Time's a Thief

by B. G. Firmani

  After we ate our greaseburgers I said good-bye to Trina and, feeling distracted and unsettled, went back to my dorm room. My roommate and I didn’t exactly hate each other but didn’t exactly get along either. On her side of the room she had hung up hundreds of pictures of herself with millions of her friends in places like Vail, Acapulco, and downtown Dubuque, and oddly, in each of these photos she assumed the exact same smiling pose, as if she were some Zelig-like Bacardi Rum girl. This was a topic of fascination for my friends, who would come over, see the sharp delineation between the two sides of the room, study poor Jackie’s photographs, and wonder aloud, How the fuck did you get a roommate like this? The answer was that I had been utterly flippant on my roommate form, and in a moment of high spirits wrote on it I am an extremely silly person! Truth is, I was a terrible roommate, an arrogant jackass and a smelly snob ready to make fun of anything that moved, so Jackie had a lot to put up with in me. She was a fundamentally decent person. Once when I came in drunk, lit a cigarette in bed, and promptly fell asleep, she knocked the cigarette out of my fingers and slapped down my flaming bedclothes with the copy of Nueva Revista de Filologia Hispánica she’d been reading. So it’s maybe not such a leap to say that without Jackie Ebersole, I wouldn’t be here today to tell this story.

  Professor Ebersole, I am told, has an impressive career as a revisionist feminist critic of nineteenth-century Spanish fiction these days.

  At any rate, that Friday Jackie had also gone away for the weekend—it could have been that my whole suite was empty, it was so quiet—so I found myself alone, sitting at the window that looked out onto the airshaft and smoking cigarette after cigarette. I tried to work a little. I remember taking out my copy of Realism and reading the chapter about death, but when I found myself just staring at a reproduction of Courbet’s peasants bowing their heads at the Angelus bell, I put the book down. Eventually it was time for dinner, but I didn’t feel like finding someone to sit with in the depressing and near-empty dining hall, so instead I went to the suite kitchen and made a big Dagwood sandwich out of someone else’s cold cuts, which were just then starting to get all hard around the edges. I wrote a little note of apology, decorated with pictures of skulls and Jesus’s bleeding heart, and put it in the refrigerator where the cold cuts had been.

  Eight o’clock found me with the Columbia/Barnard Facebook in hand (which was an actual material thing in those days, a hardback on the order of a yearbook), staring at the entry for Kendrick Löwenstein. The image printed by her name was not Kendra at all but what I recognized to be a Man Ray photo of Kiki de Montparnasse.

  She didn’t have a campus phone extension listed, just a regular Manhattan number. Did she live with her parents? Did she have her own apartment? I stared at the number, hesitating for a long time, and then finally dialed.

  “YES?” a very old, thickly accented voice answered.

  “Um, I’m sorry, I think I have the wrong number,” I said.

  “WHO? YOU WANT WHO?” the very old man said.

  “I’m sorry!” I called out.

  “THIS IS ALGONQUIN FOUR EIGHT SIX TWO NINE.”

  I had called the Algonquin Hotel? I stared at the wall, flummoxed. But then I thought of the movie BUtterfield 8.

  “HELLO, SIR, MY NAME IS CHESS. MAY I PLEASE SPEAK WITH KENDRA?” I yelled.

  “HOLD THE LINE!” the very old man said.

  There was a crazy amount of noise, as if the phone had been dropped into a bag of cats, and I could hear different voices yelling in the background. I thought about quietly putting the phone down. It seemed impossible that this could be anyplace where Kendra lived, and accidentally dialing into strange lives has always been a special nightmare of mine. But then I heard the receiver being picked up and Kendra’s voice distinctly saying, Zeyde, you know better than to answer the telephone!

  “Hey, Kendra, it’s Chess,” I said to her, something like amazed.

  “Chess!” she called out—and I confess to a warm and sudden tap of feeling in my chest. “Did you have a chat with my gramps? The fella is starved for attention.”

  “You live with your grandfather?”

  “Oh, we’re all here, driving each other nuts.”

  It struck me that she seemed to be making an assumption that I knew what her life was like.

