Four New Messages

by Cohen, Joshua

  Beat, footsore, inadequately caffeinated, Dem and I stood with our daughter at the front of the tour group led by a girl named like a corruption of a Dutch cheese—Goudla? Dougla? this cheerfully chubby checker of any survey’s Pacific Islander box, majoring in—I wasn’t paying attention—let’s say postcolonial beading or basketry as therapy. She was very kind to Veri, very patient and always touching—Dem and even me, with a bit to the cuticle fingernail graze of my elbow, a hennaed palm to my shoulder, tender but then she’d think nothing of reaching out with a surprisingly firm grip and turning Veri’s head to direct her attention: there the library, there the center for university life, here the freshman dorms (where you’ll be living next year—what a presumptuous girl) …

  I told Dem I wasn’t impressed and she shushed me but I could tell from the side of her smile, she agreed. I’m saying the physical plant wasn’t much. Prefab. Incapacitated by its overcapacity. Smogged. Now I know no city can contain all the amenities you’d find at a place like our alma mater. A city university just doesn’t have the space, no matter how big the endowment, no matter what sums of R&D cash are banking around—Manhattan Island is only so large and it’s telling that about half of its lower half is landfill. Back home we have more chlorinated pools, more recreation facilities with more stationary bikes and stairmasters, treadmills and the latest in weight machinery—hell, we even have the Flatiron, if you want to forgo the elevators and walk up it—the Fauxiron, Professor Greener once called it, whose roof I laid about twenty years ago, with Veri turning 18 this September.

  I did a fine job on that building, finer workmanship than anything we saw on our tour save for a few of the older buildings—I’m talking the stolid stuff actually of the 1900s, those tiles and carvings from when we still cared about craft, those noble columns and colonnades and ornamental gutters—all the fineries I learned to duplicate, the techniques that usurped my writing to give me a destiny with salary and benefits.

  You want Peterson’s Roofing to do up your house, but first you want to looksee our standard? Go down to auxiliary field #3—incongruous, isn’t it? insane, perhaps? jutting from amidst sports pitch and prairie, a skyscraper visible from the Mississippi, as the meeker, more Mormon guides claim when you take the tour of that campus. That slight wedge of trouble that has us wedged south of City Hall, that was Dem, that was me—clients call impressed, I do well for myself. Veri would thrive, twenty floors below that turbid eclipsing—1,750 miles away from 175 Fifth Avenue.

  Professor Maury Greener was invited out to our flyover square state to be Writer in Residence for the 1992–1993 academic year on the merit of his recently published and only book, a novel about its author’s formative years so searing, so bridgeandtunnelburning and explicitly realistic that we couldn’t resist ravishing it for autobiographical fact (an interpretive approach that Greener both practiced and abhorred). So art reconstitutes biography—or better, biography like iron can make art like steel, but then the art can be heated again and the iron reseparated, the biography flowing molten all on its own—what a significant simile! such a suitable image! He—like his hero who shared his initials, height, weight, eye and hair color, wardrobe preference for wry denims, and predilection for deli—was born on the Brooklyn-Queens border, at the conjunction of those two potent, across-the-water boroughs so fetishized for having provided the nativity of so much authentic, impactful culture of the century past: Irish, Italian, Jewish, and he was the lattermost, he wouldn’t let you forget it. Greener was the first Jew I ever met. Now I was a student of literature, not a student of the study of literature but of the making of literature (already there was the vocational calling: the desire to be trained to task, to do, to make), and though I was a voracious reader of the right writers—the lustier ethnics, the WASP authoritarians—practically speaking, my experience was nil. Jews were in the Bible, they were of the Bible. They weren’t on my TV or in the movies I borrowed, but they made the TV and movies. I didn’t expect him to have horns or anything—it was Dem’s family (typically exasperating inlaws, but also bison ranchers) who’d passed along that stereotype and when Dem mentioned it to me after reading up on Greener before he arrived, I immediately imagined a man with airhorns, or megaphones, grown out of his head—and it wasn’t like I was expecting a version of Shylock or Fagin, but I was not prepared for the irony, that fuck you and fuck your mother cynicism. This was because—memoir, self-writing again—he was raised without a father and had to toughen up fast. He had to learn—he taught himself, as his protagonist, M. Groonik, had taught himself—how to fight, how to stand up for what was his. What was his was Stuyvesant, followed by climbing the Ivy, uptown—rungs above the college Veri and Dem and I were touring, eons—humanities educationwise—beyond our own peonic undergraduate and graduate careers. And of course he had his book, which followed this titular Groonik, “amateur erector cum semiprofessional ventilation inspector,” through myriad ménages à trois and quatre in downtown New York of the mid-1980s. What that book earned him: low advance on low sales, hysterical acclaim, and, once remaindered, once out of print, this sinecure stint in the provinces teaching us hicks to rite good.

