We walk a few blocks in silence. Every once in a while, her hand grazes mine. At the corner of 23rd Street, we stop again. In the distance I recognize the red sign of the Chelsea Hotel. I walk toward it and she follows me without saying anything. We pass by the restaurant named after Don Quixote and when we get to the striped awning of the hotel we stop.
Should we go in? I ask. A flash of fear flutters in her eyes.
You think they’ll let us?
Don’t worry, they know me, I say, taking her hand. The lamps, mirrors, marble floors, paintings, and sculptures, everything about the décor seems to intimidate her. From the ceiling, there hangs a papier-mâché figure painted green, a coyote about to leap. Esmeralda laughs and squeezes my hand. The front desk clerk recognizes me. I say good evening, but he doesn’t respond. We go to the elevator. Esmeralda doesn’t take her eyes off the lit floor buttons for a second. When the number 10 lights up, there’s a metallic sound, and the door opens. I have no idea what I’m going to do after we step out. Up until this moment, I’ve pretended I was going to Sylvie’s suite, but from here on that script doesn’t work. I push open the swinging doors and glance at the long, dark hallway. To my left is a common restroom. It’s always been there but this is the first time I really notice it. I open the door. Esmeralda goes in first. Once inside, I lean on the door until I hear it click shut. I look her in the eyes. She is vulnerable, defenseless. I wonder what she sees in me.
First the money, she says.
I stick my hand in my pocket. That morning, I had taken a hundred dollars from the box in the kitchen. I see twenties, tens, fives, and a few singles. I’m not sure how much it is. I give her the money without counting it. I’m surprised that she doesn’t count it either. She opens her small red-sequin purse, puts the bundle of bills in, and takes out a pack of two condoms. The light from the ceiling has a greenish cast. On the porcelain enamel of the bathtub is a trail of rust that runs from the side where the faucet drip begins to the drain. How old are you? She’s annoyed at the question. Nineteen, she says reluctantly and leans back against the wall tiles. Shifting her hips, she begins to take off her jeans, then her panties, until she’s naked from the waist down. She opens her legs and waits. A light down covers her thighs. She throws one of the condoms into the sink, then rips open the other one with her teeth, and hands it to me. She helps me put it on as she cups my scrotum, just like she had done at the bar but now skin to skin. Her hand is warm and rough and she pulls it away suddenly. She’s dry inside. I feel the hardness of her sex as I penetrate her. She grimaces and I stop. Go on, she says, but doesn’t move. I don’t know what she’s seeing, where her mind is at. I forage for her breasts buried under several layers of clothes and she lets me caress them. She presses the palms of her hands against the tiles and pushes with her hips. A cavern of flesh. The rubbing of a blind animal against the ceiling of a grotto. A grunt, either hers or mine. The friction is painful, as if I were rubbing my eyes with fingers coated in sand. I feel the blood in my cock. I hope the condom breaks. This is how diseases find their way in. Esmeralda spitting on the curb. What had she snorted? Heroin? I knew she wasn’t shooting up because there were no tracks in her arms. She probably smokes it. Who is this girl? What’s her story? What’s her mother like? Does she have any siblings? Who made love to her first? How old was she when it happened? The sound of trees falling, a forest felled by power saws, footsteps on a bed of dry leaves, the bloodshot eyes of a wild boar. Heavy breathing. Hers, mine? Animal panting. Is it me? I can’t do this. I’m on a path carved through a granite quarry, breathing in marble and quicklime dust. Wait, I hear myself say, wait. I fish for the flask of vodka in my pocket. You want some? The animal out of its burrow, half flaccid, its cartilage throbbing like a fresh wound. This will help us both. You want some vodka? Esmeralda doesn’t respond. What’s in those deep green eyes? Emptiness. A vast vegetable silence without end. I think I see a path of light ahead of us again. Without saying anything, she reaches out her hand. Her skin is rough. I pick up a bitter smell. Mine, hers? She chugs and shivers. Go on, take another sip. She does as I say. Her eyes flare up. A trickle of alcohol oozes from the corners of her lips. Now it’s my turn. We look at each other from the waist down, her eyes lifeless now. Mine want to erase all detail, so I drink what’s left in one long swig. I feel as though I’ve climbed several steps at once. Above my eyes, her mons covered by a triangle of twisted hairs, a crack of living flesh, violently rosy, the skin bumpy. Now, clouds, I don’t know where, a desert. She’s finally wet. I slip in easily, pushing upward, burying my head in the depths of the night. Hot slime. She begins to move, hooking onto me, helping me move. She grabs my shirt, pushes toward me, digs her nails into my back, my ass, sinks her teeth in my neck, rubbing my balls. Our movements take on a mechanical rhythm. The girl is now a wild beast howling from down a well. She takes charge of my body, leading me, the muscles of her vagina pressing at the base of my penis, pulling me in and pushing me away without letting me out of her, dragging me in again. She doesn’t say a word, waits until I collapse onto her breasts. As soon as I lose all strength, blood gone slack, she reverts to her initial passivity, her eyes vacant. She waits till I go soft, then expels me from her body. The greenish light from the ceiling blinds me. I see the second condom unopened in the sink. Esmeralda goes to the bidet and spits like she had done on the sidewalk. Her thighs are shiny with fluids. She straddles the bidet and washes. She asks me if I need to clean up and I tell her that I don’t. The germs, those harbingers of death, are they already in me? I think for a second about Marc. Is he fucking some beggar? Where? In a public bathroom, like me? In a sewer, in the parking lot of the Green Snot, in his apartment? Is he reading his poems aloud to some illiterate homeless person, a truck driver, a toothless old man, a young hustler with a hard body who is set on stealing his wallet, and if he has to, cracking his head open?
