by Jan Richman
I have the same sensation when I’m swinging high in the air. When I’m feeling low or lost or horny or just plain dumb, a good sturdy glute-powered ride in the sky cheers me up. The slight nausea that hits me when I’ve pumped up as far as I can pump or the unsettling hello! of the swingset’s legs jumping off the ground each time my toes puncture the stratosphere give me an electroshock out of the blues. The skirt of my dress billows out parachute-like every time I hit my apogee, even though I’ve tucked it under my thighs as tightly as possible. I love leaning way back on the upmost pull, arching my spine to look at the cluster of trees behind me, upside-down apparitions that seem to float in the cobalt sky like plumed green clouds.
Casey is enigmatic—sexually fervent but as profound as a baby. Silly me, I thought that offering a guy a month of free pussy with no strings attached was a proposition unlikely to be refused. The first week, he suggested that I never go home to New York. He thought there might be an opportunity for me right here in New Orleans: I could turn the Triangle into a burlesque club and call it “Jan’s Pink Triangle.” I thought “Jan’s Pink Wedge” sounded nastier, but he said, “Burlesque, not porn.” On our third date, he showed up at my gate clutching the Queen of Spades I’d left on his doorstep, one of those old Victoriana playing cards with a plump naked lady on the back, sloe-eyed and knock-kneed. I’d found this one in a shop in the French Quarter, in a basket filled with silver milagro charms of tiny hands and breasts. I was surprised to find the card genuinely erotic when I picked it up; there was something about the model’s stare, her tightly coupled thighs, her shy, crimped side-part. I placed a bleary lipsticked kiss on the back and left it on what I hoped was the right France Street doorstep.
“I don’t want to interrupt your writing,” Casey said. He laced his long fingers through the gate’s ornate ironwork and looked in at me sitting in bed with my laptop. Since that first day when he’d read aloud what was on my screen, he’d been very careful to respect my privacy. He held up the card. “I got your message.” He smiled his sheepish smile, half his mouth curling up and fading away like smoke.
“That’s okay.” I replied, hitting Save and shutting off the computer. “I’m about ready for a break.”
He invited me back to his place, a small shotgun shack about two blocks from me where he lived rent-free in exchange for doing construction work—specifically, constructing an actual floor for the place. The front door looked sturdy enough, but when he flipped the key and swung it open, there was only—where you might expect to see boot-scarred baseboards or a bongwater-stained carpet—a murky, scabrous pit. He charged right in and marched down and up the hilly terrain, like a stubborn cartoon character undeterred by obstacles. I followed him by skirting around the center ditch, teetering on remnants of concrete foundation that jutted up out of the mess at odd angles. The anteroom, a chamber behind the floorless main room, was more or less level, paved with a layer of old newspapers. This served as bedroom, kitchen, and art studio. Casey referred to it as “the birdcage.” As far as I could tell, the only effort Casey had made toward reflooring was about twenty penciled diagrams that were push-pinned to the walls like butterflies, still barely flapping their intricate, patterned wings. The drawings were lovely, lined up like little windows, though I couldn’t tell their purpose. Didn’t he have to pour cement or something? Shouldn’t there be iron rebar and dumptrucks involved? There were clothes neatly folded and stacked in milk crates, next to a twin futon mattress made up with Spider-Man sheets. Empty pizza boxes were tucked next to the stove, and beer bottles rolled on the kitchen counters. Casey grabbed two beers from the refrigerator, took my hand and led me through the screen door onto the porch.
We sat on the steps and gazed out at his small backyard. In the dim light, I could see down the block of backyards, a line of ten or twelve identical little sheds spaced about twenty feet apart. Casey’s shed held a potting wheel and a few assorted street finds, like a pair of black patent leather thigh-high boots that he hoped had belonged to a prostitute. I asked to see one of his pots, but he said he was just learning and had had to break all his creations to look inside and see what he’d done wrong.
