Great Kisser

by David Evanier

  “I bought him a bottle of Scotch. And I went to Barracini’s for a three-pound box of sour candies. I gave them my order. I say, Look at me. I want my order, and I want it now. And I told the sweet black nurse: give him one. If he wants more, you give him a little bit at a time. You take a little ashtray, and you fill that up by his bed. And you fill up a shot glass with a little water, take a little Scotch, and an ice cube. Then hide it from him because he wants more. I tell my uncle, you want to take a walk? I’ll wheel you in your room, I’ll wash you around, get you dressed. Then I’ll dress you up warm, put you in a wheelchair, put his artificial leg on.”

  “I would like some cookies, Michael,” an etherized voice wafts up to me. It is Leah, whose body is twisted and whose head circles around constantly. I get the cookies for Leah. “I said I want some cookies, but I didn’t say I want them now. When I’m done with dinner I would like some cookies please—”

  “Here they are—”

  “You’re not listening, Michael. I would like three cookies please, when I am done with dinner. Please get me three cookies on a plate when I am done with my dinner.”

  “Okay—”

  “What kind of cookies do you have?”

  “Pecan and oatmeal.”

  “Pecan, please. Three cookies, when I am done with my dinner. My father will be picking me up at eight o’clock. Please listen. My father will be picking me up at eight o’clock. We will go downstairs at 7:45 and wait for him. Will you take me downstairs at 7:45 please? I would like my cookies now.”

  Danny Stein is one of the people I’ve volunteered to counsel since I arrived in Los Angeles. An obese young man in his twenties with a sharp, whining, robotic voice, he is slumped in his chair. Seated across from him, Michelle, a pretty young girl, his former girlfriend, is staring at him.

  “Hi, Danny,” I say.

  “I’m so glad I don’t have to speak to Michelle anymore. She was always bothering and disobeying me. She was just impossible to deal with,” Danny responds.

  “Danny, she’ll hear you.”

  “No, she won’t,” Danny says. “She’s deaf as a doorpost.”

  This is true. Michelle keeps staring, a little smile on her face.

  At 7:45 an arm grips mine in a hammerlock. It is Leah. I suggest we wait in front of the house. “We will sit in the lobby and look through the window for my father. My father will be here at eight o’clock. We will sit behind the glass and wait for my father.” I tell Danny I will see him on Wednesday, and take Leah downstairs.

  When her father arrives, I wave goodnight to Leah and I go home.

  II

  The next morning I take a beaming Mendel Berger on a tour of Hollywood. Mendel is 30, very fat, bursting out of an orange shirt and red suspenders. He has a bright red yarmulke on his head, which keeps falling off. Early mornings, before I meet him, he takes buses back and forth across the city to pass the time.

  Mendel usually walks slowly, but now he darts excitedly down Hollywood Boulevard. He heads directly for the booth with bus schedules and takes forty of them. He spies more booths at the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel, swoops down, and takes a pile of free coupons. He picks up the phones at booths to see if anyone is on the other end, and checks for coins. He plays “peekaboo” with me. He peers through slats to watch construction crews and checks out the baseball caps and T-shirts at the schlock shops along the boulevard. “I’m having a wonderful time,” he says with a warm smile. Suddenly he hugs me. I hug back. “And a left to the right and a right to the left and a left to the right,” Mendel shouts. “There’s only one Mendel and there’s only one Michael. Mendel! That’s my name and that’s the game.”

  Since Danny is no longer dating Michelle, I have arranged for Mendel to go out with her on a date. But Mendel didn’t know what to say to her, and told me that Michelle kept calling her mother on the phone and saying, “Mendel isn’t talking.” Today I give Mendel a list of questions he can ask Michelle on their next date: “Do you like to walk on the beach? What are your favorite foods? Who is your favorite movie star?”

  Today Mendel talks to the leaves and barks back at barking dogs. He says he wants to go to Australia “to see the ostriches, kangaroos, and hyenas.” He takes leaves off trees, pretending to chew them, and playfully says “Yummy” to me. Gazing at flowers, he mischievously asks me: “What shall I have for dessert? Maybe a cheeseburger or a knuckle sandwich.” Wrapping paper rustles in the wind as we walk and he says, “The wrapping paper is following us down the street.”

  When we get back to his house, Mendel’s fragile father is waiting for us. Mr. Berger is despondent about his son’s condition, and I have suggested that Mendel watch a video of Mr. Berger’s Holocaust testimony.

  The three of us sit in Mendel’s bedroom watching. On the screen Mr. Berger talks of Hungary in 1944: of watching his younger brother being cruelly beaten every day; of seeing his sister relinquish her one-year old baby to a capo because she is being sent to the gas chambers. On screen, he cries.