Going out, the front desk clerk gives us an annoyed look. We’ve put one over on him. We pause for a moment in front of the display cabinet to the right of the front desk. It’s full of books and other items relevant to the history of the hotel. On the glossy cover of a pulp fiction novel are some high-class whores with very white skin and their hair dyed platinum blonde. Esmeralda reads the title aloud: Chelsea Girls. What’s it about? she asks me.
I don’t know, haven’t read it. Murder, I suppose, I tell her. Do you like to read?
Me?
It’s almost dawn. The pimp is leaning against the window of El Quijote. Behind him is the knight errant’s suit of armor. The visor of his helmet is up; one of his ironclad hands holds a spear and the other the menu of the day. I say good-bye to Esmeralda, wondering if she’s just given me the gift of death, a death that someone else had already gifted her. Or maybe death will pardon me, pardon both of us, as it always pardons Marc. I feel like throwing up. Listen up, Ackerman, hold on, this is good, firsthand stuff you can use, turn into literary trash. Put together a good story, crude, raw, controlling, the material a quilt of writing, garbage-dump dreams. How about that? The crescent moon rests atop a cloud like an ashen scimitar. The desk clerk comes out to see what’s going on. Four figures on the edge of dawn. What then, Marc, will you please tell me? Is this material for your poets or mine? Rilke’s angels or Bukowski’s? No, no. This shit is real, nothing to do with literature. That’s why I want it in here, a part of Brooklyn, among so many other things, because it’s the only way I’ll cook up a meaning for it all—I think of Esmeralda’s sex taking in my own, turning it into something significant, at least for a moment. I remember her green eyes, Esmeralda from Spanish Harlem, a girl addicted to crack or heroin, no doubt. A young woman from the projects who has to put up with sons of bitches like me. Note my choice of words. Sons of bitches. Language betrays me. My mouth is dry. Could it be that even though we belong to different worlds, when I was lost inside her, we got to share something, if only for a few seconds? Esmeralda! I yell out. She and her guardian turn around at the same time, the pimp and the
whore. I take a few strides toward them. The Puerto Rican reaches into the pocket of his jacket, but she stops him. I’m too far away to look into her eyes, but if I could, I’d see that I’ve never existed for her, and I say nothing. I’ll see you, she says and turns away. They walk together toward Eighth Avenue. When they get to the corner, they turn right, heading north, and disappear.
BRYANT PARK
[May 1991]
It’s been almost five years. I had no way of knowing then, but I would never see Nadia again. June 1, 1986. She spent the night with me at the Oakland, but she was in a weird mood. The light woke us up and we left Brooklyn early, although her bus to Boston wouldn’t leave for a good while. She was going there to say good-bye to her brother Sasha before taking a flight from Washington to Paris. She didn’t know when she would be back. It could be some time. They had given her a scholarship to study at the Conservatoire National Supérieur, with Bédier. We took the subway. At the 23rd Street stop, she said she wanted to get off and walk up Fifth Avenue from the Flatiron Building to Grand Central Station. She was having trouble leaving me, perhaps because she was already certain, unlike me, that we would never see each other again. At Bryant Park, I told her that I wasn’t going to walk her to Port Authority. She took my hand and nodded. A Slavic-looking old woman watched us from her little stall.
How about some tea? asked Nadia, and went up to the stall without waiting for me to reply. The woman didn’t understand a word of English. Nadia tried Russian. That didn’t work either. So she used her hands, and managed to order for us. The woman pointed to the tables in the park, suggesting that we sit in one of them. After a few minutes, she brought us two cracked china cups. The tea had a perfume-like, comforting aroma. When Nadia finished drinking hers, she examined the inside of her cup. I did the same. The inside of mine was stained with gray shadows and some leaves floated in the liquid remaining at the bottom of the cup. It looked like algae. The old woman approached us.
