“I’m all for trickle-down economics.” He looked around the room. “Can I tell you a little secret?”
I motioned the floor was his.
“You know poor people are impossible to market to. But if you pull it off they are golden. Golden! They will buy anything you convince them to buy. Within reason, of course. You can’t convince a poor woman to buy an Aston Martin, of course. But you can get her to buy your chicken nuggets.”
He wanted to show me something on his phone. Feigning interest, I switched to the autopilot of yes while unclasping my listening device to determine Kath’s precise location. The device telescoped over the table and around the corner, detected her via a series of sonar pings standing against the wall and speaking with Hussein. Or Hassan. I would soon be drunk enough not to care, I told myself. I had crossed the Waterloo between jealousy and dread and now paddled my way across the Rubicon from dread to disaffected. Oars wrapped with cotton, undetected, not making a sound, I changed perspectives.
“Am I boring you?” Alfredo asked.
“No, not at all.”
“Don’t worry about the dinner. It will be fine.”
My ability to follow him was destroyed, drunk on the floor in pieces, each eye converted into a lowercase x.
“Do you remember everything I told you?” Alfredo asked.
“Everything,” I told him.
“Good. It’s important.”
“I doubt it.”
He laughed at my joke and then shifted his gaze to a young, fit man who looked like a Duke lacrosse player.
“Maybe if it wasn’t for that saggy jaw old man,” he rebuffed Alfredo, and Alfredo whimpered away, like a cat sprayed with water to stop chewing on the houseplant.
Soncha spotted me watching the door and held up a finger. Either another drink or another minute, I couldn’t tell which. Her I could fall in love with, I told myself. Her I could get over myself for. Someone behind me was thankful they suffered their bikini wax yesterday, because of the possible late-night festivities. I didn’t belong here. Other than to follow around Kath, I had no reason to be here tonight. If I had accepted the obvious long ago I wouldn’t be here now. I would be home with my appropriate wife, adorning her neck and the space between her amply jeweled earlobes with kisses, entering time notes into the laptop at the suburban kitchen table after she fell asleep reading light contemporary fiction, our two children asleep in their different but similar rooms, rotating nightlights casting silhouettes of trains and stars on their bedroom walls stenciled with baseball bats and basketballs.
Kath entered the back room, completing the troika, she and Soncha and Ali touching one another’s elbows and shoulders and conspiring. Soncha and Kath quasi-glowered at me. Summers ago, when Kath and Robert were still married, we all day-tripped to Jacob Riis beach. Robert drank too much beer as Soncha capoeiraed on the beach with an American boy and Robert wanted to know what was the point. Badgering the boy to explain to him why he possessed a Brazilian-flag towel and wore tiny Brazilian-flag shorts. He demanded to know just what was so fucking cool about Brazil. I took Robert for a walk to calm him down and when we returned to the girls sunbathing and the boy scared off that was the same look they both gave me. Holding me joint and severally liable for the awkward moment on account of my proximity to Fleeger.
I scanned the evening’s agenda of presentations. A bestselling author would explain our collective need for new vocabularies. An activist would discuss her efforts to provide safe abortions in Bangladesh. Followed by Kath, who would explain her new photo series, Faces of the Ciudad (a.k.a. The Miserables).
Ducking beneath the doorframe, the author entered the room and bent forward to kiss Soncha on the cheek. Even if down on one knee he would still be just as tall as her. He possessed the confident air of a very tall man who had slept with a great number of women and perhaps a few men. The Argentine watched the author take his seat next to Kath and kiss her cheek too while asking the waiter if the salad was gluten free.
“Don’t be such a baby,” the Duke lacrosse player scolded him.
The juniper berries bit and my fork couldn’t strike the Parmesan slice atop the cranberry and spinach salad. Soncha thanked everyone for attending tonight’s Qommentary, an exclusive forum for discussing the planet’s changing cultural and political landscape. I ate with drunk, hungry relish. Soncha announced how pleased she was to introduce tonight’s first speaker, author Christopher Fitzgerald.
“Excuse me if I sound lethargic,” he said, smiling, but almost hoarse. “I just returned from the Falklands last night and appear to have caught something of a cold during my travels.”
“Please,” Alfredo said.