Later, after he’d unbuttoned my shirt and played itsy bitsy spider on my belly, after I lay back on the cool porch in the dark and time stopped while he sculpted my breasts with his eager, rough fingers and kissed my nipples like they were made of whiskey, when he finally sprang up and announced, “Whew! Gotta piss,” I rifled through the pile of ripped-open mail on his kitchen counter and found out that his name wasn’t really Casey, it was Robert. I felt a flare when I saw that Lafayette Electric bill addressed to “Mr. Robert Hilliard Jr.”—an electric tingle ran through me fast and hot, a spark that entered through my eyes and flamed its way straight down to my groin. I’d been fingered by an imposter, whispering and moaning a lie. Casey had stolen his own name.
My arms ache and my belly feels confused, as though I’ve been eating balloons. I’m dizzy but infused with oxygen, and I’m sure I am lighter than I was when I got on this swing. I slow down by dragging my heels in the dirt every time I hit the bottom of my arc, creating two slightly-darker-brown stripes in the sandy earth beneath me. The sky is lopsided, fully purple now in the east but still as orange as a bitten peach in the west. I hop off onto the soft dirt, wave good-bye to the girls who have been gaping at my spirited swinging style, and head for home.
A slight breeze brings up goosebumps on my bare forearms. As I pass by the court, I notice that the basketball game has dwindled to a few teenage die-hards who aren’t expected home for dinner: a strategic, fierce game of cutthroat. There are no shouts of camaraderie or encouragement now, just heavy breathing and the squeak of shoes across blacktop. I rub my arms and quicken my pace, and decide to take the route home that goes by Casey’s place. Walking up Dauphine until it hits France, I turn right at Lorenzo’s Pizza Parlor.
I spent an hour in Lorenzo’s last Monday night, when it felt too lonely and pathetic to be watching the Academy Awards alone in my tiny soundproof vault, where my running commentary on Debbie Allen’s jazz-hands choreography would evaporate into the indifferent concrete. Casey was at a hockey game, and I was sure my rancor would be lost on him anyway. I have made no other friends here, certainly no one I’d feel comfortable enough with to adopt a spot on their den sofa. Then I remembered that Lorenzo’s had a big-screen TV, broadcasting gay porn whenever I’d been in to pick up a pizza. While it may seem strange for a pizza parlor in a semi-remote working-class neighborhood of New Orleans to be staffed and patronized largely by leather queens, the more I’d looked around, the more this seemed to be the case—and who better to join in dissing Gwyneth Paltrow’s bad taste in designer gowns than a bunch of pizza-loving, smut-respecting, bearded, buttless-chap-wearing gay men? Unfortunately, the place was (inexplicably) kind of dead on Oscar night, but I drank two beers and shared an unbridled, extended giggling fit with the bartender during the Elton John/ Eminem duet before returning to my lonely abode.
Just past Lorenzo’s, I am thrown back a step by a sudden burst of stentorian barking from behind a tattered yellow house. A gargantuan black mastiff comes flying around the side yard and hurls himself at me. His heavily muscled body hits the wobbly chain link fence that separates us, and I am unable to move my limbs. He keeps jumping at me, launching himself again and again onto the swaying metal wall, snarling and roaring as his hard block of head showers drool in great arcs like a lawn sprinkler. I crouch on the sidewalk with my hands over my ears, paralyzed by the violence of the roar. I haul breaths from the deepest part of my lungs, and my whole torso heaves like a long-distance runner’s. I can’t believe I forgot to tiptoe by the yellow house so as not to awaken the wrath of the volatile beast. I want to get up and flee; I don’t know if the fence will hold; each time the heavy bulk of his black body advances, I think this time he will break it down, this time I will be invaded, overpowered by the rush of this animal’s desire. I can’t move
. Looking up France Street, I long for some sign of Casey: the wheels of his bike displacing the dirt in the empty lot, or the thud of his basketball in the street. All I see are shadows and mirages. The mastiff’s eyes are trained on me, shining and wet in his head, twinkling like pilot lights.
And then something happens: suddenly, night falls. The streetlight on the corner of Dauphine flickers three times, sluggishly, and then stays on, illuminating my frozen huddle. The white skin on my arms is as puckered as a chicken’s. Glancing around, I pick myself up and slowly cross the street, pretending not to be humiliated and shaken. The artificial light has flummoxed the beast’s impulses. I don’t think anybody noticed.