Do you think she knows how to read tea leaves? Nadia asked.
If she does, it wouldn’t make a difference, since we don’t speak the same language.
The woman smiled as if she had understood us, took the cups, and went away. We looked up. There was a light fluttering in the air, the rustle of slow white shapes raining upon us from above the tops of trees. The park was boxed in between skyscrapers, and a swath of swiftly moving clouds would occasionally drown it in near-complete darkness. The shadows of the trees trembled on the concrete paths and on the marble walls of the library. The white shapes were shreds of paper that someone had tossed out one of the buildings facing 42nd Street. Some landed on the grass, others on the surrounding tables or on the sidewalk below the park balustrade. A strip of paper, long and curly, landed on Nadia’s lap. She picked it up carefully, smoothed it out, and read it to herself.
It’s from a love letter, I think, she said, handing it to me.
The pieces of white paper continued to rain on us. When they had finished falling, Nadia stood up and began to pick them up. Piling them up on top of the table, she was able to put together two incomplete, rather wrinkled pages, loose pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. Reading in a low voice to herself syllable by syllable, she managed to reconstruct several passages. It’s definitely a love letter, she confirmed, looking at me, and she read aloud from the fragments she had pieced together. She took a long envelope out of her bag, one of those with a plastic window for the address, and carefully slid the sheets inside.
Give me your notebook for a second, she said when she was finished, and buried the envelope in its pages. Then she closed it and looked up at the sky as if double checking there weren’t any last shreds of paper about to arrive. You have to do something with this, Gal.
Something like what?
You have to find out about the rest of it, reconstruct the love story from this letter and write it. Why don’t you include it in Brooklyn?
Fourteen
RETURN TO FENNERS POINT
“I once started out
To walk around the world
But ended up in Brooklyn.”
LAWRENCE FERLINGHETTI
A Coney Island of the Mind
[Brooklyn Heights, April 17, 2008]
I’ve grown more and more obsessed with death, Ness. I know it sucks to talk about it, but the thing is that it’s not easy to avoid when all your friends are dropping like flies, leaving you more alone than a car at night in the rain . . . Well, when you get to be my age, what can you expect? You know how old I am? That’s right, eighty-six. I’m surprised you remember. I was born in 1922. My affairs are in order, both legal and otherwise—I don’t mind telling you these things, you’re family. Look at Raulito, ’member I was once so worried about him? He’s making a fortune now. Everyone goes to him because they know he’s honest to a fault. My daughters are both fine too. Camila left her husband and is now with a guy who works in a bank. They live in Tulsa. Wally was full of shit, so I get why she dumped him. My other daughter, Teresita, she’s single, she’s the brains. Teaches natural sciences at a college in Baltimore. You’ve never met my daughters, have you? Vincent you’ve met, that I remember. It’s him I want to talk to you about. I know I’m not going be to around much longer, so I’ve been worried about the bar. At one point, I thought I basically wouldn’t have any options aside from hiring a management company or just selling the place. And that would have been the end of the Oakland. Luckily, though, there’s been a new development. Vincent wants to run it. How about that? He got divorced too and is moving to Brooklyn. All’s well that ends well. He sold his business in Rochester. A clean slate. He’s going to be the one in charge of the Oakland when I’m gone, because the Oakland must go on, like life. My wife, Carolyn, is fit as a fiddle. She’s fourteen years younger than me, so she has miles to go. The sad thing is that I lost Víctor, my assistant. Didn’t you hear about that? He opened his own bar. And do you know what he called it? You got it, kiddo, exactly. The Oakland. So what can I say? My bar now has descendants. We’re going to have to number them like kings in the old days and moguls now. Charles V, Ford III, Oakland II. But I miss Víctor like hell. Gal discovered him, I know you know that whole story backward and forward, I’m sorry, you know how we old farts repeat ourselves. Oh well, I have a new assistant, Danny, but he’s just got no color, if you follow me, and I’m not just saying that because he’s white. I’m saying it because he’s useless, not to beat around the bush, although I like the guy and accept him as-is. That’s how life goes, you get more tolerant, and if you don’t, who the fuck cares anyhow. Like the saying goes, grin and bear it. And, you know, there’s a Spanish proverb that comes in really handy here: No one goes to his own hanging willingly. So, yeah, the Oakland’s gotten a bit rundown. Still the same regulars, a bunch of burnouts and has-beens, but look, if I took them all in when they were young, I’m hardly going to turn them away now that they’ve got one foot in the grave. They never had anywhere else to go—the Oakland’s been the only home they’ve ever had. Take Niels, for example. He’ll kick the bucket with his elbows on the bar—though I bet he’ll bury all of us. My God, tell me one thing, Ness, when was the last time