He crunched some toast. He was really pleased with this. "I knew you'd like it," he said.
That afternoon, an old guy came into the café, sat down at a table by the window and ordered coffee. I brought it to him, along with a little pitcher of milk. I went back to reading the paper at the table nearest the counter. He was the only person in the place. The café did almost no business, and as a job, it was pretty much a joke, but I did get to eat a meal—anything I wanted on the menu. Olivia, the Greek woman who cooked, seemed to enjoy making me food. It gave her something to do.
After a while, I went over to check on him.
"Milk," he said, tapping the creamer, which I saw was empty. I took it away and got Olivia to refill it, then brought it back to him. I went back to my paper. I'd been going through the Help Wanted ads. There wasn't anything I felt qualified to do. I wondered what you had to have studied in school to get appointed to the Money Desk.
I went to check on him again. "More coffee?" I asked.
"More milk."
The creamer was empty. His coffee cup was just about empty too, other than a puddle of light brown at the bottom—if he filled it again he was going to be drinking straight milk. Which, it suddenly occurred to me, was the point. The guy was drinking as much milk as he could for the price of a cup of coffee. Still, I had Olivia give me another refill.
Another half hour went by. It was raining out, although lightly. No one else had come in. Our selection of Italian pastries—delivered on Tuesdays and not thrown away until the following Monday—glowed preternaturally in their glass case by the register. I went to bring him the check.
He studied it briefly, then tossed it to the table. "Sorry," he said. The bone structure of his face was evident under his skin, and I thought he probably had been a pretty good-looking man in his day. He had straight gray hair, a full head of it, even at his age, which had to be past seventy. His blue-green eyes looked murky, and I wondered if he saw very well out of them.
"You don't have seventy-nine cents?"
He shook his head.
On the one hand, I felt bad for him. This was a pretty pathetic way to fill up your stomach. But I represented the café right now, and the café was being wronged. "You can't do stuff like this," I said. "You can't just go into a place and order food that you don't have money to pay for."
"Sure, I can," he said. "I just did."
"Well, I mean, you can. But you're not supposed to."
"Why not?"
"Come on. You know why not. The social contract. The rules. The world doesn't work that way. Things cost money."
"Let me ask you something. That coffee I drank—it was already made, right? It was sitting in a pot, just cooking away on a burner." He gestured toward where our two Pyrex containers of coffee sat waiting. "After a while, it gets bitter and nasty tasting. What are you going to do with it? You're going to throw it out. That being the case, and business being what it is"—he gestured around at the empty room—"you can afford to give me a cup of coffee. In fact, maybe it's your duty to do it. If you've got something you don't want, and you throw it away rather than give it so someone who does want it, that's not just wrong, it's spiteful." He dug briefly in his nostril with his pinky. "You're one of them from the third floor."
For a moment, I considered pretending I had no idea what he meant, but I could see that this wouldn't work—he had me fixed in his gaze now, and I felt even worse about lecturing him on the coffee. "Sorry about all the noise," I said.
"I heard worse," he said. "I fought in Sicily. Try the sound of an eight-inch howitzer sometime."
The conversation seemed to have reached an impasse. "You want a cannoli?" I asked.
"For free? Or for money. Because I just told you, I don't have any."
"For free. Or on me, anyhow. For the trouble about the apartment."
"Those things are nearly a week old. I'm down around here a lot. I see how often the delivery guy comes. No thanks."
"All right," I said. "I'm going to let you slide on the seventy-nine cents. But you have to understand that not everyone else is going to be this easy to deal with."
"It makes you feel good to say that, doesn't it? You'll let me slide."
"I don't feel one way or the other."
"Then forget about that slide part. Make it that you gave me a cup of coffee. That's a nice thing. You can feel good about it, I can feel good about it. We're neighbors, after all."
"Fine," I said, taking his cup away. "I hope you enjoyed your coffee."
"Not much," he said. "But thanks for asking."