“Why were you in the Falklands?” asked a large-boned blonde woman wearing black, cat-tipped glasses, her fleshy arms tattooed vintage Village rockabilly.
“I can’t tell you.”
“Why can’t you tell us?” asked the lacrosse player.
“Perhaps, Chris, it has something to do with your next book?” Soncha asked.
“No, nothing like that, Soncha. I just woke up last week and had an overpowering urge to go to the Falklands.” He faced the audience. “Because as creators, we must follow our urges, the sources of creativity, our empowerment. We must listen to our muse. If she says, ‘Chris, go to the Falkland Islands,’ I must go. I can’t question her. Otherwise she’ll leave me for someone else.”
“Is it absolutely necessary that muses be female?” asked one of the black lace sisters. “Why can’t my muse be a male?”
“Now that’s an interesting point,” the author said. “What’s your name?”
“Mona.”
“That’s a really interesting point, Mona. It’s true. Some nouns do take the feminine pronoun.”
“They don’t take Chris,” Mona replied. “They’re imposed by the hierarchy.”
This back and forth pleased Soncha, who possessed a front-row seat to her own private, intellectual Wimbledon.
“Must the feminine pronoun always be associated with fickle inspiration?” Mona asked. “With whimsical ephemera?”
“Oil tankers,” I retorted, surprising myself.
“Speak up, Stephen, please,” Soncha said, enthused.
“Oil tankers. Ships. Vessels.”
“What about them?” Mona asked.
“They take the feminine pronoun,” I said.
“Not ours. Not our hospital ship,” Mona said. “He was our Hercules.”
“And why do you think that is, Stephen?” Soncha asked. “That ships are given the feminine pronoun?”
“Because they’re possessed by men,” Kath injected.
“Not sure I agree with your choice of the verb ‘take’ either,” said Mona. “More like branded.”
“Did you just say branded?” Alfredo asked. “What does branding have to do with his muse?”
We returned our attention to Fitzgerald, standing patiently behind the podium. He pressed the projector button and the image of a skinny runner with a blond ponytail appeared on the wall behind him. Staring at the camera in horrific surprise.
“Chiva Blanca, ladies and gentlemen,” Fitzgerald said.
“And he never stops running?” asked Hassan or Hussein.
“He never stops.”
“Must be great for his core strength,” Alfredo confirmed.
“What about footwear?” asked the lacrosse player.
“He runs barefoot,” Fitzgerald explained.
“No,” the Argentine said. “Who would run barefoot? No way.”
Fitzgerald again pressed a button and displayed a picture of Chiva Blanca’s feet, bloody and calloused and bruised almost beyond recognition.
“He runs for the pain,” Fitzgerald explained. “Pain is his fuel.”
The diners gasped in awe, both in denial and intrigued, interest piqued to maximum capacity, where one’s consciousness expands. The point where true Qommentary can commence.
“You see, we don’t possess the vocabula
ry, the consciousness, to comprehend the reality of Chiva Blanca’s pain,” Fitzgerald explained. “It requires photographs for me to convey this man’s uniqueness. My challenge to you is, how do I do this with written words?”
“I understand what you are saying,” Kath said. “I can see the problem.”
Fitzgerland thanked Kath for her qomments and continued.
“Chiva Blanca is a runner, that’s evident. But he is also a vessel. To how we communicate. Which raises the very subject of how we formulate language. If language is our source code, akin to our source code, as I have posited in my last eighteen books, then we can program the words and acquire the image in our imaginations. But if language is more primordial, derives from our collective conscience, evolves from our experiences, the memories of collective humanity, then how can we even begin to comprehend Chiva Blanca as anything other than a pure masochist?”
“Either a guide for the future,” Soncha said.
“Or a mirror to our past,” Ali added.
“Our primitive, collective, unconscious past,” Fitzgerald replied. “Which brings us to the next logical question. What then is a typo?”
I finished my drink, trying to discern their logical connection, as the green caterpillar commenced chewing the white tablecloth with its sharp, tiny teeth.
“If writing is what I like to call accessing our personal containers of metadata, then there is no such thing as a typo.”
“Please explain yourself more, Chris,” Soncha said. “I don’t think I get that.”