Dear Chantelle, I scribble in my head, Can you stand as strong as a concrete tree in a hurricane? Survive a plunge down Niagara Falls in a ten gallon hat? Keep your cool when your wig collection catches fire and the whole house oxidizes the color of fresh meat?
I have started a collection of virtual RSVPs addressed to my dad’s fiancee, and composing them has become a compulsive habit, keeping me as busy as my roller coaster notes. For some reason, many of my RSVPs are in the form of questions.
Dear Chantelle, does anyone call you ‘Chanty’? Can you stand by your man when he can’t stand by himself? Can you stand him when he twirls you, when he breathes you, when he stands you on your head?
“Dear Chantelle,” I finally wrote yesterday on the stamped card that was enclosed with the invitation, “Thank you for inviting me to your wedding. As it turns out, I will be on the West Coast in April, and I’d love to attend. I’ll be bringing a date. We’d like the chicken and the prime rib, respectively.” I signed my name legibly, which took some steady concentration. I wanted her to be able to read my signature. I wasn’t sure how much my father had told her about me, or even if he’d ever mentioned me. It had been so long since we’d seen each other, and somehow I had the feeling that he was keeping me just beneath his surface, as he’d always done. But my “Richman” would call attention to itself. I was practically the only one left in the bloodline, besides my dad. I stamped it, and sent the card.
Almost at the end of the block on France Street, I see Casey’s denim-blue Dodge Swinger parked outside his house. He’s not out on the stoop, but the lights are on inside his place, sending a fuzzy yellow glow out into the darkening street. I walk up the steps to the front door and raise my fist to knock, when I hear voices inside, laughing. One voice sounds giddy and female, like a girl being squeezed around the middle. I casually drift to the left, attempting to glimpse something through the front window, but Casey has hung heavy butcher paper there, and all I can make out are distant shadows back in the birdcage. After looking around to make sure no one is watching me (the neighbors have retreated from their porches, and the few meandering pedestrians are far down the block), I decide to dart around to the side of the house and take a quick peek in the kitchen window. I know I shouldn’t, but now I am really intrigued. Does Casey have a girlfriend? Is that why he’s been acting so broody lately? Is that why he stood me up? I have a feeling that one glance will tell me what I need to know, and I can’t resist the temptation to further examine Casey’s secret life as Robert, to pick out the camouflage from the tangle of real jungle.
It’s easy to sidle down the narrow alleyway between houses without garnering any notice. It’s shadow-dark and filled with shrouded lumps of vaguely human-shaped junk—an old stove, a pile of tires, a rusted floor lamp in classic hangman pose. No obstreperous dogs erupt from hidden yards. I gingerly step around the detritus, dragging my fingertips along the house’s blistered paint. The kitchen window, a small grimy pane that’s been long-since painted shut, hovers above my head. I’d forgotten about the raised brick piers that make the ground floors of the houses a few feet higher, a staple in New Orleans architecture, built to withstand the constantly rising sea level. After tugging briefly and uselessly on the heavy stove, I traipse through the dirt, pulling three tires into what looks like a reasonably steady tower beneath the window. If I stand with one foot on either side of the top tire, distributing my weight equally, I should be able to brace myself on the window ledge and get a good look inside. I lift my right leg and place my foot in position, while leaning with my left hand on the opposite point on the tire. Once I’m balanced there, I can hop up heartily and hope my left foot lands in the correct spot. I take a breath, issue a silent drumroll, and blast off hard from the ground, reaching up to hug the side of the building. Just as my foot comes down a few inches wayward, I manage to grasp the end of the window ledge and hoist myself into equilibrium before my slipshod foundation topples.
