but it starts wearing me down. “The grass you brought in today is moldy.” I stop coughing, but my ears are ringing like after a slap in the face. “It hasn’t been stored properly, it got wet, it’s got mold everywhere, maybe from the lemon peels, I have no clue whose idea that was. It’s a mess.” From the coughing, my eyes start filling with tears and everything begins spinning. “The cannabis is fucked. It’s good for pretty much nothing.” I quickly wipe the moisture from under my eyelids with a sleeve. Suddenly my attention is distracted by a dozen female buttocks in different shapes and sizes, tastefully lit with small spot lights. They are made of bronze and arranged on a special shelf by the dark bookcase.
“Very nice.” My voice rasps. The Boss lifts an eyebrow.
“Excuse me!?”
I point at the installation of beautiful female asses. “Kalepa ta kala.”
“Pardon?”
“Simple is beautiful. An ancient Greek saying. Or . . . beautiful is simple. I don’t remember how it goes.”
“Oh, that?” the Boss grins. “Those are casts of some of the women whom . . .” he shrugs, “whom I’ve had the privilege of knowing . . . up close.”
“I see.” Now, I feel embarrassed to keep looking in that direction, which takes me back to the marijuana problem, to the problem with Danny’s money, to the problem with Stella, the problem with the burned-down house, with the forever-gone past, the problem with me, the problem with all these problems. A door opens, somebody brings the bag.
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