“Let me give an example. If I write the words ‘fattened calf’ on a piece of paper. If my intent is to write the words ‘fattened calf.’ But I instead write the words ‘flattened calf,’ is that a typo? Or is it something else?”
“It still evokes the image,” Soncha said. “But of both a fattened and flattened calf. Or two calves. One fattened and one flattened.”
I zoned out. Wanted to ask the bartender the score of the game. Whether there were any Latins on the court at Madison Square Garden. Fitzgerald finished his strange speech and the crowd applauded and the man took his seat, knees up around his ears, raised his glass to the audience, thanked Soncha, and offered to continue the conversation after dinner, if anyone was interested, which he didn’t want to presume, though he knew this was the case.
The waiter set before me a square plate of fish in red sauce and Mona took the lectern, standing on her toes.
“So, hi, everyone. I spent the last six months at sea,” she said. The image of a hospital vessel appeared on the screen behind her. Along with a map of the ship’s voyage from Singapore around the Straits of Malacca to the fingers of Bangladesh’s mangrove deltas.
“Now, it’s never easy to provide safe, effective abortion services in South Asia,” she explained. “There are all sorts of nasties you have to deal with. Mullahs, husbands, fathers, brothers. Acid attacks. Customs officials.”
Something raucous, sudden and unexpected, on the other side of the room’s entrance and back toward the Village bistro’s bar, halted Mona’s talk. There must be a fatwa against her, I thought, sitting up in my seat. To be served and executed at once. Soncha bolted from her seat with her thin outstretched arms to halt what could not not be a suicide bomber from detonating her Qommentary to bits. Behind her, Hussein and Hassan wielded chairs like human plows to repel this mess of dirty boots and scabby skin, lice and ringworm, forcing its way into our realm of pure Qommentary. Wherein Jupiter now entered, crawling beneath the jostle, supine, de-supining, upright, mouths agape, Jupiter’s too, all of us more surprised by the sight of the other than the other.
“Who is this funny black man?” Alfredo asked.
Jupiter prowled back and forth in the projector lights. Big eyes bright like Koh-i-Noors, like a nocturnal photograph of a leopard, scarred in battle with a thrashing wildebeest. The underlying event and Qommentary no longer symbiotic but synchronized. In real time. I half-expected Chiva Blanca to run into the room and join the fracas. Jupiter came strapped, with an old bullhorn and a cardboard sign around his neck that commanded: YELL AT ME FOR A DOLLAR! Kath rushed at him. Some inner servo of hers no doubt wanting just as much to film him as to make him disappear.
“Jupiter” click “please” click “don’t” click click click “do this,” she pleaded.
“Where’s my dollar? Where. Is. My. Dollar? Read the sign, Kath. Don’t yell at me without paying the price.”
He blew invisible fuzz from the mouthpiece of the beat-in bullhorn. It’s a slave name. He gave it to himself. The smooth keloid the length of his mandible shined in the lights of the projector.
“Whose streets? Our streets,” Jupiter chanted into the bullhorn, as the crusty kids overpowered Soncha’s and Hussein’s and Hassan’s defenses and now plundered and pillaged bread and breadsticks and cocktails and fish from the U-shaped table, none of them concerned with gluten or peanuts or thirty-day cleanses, scarfing down food and drink without swallowing, in true paleo fashion, before the seated, dumbstruck crowd: Mona and her black-laced and blue-soled and polo-booted crew; Generation Axe; the Argentine; the Duke; men wearing too much fashion; women donning too much jewelry. Geraldine motherfucking Ferraro and Walter fucking Mondale. Brazilianed—and not the people. Too proud and confident in their constant search for exclusivity, originality, creativity, fame, recognition, disruption, stickiness, empowerment to realize that for Kath and Soncha and Ali—their friends—this was a catastrophe. Now taking in the destruction almost like it was performance art.
“Send in the mariachis,” the lacrosse player yelled, laughing. “I’ll pay.”
Jupiter & Co. present to you tonight the arrival of a risky, unanticipated thrill. Something more than a little unexpected. Traversing the distant realms of true Qommentary.