And there, on the newspapered floor of the kitchen, is Casey. He’s wearing a pair of boxer shorts and a white T-shirt, lying with his knees raised and his arms splayed out to the sides, his long wheat-colored hair spilled on the floor like a wide dirt road. Crawling up and down his vibrating torso is a very small child in a Winnie-the-Pooh diaper. The kid scales the mountain of knees, then flings himself onto Casey’s plush belly, squealing in terrified glee as though he’s jumping out of an airplane. Then he runs back around and climbs Casey’s knees again, poised for re-launching. Casey is just lying there, giggling, with a beatific grin. I haven’t seen that look on Casey’s face before, maybe I’ve never seen that look on anyone’s face, such purblind, unadorned bliss. In that look, there is no world beyond the kitchen floor, no window, no sky, no France Street or night coming on. There is just that small body, rising and falling again and again, absolutely sure that it will be caught. I don’t know what exactly I expected to find here, but a cherubic boy using my lover’s body like a jump castle wasn’t even on the list. Through the grubby, rain-stained window I can see that the kid has wheat-colored hair, and that Casey’s arms, flung out on the makeshift floor, are ready to spring into action should that baby make one false move. I want that force field around me. That safety bar is a haven I remember from a dream. I smile in spite of myself, letting my farewell spill out silently like a rush of steam from a moving train.
Cut It Out
My father’s virtuoso performances took place when no one was awake to see them, at five-fifteen in the morning before the first rays of sunlight turned somnolent Hackensack, New Jersey, into the cranking machinery of a city in motion. The residential streets were still dark when my father began his paper route, but the purple sky was ragged with a royal blue diagonal stripe in the east, evidence of brighter hues to come. The boy on his bike throwing papers was the bugle that tacitly sounded, marking the dividing line between deep sleep and morning bustle, between dugout dark and blistering light. His bike’s shy squeak rasped its repeated syllable as he pumped through the empty streets with his canvas pouch slung over his shoulders.
My father had inherited the southeast Hackensack route from his brother the May he turned nine, graduating from an entry-level route that encompassed no more than thirty houses in one block and a cul-de-sac (the same circuit along which their mother had taken them trick-or-treating when they were toddlers). The southeast route started six blocks from their house, swung around the edge of the riverside along the row of newer, upscale homes with front yards the size of national forests, and then back down into the midtown grid whose blue-collar lawns had a postage-stamp uniformity that was heaven to a paper boy’s sense of aesthetics. When he set off from the house, after he carefully unlatched the shed and silently wheeled his bike out so as not to wake his parents, his pouch was stuffed full of freshly bound newspapers, folded in perfect thirds so that just the New of The Newark Star was visible on top, underlined emphatically by the wide beige rubber band.
The stack of papers, unassembled, would always be fanned on the stoop by the kitchen door when he stepped out barefoot in the dark pre-dawn to fetch them. Sometimes he tried to stay awake after midnight in order to catch a glimpse of the courier he’d never seen but had often imagined as a leather-faced Jimmy Cagney with a limp or maybe a glass eye, some pirate-like impedimen
t contracted in the line of duty that added to his tough swagger and salty demeanor, who delivered stealthily to all the paper boys in town in the wee hours when the ink was barely dry. The Newark Star night visitor was a wily and ephemeral patron, much touted but never actually seen, and he was the closest thing to Santa Claus my father had known (his parents had broken it to their sons early that the man in the red suit was a figment of the collective goy consciousness). My father accepted his tutelary newsprint gifts with a shrug, dragging the great stack into the kitchen and, after pouring himself a glass of orange juice, collating the bunches. He pressed the sports sections into the front sections, dropping those onto the floor where the local scene and classifieds lay. He’d crawl around on the cool tile, tamping, folding, and tightly binding each island, sliding the rubber band down off his wrist and over his splayed hand until it was flat and perpendicular, marking the middle of the parcel. After he’d finished, his pouch resembled an open can of vienna sausages, machine-packed in tight rows. It was awkward to carry that many papers slung over your chest and still be expected to pedal successfully, but my father flew the initial six blocks to the starting gate of his route with only one or two shuddering delays when he’d grip the handlebars with one hand and the mouth of his pouch with the other, and slow way down, weaving in and out of the dotted line in the center of the deserted street like a drunken skier slaloming his way down a bunny hill. Once he hit Fig Street, and he could begin tossing some of his ballast, he was able to maintain a constant high speed, incorporating his shivers and dips into the rhythm of his driveway swerves and nickel-curve pitches.