  “Do you, I don’t know, want to go with me to the Ritz and see the Cro-Mags?”

  “When?” she said.

  I looked at the clock.

  “Like, now? Like, soon? Like in an hour, actually.” I could almost feel myself sweating, as if I were asking her out on a date.

  “Geez, I’d have to put my face on,” she said, which was not the response I’d been expecting.

  “I’m sure your face is fine,” I said.

  There was silence.

  “Kendra?”

  “I could meet you there a little after ten,” she said.

  “Cool!” I said, with real delight.

  “But don’t be late,” she said.

  “I never am,” I said.

  Instead, she was late. She was actually very, very late, and in fact I was drunk as a skunk by the time she got there, or at least by the time we found each other. I am in some ways a deeply shy person, and to overcome this, back in the old days especially, what I would do was drink. Drink my face off. I haven’t been to the Ritz in years—it’s since reverted back to Webster Hall and apparently it’s much cleaner, brighter, and just more all-around fabulous now. In the ’80s, though, I remember it as cavernous and dark, with sticky black surfaces and a sour-beer smell, a place where you could get into trouble. And as I remember this night, I was at the bar getting yet another beer with money I didn’t have when I felt a yank on my arm, and there was Kendra.

  “Hey!” we yelled to each other over the music.

  She had made herself up in her exaggerated silent-movie way, but she seemed curiously subdued, or distracted. She was doing something weird with her mouth, sort of popping and clicking her jaw. At that point I didn’t know Kendra’s complex history of addictions, but I did have an older sister, Olivia, who was a precocious user of a different style of drugs—old-school hallucinogens instead of new-school amphetamines—and who had done herself a world of bad when I was still a kid, which put me off doing anything more than the occasional hit off someone else’s bong. So even though I was drunk, I was aware that Kendra was very far away from me on some other high at that moment.

  And in no time at all a guy joined us, a guy I always saw at shows at CBGB or at the eighty-five-cent pizza place on St. Mark’s, who was forever telling me all sorts of shaggy dog stories about being a roadie for Samhain, being a former member of Murphy’s Law, or, incredibly, being the American cousin of one of the founding members of Can, even though when pressed he didn’t know any of their names. I was such a confrontational so-and-so at that age that I thought he was challenging me to an I’m-more-punk-rock-than-you pissing contest when in fact what he was doing was hitting on me. I was blind to this, however, until I saw the flirty way Kendra was with him now. She did little head-tilting adjustments and things with her hands—she actually reached out and pulled his cigarettes from his shirt pocket at one point, and then, when he had to “go deal with something,” offered to hold his flight jacket for him. It wasn’t clear how well she knew him or what the story was, but I felt annoyed, and obscurely jealous. He wore the regulation nonracist skinhead outfit—red laces, red braces—and his name was Dan or Andy or Knucklehead. At any rate, this went on for some time, with him going off to mosh or do whatever important thing he was doing and then coming back to us like we were his waiting band bitches. My resentment was rising. Finally, when he was off again to have a pee, as he so descriptively put it, Kendra suddenly turned to me and yelled, “We’re getting out of here.”

  “What?” I said.

  “We’re getting out of here now.”

  “Why?” I said.

  “ ’Cause I totally stole his stash.”

  “What?
”

  “You heard me!” she said with glee.

  I stood there blinking.

  “Would you just put it back?” I said.

  She threw her hands up joyously. What could she do? This time he’d taken his jacket with him.

  “Come on!” she said.

  She grabbed my hand and suddenly we were running through the club. Have I mentioned that Kendra was kind of a big girl? I mean like a statuesque girl, tall and handsome—no size two shrinking violet this. Everyone practically dove out of our way as we tore through the club, galloped down the steps, and beat it up the street. I had no history of stealing drugs from anyone—of stealing anything from anyone, unless you count the dollar I took off Eddie DeLuca’s desk in the third grade, something I spent years feeling terribly guilty about—and I was completely freaked out and running for my life, while Kendra was practically hooting aloud and skipping by the time we got to the corner. Eleventh Street runs smack into the back of Grace Church at Fourth Avenue, and it was there that we suddenly heard a furious male voice bark Hey! from down the street. Kendra almost ripped my arm out of the socket and then we were tearing south. The girl could really hoof it, and even in the midst of my terror I thought, Geez—I should really cut down on the smoking. We were on the next street booking west and then turning another corner and another one still and I couldn’t even tell you where we ran to when she said, Quick! Duck in! and we dove into some under-stoop entrance gate. I remember thinking it was crazy that the gate was open, but then somehow she quickly opened the inside door as well. She slammed it behind us.