  It seems that the ’80s—the decade of my adolescence spent lurching dazed between milking and collecting eggs at my parents’ dairy farm and videogaming after homework—was the last tolerable decade in New York, despite the city going broke, despite the crime: it was Greener, who had eight years on me, who taught me to qualify. For him it was the decade of punk rock, hip hop, rap, graffiti as art, heroin and coke, a scene where everyone became millionaires at their mixed media before dying of AIDS or, as Greener wrote, “wrote excessive books about excess that were never excessively read” (though, he once recommended, the hardcovers’ dustjackets were useful for cutting up lines)—the last decade before the encroachment of the rest of the country, before the suburbs moved into the urbis. All that pseudoculture that Greener hated: the chainstores, the megamalls, the ATMized shopfronts unmanned but anyway lit and heated and airconditioned 24/7/365—he hadn’t been around any of that before it began coming to New York (downtown definitely has all the familiar logos by now), and just when it came he decamped to its source. He came to our state, our city, our cow college town—the world capital of bad depressing homogenous capital. We had—we still have, unupdated, unredone—an airport, then a strip of consumer options, then, up the hill, the College on the Hill and, when he first arrived, his second night with us—arrived unaccompanied at 35, balding and fattened like a species of livestock new to us who knew our livestock, but still recognizable as ready for slaughter—he invited Dem and me out to dinner along with a half dozen fellow students, but not because he wanted to bond.

  He said, Don’t think I want to bond, it’s just that your girlfriend’s too pretty, which for him passed for a compliment.

  He stood us a round of dollar margaritas.

  I didn’t have the heart to tell him, my fiancée (that character still sounded too foreign).

  All throughout dinner we were introduced to that hilariously raw style of metro complaint, the perpetual bitching of the provincial Manhattanite: could the food be any worse? could the service be any worse? could the fluorescents be more industrially fierce? which were cornier, the corn tortillas or the restaurant’s muzak and decor (the decorations were stapled sombreros and hefty husks of lacquered maize, a burro mural in dishwater pastels below dishsized speakers blatting juvescent pop top-40)? could the conversation at the surrounding tables be any stupider? could the people tabled around him be any stupider? He was caustic. Could he get a new knife? He’d drunkenly clunked his last to the floor.

  The food was nominally Mexican (his request)—did we take him to Taco John’s or Casa Agave? I’m not sure which chains we had then—pre-Chi-Chi’s, ante-Chipotle—Chili’s?

  About as Mexican as Hitler, he said, As Mexican as spätzle, he said, then, after the flan, wiped his mouth with the zarape that served as tablecloth and said:

  Here’
s your first assignment.

  And then took a shot of tequila and said, Margarine-flavored tequila.

  For our virgin workshop in this burg, I want you to write a story about our dinner tonight, but make me out to be the biggest asshole possible—I want to be fictionalized, hyperfictionalized, let your imagination graze free on the range—have me robbing this joint, have me taking a shit in the rice and beans, out me as this pretentious pinko kikeabilly snob, though still deigning to rape your wives, he looked at Dem then looked at me, winked.

  Hand that in, he said, or else.

  Or else?

  (It was like the entire waitstaff asked that too.)