you stopped by . . . ? Fuck, really? In that case, we’ve got to get through a lot of background before we can tackle the important stuff. Let’s see, who’s still around from your time? Manolito el Cubano died of AIDS at Beth Israel. It was horrible. He wanted his mother to come and see him. One day, Nélida and I went to visit him in the hospital and it left our hair standing on end. He was howling, Mamá, mamá. It cut right through you. So I offered to pay for her plane ticket. I found out she lived in Tampa—and she’s still there now. I got in touch with one of his sisters. She said their mother couldn’t come. Alzheimer’s. Didn’t say a word about coming herself. I didn’t push it at first, it wasn’t my business, but at some point I just had to ask—I gave it to the sister point blank, and she said . . . well, she said she wasn’t coming either, there was too much between them, bad ugly things that it was best n
ot to stir up, so I left it at that. Manolito always said that he wanted to be buried in Cuba, though of course he meant when Fidel died, so . . . Anyway, we buried him at Woodside, in the original cemetery, yeah, that big one you can see from the BQE. And Ernie? He retired finally. And I say he retired because what else can I call it. He works as much as he ever did, which is to say not at all. He hasn’t broken a fucking sweat once in his whole goddamned life. No, no, I tell a lie, actually, he probably works more now than he did before, because he offers you a drink without your having to ask for it, whereas, before, it was impossible to even get his attention. You asked him for a drink and he just looked at you like you’d taken a shit on his mother’s tombstone or something. He’s moved from one side of the bar to the other—that’s basically what his retirement entails. Now he’s just one more of the rabble of drunks. The only one who’s exactly the same as ever is Nélida. I don’t know how the fuck she does it, but she doesn’t age. She gets younger every day, has more drive and energy. She reminds me of Celia Cruz. The truth is that I don’t know anything about anyone not related to the bar. There are four or five old friends I still talk to. Though fewer and fewer as time goes by, I must say. It’s different with you, because you’re the one who calls all the time. Louise? The truth is, I never see her. Not that we saw each other a lot before. She was Gal’s friend, really, so if he wasn’t in the mix, we didn’t see each other. I mean, I see her every year or year-and-a-half, if we’re lucky. She’s another one that never ages. She looks the same as twenty years ago. She’s another one who calls pretty regularly, like you. I’ve always liked her, a good hardy woman, just like I like them. She broke up with Sylvie, you heard about that, right? What you probably don’t know is that she went back to Europe. Sylvie, yeah, not Louise—no one could drag her out of New York. Who would have thought it after so many years? No, not Switzerland, she lives in Paris, thrilled, enjoying her fame—yeah, she won the art lottery too. I hope it doesn’t eat her up. No, look, kid, come on, I’m not implying anything, don’t get me wrong, I’m happy for her. Sure Louise is fine, she’s the one who decided to end it anyway. It was me who called her last time. I was watching PBS, and all of a sudden something about the Spanish Republic came on, and I said: Fuck, of course. Today is April 14. I thought about Gal. When the show was over, I called her. It was a good thing, because she said she had been thinking about him all day too. We talked for hours. Don’t forget to drink a toast to the Republic, she said in the end. To the Republic and for Gal. And I said what the fuck, and declared an all-night open bar in honor of Gal Ackerman. Half the patrons didn’t even know who he was, but an open bar was just dandy with them. I didn’t care about what they thought. All I wanted was for them toast him, and, of course, there were quite a few who did know him. I sat by myself at the Captain’s Table and in between sips I remembered this and that. You have to take into account that Gal lived here for quite a few years. I also thought of you, ’cause you also spent quite a bit of time here writing that novel. How long did it take you? A couple of years, no? Holy shit! It was hard to get you to accept a salary, remember? Too bad you needed to leave after everything was done. Well, the important thing is that you finished the thing. And remember how at first you would come down with the boxes and we burned any papers you didn’t need? When I told you we were like the priest and the barber, you cracked up. Admit it, you were surprised that I had read Don Quixote from beginning to end. It was the same with Gal, because I’ve never been much of a reader. It was my father’s doing, Don José Otero, may he rest in peace. When he went blind, he made us read Cervantes to him aloud. My mother, my sisters, and I took turns reading him a few chapters at a time. The best part about that was to see how he laughed, it was a such a joy. In the end, I caught the bug too. Probably if it had been up to me, I’d never have done it, but on his deathbed my old man made me promise that I would read the whole thing myself, and of course I did. I still have the copy he gave me, and of course it keeps coming up. That’s the thing about that book—all the things that happen in life are already in there somewhere.
Call Me Brooklyn Page 27