I couldn’t resist—I dipped a sugar packet into a glass of water and lobbed it at Alfredo. A direct strike to his canary pocket square. Who did this to him? he demanded to know. Ali grabbed the microphone and struggled to assume the podium, jostled by homeless anarchist youth, way out beyond his zone of efficacy.
“Please don’t do this,” he implored Jupiter and the protestors. “We empathize with your cause. We are all subject to the dominant paradigm. There is plenty for everyone.”
I tossed a soggy sugar packet at the Duke lacrosse player, emptied the caddy on the table, and lined up additional projectiles to salvo. Kath ran back and forth, between Jupiter and Soncha, Soncha and Ali, back to Jupiter, struggling to discern what to do. Her soft propeller now whirling in the opposite direction of where she believed the evening was destined. Bow straight ahead, stern in reverse. The pressure cracked apart her hull, her propeller quickly losing thrust as Jupiter scolded her with a long pink finger.
“I warned you, Kath.”
“Warned me about what?”
“Not to poverty pimp us,” he said, shaking his head.
I finally kind of understood what he meant.
“What does that even mean?” she pleaded.
“I shouldn’t have to explain.”
A body in motion must stay in motion. No one in this room possessed enough force equal in strength and magnitude to contain Jupiter and his miscreant gang of youth as they leapt atop the table, the girls in black lace now scattering from their chairs beneath the tablecloth, pulling their sisters and cousins to safety, covering their faces with forearms. On cue, more motor-greased youth in raunchy salivating death punk finery entered the room, strumming banjos and plucking Jew’s harps and wrestling amongst themselves and knocking over chairs and tables, tablecloths and drinks and food and flower arrangements whole hock. Crashing sounds and shrieks, grunts and screams.
“Whose streets? Our streets,” Jupiter yelled, goose-stepping through the empty core of the once-U-shaped table. Fitzgerald stood tall and telegraphed a punch in Jupiter’s direction, but he too succumbed to the mass of crusty kids and down good Fitzy went, beneath a pile of sweat and dirt, until he broke free from the rumble and crawled towa
rd the fire exit. His hands agleam with a generous application of hand sanitizer that filled the room with the toxic effluvium of jellied isopropyl alcohol.
“Over here,” Fitzgerald said, signaling to the sisters cowering beneath the table.
Dutch climbed atop the table behind Jupiter, donning a golden paper crown, kicking over mushroom soup, tearing meat with her blackened, pointy teeth. Soiling the vintage fabric of Mondale/Ferraro ’84 as a quorum of diners escaped through the fire exit, dusting off their clothes. Even those unscathed did the same. I ducked a Frisbee of a dining plate and followed the crowd through the open fire door. Someone said tonight was clearly a success. Someone else that they loved coming to these things.
“Always something unexpected.”
The narrow Village street now the staging ground for a throng of police officers snapping on white helmets, plastic hog-ties dangling from their belt loops, pulling on latex gloves, reinforced by the mounted brigade polishing their billy clubs in unison and preparation. I spotted Kath yelling at Jupiter.
“I tried to find you,” she said. “To tell you about tonight.”
This was a lie.
“You failed.”
“But I couldn’t find you.”
“Well, doesn’t that make everything all white.”
The police marched in lockstep, phalanxed behind plastic shields. For no discernible reason a bomb-disposing robot joined them, robot arms raised in some type of rejoice. I pulled Kath by the sleeve as she berated Jupiter for ruining her evening, stretching the blend of her Lycra-cashmere, until she capitulated, now dangling one long sleeve as she looked back at him over her shoulder. Jupiter couldn’t have cared less, and he pointed at me as if I would get mine too, someday. We exited the alley and regrouped on the sidewalk with Ali and Soncha. Now down now to twenty-eight braids.
The riot rumbled onto the street. With the force of a tsunami moving through a coastal village. Through the window doors of the bistro. Past the marquis of private parts. Onto the sidewalk. More police officers and more dirty American kids stomping the ground, ready for a fight. Smoking broken cigarettes as the tall, thin women drinking at the bar leapt from the open windows. Little colorful triangles of thongs visible between their waxy bean legs. Ali picked from his hair what looked like cheesecake as Jupiter galloped away atop a commandeered horse, chased by a team of cop jockeys donning midnight-blue pennies.
All the Beautiful People We Once Knew Page 25