  “What the—?” I said.

  “Shhh!”

  We stood there in the dark, panting. What was this place? All of this seemed random and crazy, but it wasn’t punk rock to ask lots of questions. There was a phrase people punted around: Act like you know.

  And then—click!—the light went on, and Kendra was bathed in a jeweled light. Garnet and ruby and emerald on her powder-white face, her eyelashes fluttering long shadows on her cheeks.

  “What is this place?” I whispered.

  “It’s my house,” she said, fighting to catch her breath.

  “It’s your house?” I said.

  She nodded vigorously, still catching her breath.

  “My parents’ house,” she said. “Dad and Clarice…Clarice the Fabulous…who are—thank God—upstate for the weekend…Bertie’s gone with them…but maybe we’ll see Jerry if we’re lucky…actually, we’re in a fight right now, so fuck ’im…but you can meet Cornelia…Cornelia the Priss…and my gramps is home. They always try and stuff him in the car, but”—she stopped, gulping for breath—“Jews hate the country.”

  I stood there trying to take all this in when into the circle of jeweled light cast by a colored-glass lamp overhead came a big black cat, twirling itself around my ankles. I crouched down to pet her and she immediately collapsed on her side, offering up her belly for caresses.

  “That’s Agnes Smedley,” Kendra said. “She’s a total whore.”

  I remember laughing, looking up at Kendra. Not knowing then, at all, how important this house and these people would become to me, and how completely they would break my heart.

  3

  Working at the Acme Corporation, I felt like my world had shrunk to the size of a biscuit.

  Mostly I kept my head down and did my work. You sure are talkative, Frances! Walt would say, poor, sighing Walt with his crunchy snacks, who, I learned, had earlier that year been downsized from a long-term sales job for a manufacturer of plastic storage devices. No matter the bedlam going on around us, Walt remained calm. On top of the obscenity-filled screaming matches between trash-mouthed Nikki and Vinny, the dispatch manager, sometimes the interpreter requests would come in fast and furious, and the three dispatchers who actually did any kind of work would be juggling receivers, hollering over workstation dividers, trading names and numbers to find interpreters to send to government offices, detention centers, courthouses, everywhere. Orders came in from all over the ravening prison-industrial complex, from all across New York State to as far west as Ohio, as far south as the Chesapeake Bay, and as far north as snowy Vermont. Most seemed to be for Spanish, sometimes with the slant of a certain area—Colombian Spanish or Caribbean Spanish, a dispatcher would shout—but there’d be orders for Mandarin, Russian, Urdu, Portuguese, Bengali. Sometimes requests would be for a language so obscure I’d find myself Googling it to find out what country it was spoken in. More than once this gave me a picture of a quaint little clapboard courthouse with some sad and specific tragedy playing out inside, half in English and half in Phla, Vepsian, or Kwerba. During one especially frenzied moment, the liveliest dispatcher hopped up on her desk and yelled into the frantic air, “I need a Twi in Philadelphia!”

  Amid this chaos, Walt always spoke with a compassionate calmness and never said anything bad about anyone. In fact, before essaying any conversation, he seemed to dowse around in himself for a new reserve of goodwill to pull up to his defeated exterior. Walt was so gentle that sometimes I thought he was probably mad as hell—shrieking effing furious—but needed to swallow it lest he go totally berserk and beat the whole crew to death with his computer keyboard.

  The owner, Dee-Dee, would come by every once in a while to give me a totally delusional, unwanted, and unnecessary pep talk—Doin’ pretty good, Frances, why this time next year we’ll have a whole slew of proposal writers, with you overseeing all of ’em!—after which he would run back into his office, stab on the speakerphone, and bark like a dog.