The beach house was in Quogue. We got there around 4:00 P.M. and set up in the living room. People in robes and swimsuits passed through, some nodding at us, though it was clear they thought we were about as interesting as plumbers called in to fix the toilets. At five, the drinking started in earnest, and by six there were attractive, tanned Manhattanites everywhere, sipping wine, drinking bottles of Heineken, slipping off to the bathroom to do lines. We partied with them, or tried to. Partied around them might better describe it, as they seemed not to notice us at all.
I was determined to break through to the other, beautiful side. "What about those air traffic controllers?" I said to a surprised-looking woman with dark hair and bright red lipstick.
"I think they're idiots," she said. She sized me up, then apparently decided not to eat me. "They're overpaid as it is. The president is doing exactly the right thing."
"Not exactly standing with the working man, huh?"
"Are you a working man?"
"No," I admitted. "But that's not for lack of trying."
"Excuse me," she said, "but are you supposed to be here? I mean, do you know someone from the house?"
"I know you," I said.
"That's probably not sufficient. This is a private house."
"I'm with the band."
She brightened. "The band! I heard there was going to be a band. Well, then, that's all right. What do you play?"
"Do you like Foghat?"
"I don't know," she said. "I might."
"Don't you think Reagan is a little, I don't know, creepy?" I asked. "Like someone who'd try to sell you stuff on late night TV?"
"You might not think it to look around, but about half of us here at the house are Republicans."
"But you're cool with drugs."
"Way cool," she said. "What have you got?"
We played for them, and they danced. They danced and waved their hands in the air and drank and smoked, and the air filled with the scent of sweat and ocean, and there was sand all over the wooden floors. We were one strange band. Greeny had brought along a gold-toothed Jamaican guy named Dave King to our last couple of rehearsals, and we now had "Jammin'" and "No Woman No Cry" and "Many Rivers to Cross" in our repertoire, which also comprised a couple of rockabilly numbers, a version of Steely Dan's "Bodhisattva," and—at Ed's insistence—a rendition of Coltrane's "Impressions." Dave King knew almost none of the lyrics to his reggae songs, but it didn't matter because he wore a colorful floppy hat, had a nice voice and great accent, and was happy to rap away for as long as you'd let him about "Jah" and "one love," and whatever. He was a hit ("Where did you find him?" my surprised-looking Republican asked me during one of the breaks), even though I suspected a lot of the time even he didn't know what he was saying. He passed around a big splif during "Jammin'." We stopped at 1:00 A.M., but the yuppies took up a collection and presented us with another hundred bucks and we played an extra hour, finishing up with "Slow Ride," for what had to have been the fourth time. I felt unstable, unreal. "Slow ride!" the bankers and brokers shouted along with us, positioned in front of us like figures in a bacchanal. "Take it easy!"
On the same day that our front door finally reappeared—now painted a glossy black—I got a job proofreading tombstone ads for a publisher on Wall Street. Café D'Oro had closed—I showed up for work one day and the place was locked up tight. Ed had found a gig accompanying a piano player at Top of the Six
es, where the full windows next to the urinals in the men's room allowed a dizzying view down onto the city streets. He'd be moving shortly; I'd already put up signs down at Key Food to try and find another roommate. The rich, we agreed, really are different from the rest of us—they even peed differently. Tombstones are those big notices in the financial pages that announce, for instance, new issues of bonds, followed by literally hundreds of names of various corporate underwriters. My job was to sit alone in a small office with these things spread out in front of me, going back and forth between the originals and the ones that would be appearing in the paper, looking for mistakes, of which there were almost never any. Once I found "Salomon" spelled "Solomon." After a couple weeks of squinting and giving myself headaches, I began to realize that I didn't need to try so hard. I started skimming over the stuff without really looking at all. I began to hope I was missing stuff; getting fired would be just fine with me.
On the subway home one evening, my train shuddered to a halt short of a station and the lights went out. We sat in darkness for a while, all of us strangers continuing to pretend that we had nothing to do with one another, that we weren't suddenly part of something larger than ourselves. Invisible newspapers shifted and rustled, throats were cleared. Then the engineer's distorted voice came over the intercom: "Motorman, we have a man under."