  Bring me anything you want.

  Staggering out of the restaurant he was slurring, But I’ll only read a story if it’s finished.

  The first story I brought Greener was my own original creation I barely remember save that it involved a young man who went away to war—which war? did I specify which or even have a certain war in mind? who came home with medals bandaging his wounds to find some things different, not drastically different, just slightly different, like his wife has a name that sounds like her old name or what he thought her old name was, or his daughter’s just as beautiful as he’d remembered but instead of having green eyes and blond hair she has blue eyes and brown hair and this destabilizes him, this youthful veteran, who begins behaving differently himself, indulging in violent outbursts he and everyone around him regard as wholly uncharacteristic (unable to give this unrecognizable family affection or hold down a job, he blots his days trying to throttle a motorbike engine)—the reader has to wonder how sane he is and, if he’s not sane, how that loss of sanity will end: with murdering his family? with murdering himself (the vet was based partially on my grandfather, WWII, partially on my father, Vietnam—I’ve never served and that and the double models for the protag were probably why I kept the exact date and location of the conflict vague, though current events conspired to turn a few references Arab)?

  Greener didn’t like it, he didn’t like: fiction about war, fiction about animals and farming (the ancient pastoral was fine but the modern rural, verboten), fiction about or narrated by children (who were the same as animals to him). Essentially he didn’t like any writing by anyone living not him—here was a man at war with himself—though he did grudge me praise for the second story I gave him, which was the purposefully stilted, nearly dialogueless telling of an English professor, an expert at translating anacreontics, visiting this college far out in the stix to deliver a paper at a conference, fumbling through his presentation, stumbling into an unrecommended, ostensibly Vietnamese frytrap and getting so drunk at its incongruously tikified bar that he falls asleep on his stool and has to be woken and driven home by a waitressing doctoral student he offers “to put in a story”—or was it “to write into the next novel”?—if she sleeps with him, but she doesn’t and instead leaves him sprawled in the rear lot of his motel, where delirious through the night he apostrophizes squirting skunks, revived only when he’s hit in the head by the proprietor’s newspaper delivery, that local paper Greener refused to read (incidentally the only paper that pubbed a positive obituary).

  Apparently no other student had taken Greener up on his suggestion to turn him into lit and, when he cornered me after that inaugural class that left approximately half the roster in tears—its surprise subject was how if you intended to succeed as a writer it was necessary to move to New York—I could tell he was struggling with a reaction: whether to treat me like a fool for taking him so seriously, or to treat me like a prick for taking him so seriously (Greener was very attuned to prickishness, and to pretension, except in himself, except in his description of “a city so personal, it’s as if it existed solely in dialogue”).

  Your traducing of me, he said, it’s salvageable.

  It is?

  More so than most of the crap getting published.

  He waited for a lesson in timing.

  Then said, Which isn’t saying much.

  Greener turned to erase from the blackboard the map he’d scribbled, not showing but telling the locations of the better bookmarts of Manhattan (ten of which, Dem tells me, have since closed), then had me accompany him to his office and then, following farther—out.