  Mostly I dealt with Cissy. Since she was Acme’s ops manager, I’d often have to go into her office with a question. She’d raise her head and have the angriest and most defensive face imaginable on, which would then blossom into fond smiles when she saw it was me. What do you need, pumpkin? she’d ask, and I would feel at once abashed, a little bit sickened, and yet perversely pleased at this. Because I hadn’t had a real mother in years.

  Anyway, one early visit to Cissy’s office, I found her on the telephone, and I signaled that I’d come back. She arched her eyebrows—eyebrows that had been plucked out in their entirety round about 1969, and which she must have drawn on each morning with a fluorescent orange highlighter—and smiled at me, indicating that I should wait.

  Suddenly she erupted in a fit of yelling: “I say fire their asses! Fire their asses! That girl does nothing! All she does all day is put on friggin’ makeup! That whole department does nothing! Grow a spine, Dee-Dee!”

  I left the room. Of course she was talking about the dispatch team. She had nothing but hatred for Nikki in particular, and not so much because Nikki was an ignorant, lazy dope, which she was, but (so it seemed to me) because Nikki was young and sexually attractive. I had the feeling that Cissy would have gladly thrown all ninety-six pounds of Nikki out the window with no regrets whatsoever.

  Sitting there at my desk, thinking these thoughts, with the phones on the dispatch side of the office ringing off the hook, I heard Vinny yell at Nikki, “Answer the fuckin’ phone!”

  “Answer your fuckin’ bald head!” she yelled back.

  “Answer the fuckin’ phone, you fuckin’ piece a shit!”

  A steam whistle of exasperation shot out from Nikki and up over the workstation divider that separated us. And then she picked up the phone.

  “Yeaaah, Acme Corporation,” she said. “What the fuck?”

  When my first check from Acme came in, Fitz and I raced off to the Indian importer’s on First Avenue and bought huge bags of brown rice, lentils, dry beans, and tea for a month, then walked home swaying under the weight of our bundles. We bought water filters, potting soil, jumbo containers of eco-friendly dishwashing detergent, reserve bottles of Dr. Bronner’s Peppermint 18-in-1. Back home, we mapped out our meal plan for the week with Clausewitz-like precision. Then we went across town to Citarella and bought two dozen Wellfleet oysters for $37.98.

  Have I mentioned that we lived in the East Village?

&nbs
p; I’d never really planned on living in the East Village. Reflecting the changing fortunes of New York City neighborhoods, my tribe’s place really was Williamsburg, mostly Northside but Southside too. Fitz had a few years on me, so he was more of that early ’80s East Village generation, and when he and his old friends got together, they’d reminisce about long-gone things like Save the Robots, The World, Gracie Mansion’s gallery, Dean and the Weenies, and the sad, strange career of Rockets Red Glare. But the low rents that had helped anything cool flourish there were pretty much gone by the time I graduated from college. Similarly, after my time in Williamsburg, it became mostly closed to new crops of cash-poor creative transplants, and Greenpoint had filled up too. New luxury housing gobbled up space and squeezed out everyone below a certain income level, so people moved east to Bushwick, up into Queens, or to parts of Brooklyn that felt to me so far-flung you might as well have been walking on the moon.

  Anyway, I’d long ago planted my feet on the soil of Brooklyn and planned on keeping them there. But once I got with Fitz, it was easy enough to leave my Southside apartment and come back over the water for a fifth-floor walk-up. Even as the new brand of greed, the post-9/11 grab-the-shit-you-want-and-screw-these-loser-poor-people greed, started running amok through this city of ours and new buildings rose around us on all sides, making us feel like we were in “The Cask of Amontillado,” getting bricked in alive.

  The day we went across town to Citarella’s, I asked Fitz if he wouldn’t mind walking home along Eleventh Street. I didn’t have to explain to him why, even though this stuff was ancient history. But what’s funny is that for years I’d managed never to walk down that particular block. Past that particular house. I guess it’s easy enough to avoid, but even so.