We'd hit someone. I felt my pulse race. Somewhere out there, perhaps only yards away, separated from our little car of commuters by a thin layer of steel and glass, was tragedy. Life and death. We waited. I smelled cologne, a vague hint of mothballs, a growing scent of sweat. Man under. We continued to wait. Lights flashed outside the windows, there were mysterious sounds, shouts, clanks. We weren't responsible, and yet we couldn't go—this was our tragedy, like it or not. Minutes passed and still no one spoke. Then, with no further comment from the conductor, the lights flickered back on, there was a whirring sound of engines coming to life. The car jolted like it had been kicked from behind, sighed once, and proceeded forward.
Another Coyote Story
By about the fourth somersault I knew I had no chance of surviving. A bouncing, limp puppet, I'd lost skis, poles, hat, gloves, glasses. Every now and then, in the tiny intervals when the ten guys in boots who were kicking me in the ribs stopped to catch their breath, I thought I saw the sky. My mind slowed way down the way it used to on rainy afternoons in math class back in high school—voices of smokers and lovers floating up from the parking lot, the wind shaking the leaves of the big oak just outside the window, the inscrutable geometry of my future a momentary stop against time—and I weighed various endings. If I didn't hit a tree, it would be a rock. That, the exposed nut of my head meeting an unforgiving bit of landscape, would be sudden, and probably the thing to hope for. I also imagined sailing over a cliff, a more exhilarating, spectacular end (surely, people were watching this), but one that might allow too much time for thought. I blew snow from my mouth—it kept accumulating—and tried to tell if my neck was broken yet (I didn't think so). I heard a loud "huh, huh" sound, wondered what it was, then realized that I was the one making it and that I was hyperventilating, this perhaps in response to having the wind knocked out of me repeatedly at regular half-second intervals. Then, with no particular sense of failure or accomplishment—really, with no sense of event at all—it was over. How did it feel? The nearest I can come is leaving the house and suddenly remembering you left your keys. Like that.
You expect crepe, relatives, a fiery transition from material form, possibly some sort of tunnel of blue light. I was taken out to steak night at The Lion and Turtle.
The undergraduate to my right was angry. Sherman Alexie had apparently bailed at the last minute, and I was his sub. "I read all his books," she said, tucking her brown hair back behind her ears. "I was so stoked to meet him."
There were six of us around the table, working on our waters and a big basket of bread. I didn't want to say anything, because I was pretty sure I'd bitten my tongue through in about nine places, and if I opened my mouth, I was likely to disgorge a fair gob-full of blood. Instead, I reached into the basket and removed a roll.
"What do you plan to read tonight?" asked a man about my own age, with a preposterously black goatee, black turtleneck, black jacket, and black plastic-rimmed glasses. It was immediately clear to me that if he hadn't yet had an affair with the student who had been so stoked, they were on the verge of it. They had a way of ignoring each other so thoroughly you just knew they were involved.
Now, in my life, I should say, I was sort of a writer. I wrote catalog copy, mostly, for universities and small colleges. "Nestled in the heart of scenic central Pennsylvania, St. Lawrence College of Scranton provides an exceptional value in undergraduate education." "Baltimore Union, an exciting urban university—let's grow together!" And sure, like every third person you meet, I'd started my share of novels, never getting much more than fifteen pages into them before realizing that I was out of ideas, that my plot consisted more or less of what had happened to me that day, and that in lieu of any real plan, I just kept making up new characters—an outward, rather than forward motion. So perhaps all of that had been some kind of sin—vanity?—and this was my punishment. In any event, I was stuck. These people wanted me to perform.
I sipped my water, stalling for time. Something about the faces of the people around me suggested I might be in the middle west, or close anyway—perhaps Ohio. The salads that arrived were entirely iceberg.
"Something from the new book?" suggested the formerly stoked girl. I nodded. That sounded as good as anything. She had nice eyes.
I probed my mouth with my tongue; as far as I could tell, I wasn't hemorrhaging, and the teeth were all there.