  He’d been in town—what? two weeks at that point? Calendrically it was still late summer, Indian summer, but, like the Indians, faded, failed. No one had welcomed him, I don’t mean officially—the English department assisterati had requisitioned an ID card, dealt with the bursar in the matter of his tax forms, dealt with housing’s sophomoric supernumeraries in the matter of his housing—I mean, by his own slyly pathetic admission, no one had just casually shown him around, given him the gossipy lay: what Dem and I and Veri were getting at NYU—e.g. this is the library, where you can basically make camp with an open fire and live in the stacks (Greener’s class spent most of the fall doing that), the maths and sciences department, art, architecture, & design, journalism school, law school, center for experimental veterinary medicine. Greener was shocked by this greeting, honestly shocked, though what he interpreted as dereliction was merely the native reserve. Teaching being such a social activity—professors all day interacting, during office hours, in the hallways and restrooms with whomever they came across—that when their classes were over, they went home to stay home. They nested, our school mascot being an indigenously endangered nestbuilding bird. They projected documentaries and Scrabbled, chefed around elaborately, identified hobbies, attempted a baby. Certainly the school hadn’t hired Greener only to ridicule him (they were pleased to have a minority: not someone Semitic, but someone who’d once been reviewed), certainly his agent hadn’t arranged this appointment expressly to ruin him, as he maintained—though that suspicion, maybe, that paranoid loneliness revealed in his rage (what’s the administration doing on weekend nights more entertaining than entertaining me? how many cold Sundays can I spend jerkingoff to the Hudson?), was why we, the two of us, were walking, or maybe it was that he wanted to use me to get closer to Dem, who’d returned to our apartment from workshop to dry her eyes and dry our laundry. Other faculty had tried to get to her before: Horniak, Rutter, and BJ, her poetry thesis adviser, whose plywood cubicle was adjacent to Greener’s. Whenever he wasn’t meeting with a female student, he, BJ—that bald bold unit postured like an italicized questionmark—was seated in front of the computer the school had just given him, trying to figure out which slot the discs went in, grouching that his monitor was busted when it wasn’t plugged in.

  I invoke this confusion to remind that when Greener was in residence, daily web use—campuswide internet access—was still a decade away. If our alma mater would’ve imported him just after the millennium, who knows if he would’ve felt so forsaken? who knows if he would’ve even dreamed of this gest?

  As we roamed upper quad to lower, Greener became, by steps, progressively glummer until he was saying, You want to know the truth? New York’s flunked me. Why else am I here? I’ve been suspended, I’ve been expelled.

  I said, You seem to be doing OK.

  Not compared to how I’d be doing if publishing weren’t over, with the money gone and editors not editing, my generation’s screwed—we’re not the immigrant experience, we’re not the assimilation experience—we’re the first nothing generation, we’ve got nothing to write about and no one to read it, everyone too busy getting technologized, too harried with degrees.

  Greener paused.

  The conversation had taken an unpromising path. And we had too—leading down the hill to the labs.

  Still we’re better off than you are, he said—before you or your girl would even belong to a generation, you’d have to intern in midtown, where generations matter.

  You’re being unfair, I said, they matter here—your lineages and pedigrees—much more than on the coasts with all that transience.

  I bummed a cigarette off him. Because he smoked, I smoked too.

  I said, My family settled her
e before statehood—did I tell you I’m 1/16th Sioux?

  He said, Intro to Identity. Multiculti Polyethnic 101. My parents survived Europe just so I’d write about it, they survived Europe just so I wouldn’t.

  Greener was the type who’d give you a cig but not a light.

  I said, I was born here, completed every school here, Future Farmers of America central district secretary, which might not mean a lot to you but.

  Greener interrupted to ask, What conceivably could have made you a writer?

  The prairie grasses, the wheaty wilds, the good solid old-style people.

  Bullshit.

  Bullshit’s a valuable fertilizer.

  We’d walked into an unfertile field. A disused roughly triangular or sideways conical in its footprint pitch at the ragged edge of campus, which the baseball team—Ra, Ra, Bara Cara, Hep Hep, Don’t You Dare-A—had used for practice before the new stadium was built.

  A pitch outgrown with weed, rutted with deep mud troughs where the dean’s tractor had rusted. Haybales, scattered silage troughs, hose. A pecked senseless scarecrow, straw packed into the uniform of last season’s starting pitcher from a rival team one state over.

  Greener and I stood next to each other along the lip of the outfield, dividing what was collegiate from pure nature.

  He asked to feel my hands.

  When we clocked in for the next week’s workshop, a group of sincere and avidly morose shufflers, the room door had a slice of notepaper taped to its window at a reckless angle, pat will bring you down to the field—the handwriting that schoolboyish amalgamation of broad block and cramped cursive we’d become pros at deciphering—as for Pat, that’s still me, and though Greener hadn’t cleared this responsibility with me in advance, I led.

  Trust me. Mind the foul lines. This way toward the margin. Rounding third base, second base, first.