The professor—he had to be one, even if he'd been drawn by a cartoonist—buttered a roll. "Do you get to New York much? I'd kill to spend an hour in a real bookstore, get a decent cup of coffee. You know what I'm talking about. Culture out here is a bunch of white women meeting once a week to discuss Beloved, which they haven't read and couldn't if they tried, but they do get to drink a little blush wine and eat cheese, so it's worth it."
His students, I thought, seemed a little tired of him.
"As a Native American writer," a skinny boy across the table from me asked, his voice the timbre of a badly played oboe, "do you ever feel compelled to address certain subject matter that you might otherwise not? In other words, is your identity controlling, or liberating?" He colored visibly, his pale skin growing blotchy. "I hope that wasn't out of line."
The thing we don't know about death is how sarcastic it makes you. The dead understand life in a remarkably hard, scientific light—none of that weepy, Raphael-angels-and-Mozart stuff the living want to project on us. From the outside, life tends to look like an elaborate setup for a joke. Think Rube Goldberg, think banana peels. Quite the opposite of how it feels when you are in it: it's clear, linear, unsentimental as mathematics. In my case, my thumpy exit was the sum of the following, in reverse order:
Choosing to follow my buddy Rick onto a narrow, steeply pitched ski slope boiled over with big moguls that had frozen overnight and made a sound like a cat hissing if you tried to turn on one, which I did, unsuccessfully.
Smoking a fat joint on the chairlift with Rick's stoner friend, Josh, on the way up, before my first run, still hung over and tired from a long day of skiing the day before (not to mention the whole business with the fire alarms), and way out of practice with dope smoking anyway.
Putting on the new bib-style ski pants I'd purchased specifically for this trip, which had the effect of turning me into a kind of greased bullet as I caromed down that slope in the Utah morning, actually picking up speed as I went rather than slowing, my occasional attempts to turn face down and legs downhill (self-arrest!) useless against the gravity that had me putting on a tumbling act.
Going on this trip at all.
The further back you go, the less obvious connections become, but that doesn't mean they aren't there. A
half mile short of Niagara Falls (U.S. side, Bridal Veil), there is water that appears to be just standing around minding its own business. "You don't know what you're in for!" Cleo shouted at it, when we visited just last year. We'd been fighting again, though we weren't just then. "I have seen your future, and it's not pretty!"
But of course, it was. I bought her a souvenir rainbow mug.
Three fire trucks. Me, standing out in the Utah night with at least one hundred other perturbed ski vacationers. "It's nothing," I'd told the blonde girl at the front desk a few minutes earlier. "You can turn it off." She couldn't. New hotel. Manager off the premises. An air-horn sound banging through all of our brains at one-second intervals, just in case anyone should forget that this was an emergency. Bells ringing, too.
Chickens. Three of them (one per truck?—patterns emerge only in retrospect), pierced repeatedly and strategically, garlic shoved into the holes. I pointed out the smoke that was beginning to creep from the stove burners, white wisps of it, fragrant, but just a little foul smelling too (no pun). "We'll open a window," said Martin. He and I had been hired together back in Colorado. His gig was computers, mine PR. On weekends we'd pick a ski area and drive to it. A former rugby player, he was well over two hundred pounds and skied in a greenish oilskin affair that came down to the knees and was more the kind of thing you'd wear trout fishing in the Highlands. He'd been married in a kilt—I'd seen the photos. "Air things out a bit." When the room started to get really smoky and our detector began to beep, someone else had the bright idea of opening the door to the hallway, too, to get a little cross-ventilation.
Seven exhausted, hungry guys in their forties crammed into a two-bedroom suite, every inch of the floor taken up with clothes, boots, sleeping bags, mattress pads. A couple of beers, someone rolls a joint. Grocery bags arrayed on the countertop and the small kitchen table, chips and jars of supermarket-brand salsa. The other guys were married, but I still wasn't, and it was starting to feel embarrassing. The art on the walls was tasteful in an invisible way—pastels, flowers—there mostly to remind you that this was a quality room. Cheaper hotel, uglier art. Fly in first class and you get a free drink and a different kind of tray table, but it's still the same plane. Our window had a good view of the parking lot and a few office buildings, dark mountains looming in the distance behind them.
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