  I feel a hand on mine, and a body shaking. Mendel is revving up to one of his trademark hale and hearty laughs, which he usually emits every three or four minutes, no matter what we are talking about, sometimes followed by a high five. I put a finger to my lips to shush him.

  He is silent the rest of the time: about an hour and a half. He fidgets, yawns, and scratches his fingers. But Mendel is listening.

  At the end, we all stand up, the three of us. Mendel is not laughing, or smiling.

  His father turns and looks at his son in surprise.

  III

  At three o’clock Danny, my prize client, is waiting for me. “I still have my problem with pretty women, Michael,” he shouts at me. “I’m like a buzzing bee among a lot of flowers.” The people around us try to look casual.

  Danny has a tortured look. Everything about him is slightly off: as he walks, he holds his left hand up in the air.

  Danny is a surprise kisser. He kisses beautiful women, strangers whom he cannot resist, on the hand. “But I’m not the only one with problems, Michael. Today I was walking with my friend Jody, and we saw a pretty girl. Jody walked into a store window and broke his nose. He had to go to the hospital.” Danny smiles. “And Jody has a tragic past. His girlfriend drowned in the bathtub.”

  He has gotten into trouble with the police and been warned that if it happens again, he may go to jail.

  “I had a little trouble this morning myself,” Danny reports. “Judy, this girl at work. But I only stared at her and said certain things.”

  “What happened?”

  “Well … she triggered my urges. She was wearing a pink sweater and a black brassiere under it. I got carried away again, Michael. But I’ve solved the problem. When I see her next time, I’m going to cover my eyes with my hands.

  “Or I’ll just have to talk about good things. Not about things that will scare her. I’ll just strike up a good conversation and not concentrate on her clothes and body. Just concentrate on appropriate eye contact. Rather than stare, I’ll move my eyes around the way my therapist told me to.” Danny demonstrates how he will move his eyes “toward his head” rather than toward the girl. “And my therapist told me to move my hands up and down while I walk. This is my relaxed mode.” I don’t see much improvement. Danny still looks a little weird. “I just get so anxious when I’m around a woman. I don’t know how to act appropriately with her. And I do stupid things because I don’t care about life. But once I meet the girl of my dreams, hopefully my life will begin spinning in another direction.”

  Danny knows how his autism affects people and what he’s missing by a few inches: normal friends and a decent social life, the ability to fit in and be accepted, and above all, a relationship with a beautiful girl who does not have a disability. It’s like a hungry man looking through the window of a restaurant at a banquet. He joins college clubs and watches the other students sit far away from him and even quit the clubs to get away from him.

  “It may h
ave something to do with the way I see my eyes, Michael,” he says. “I think I have what’s called evil eyes. So I see things differently from anyone else.”

  “What are evil eyes?” I say, even though I know what he means.

  “I use my eyes for evil looks.”

  “But you’re not evil, Danny.”

  “I know. I stare because I’m afraid of saying anything to a pretty girl. That’s why I do it.”

  “What would you say to them if you could?”

  “I would try to say hi to them.”

  Danny pauses for a moment. “I think it may also have something to do with balls and pillows too.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Somehow I see women like pillows instead of human beings. Someone to hug and kiss and lie on and all that stuff. I even bite my pillows. When I was with Michelle as boyfriend and girlfriend, I bit her sweater and squealed.

  “Eleven years ago, on June 12, 1986, a Wednesday, at 2 P.M., my Mom was driving and she got very upset on the freeway because of all the cars. And I’d been so nice to her that day: I’d taken her dogs out for her and they’d done potty and poo-poo. But she got very upset with me, Michael. And I squealed at her. And I’ve begun squealing at pretty girls a lot again. They don’t hear me. I do it from a distance.

  “The laws have gotten tougher because there are a lot of women that have been raped by a lot of nasty men. And a lot of children kidnapped by a lot of crazy men. It’s not like the old days anymore when men were allowed to kiss women on their hands. Those days are gone.”

  We sit in Baskin-Robbins and Danny finishes his double ice cream cone. “And then there was the mall last night.”

  “What about it?”

  “Well … there were these female piano players.”

  Danny pauses. “Same old stuff. Anyway, I could have gone further with Judy. I could have taken my pants down and placed my penis on her hand. I didn’t do that.”

  I say goodbye to Danny.

  IV

  I am seated in my car, locked in Helen’s garage. The garage door is shut, and will not open. I took too long getting my car, and the garage door shut on me. I look for a way of getting out.

  Helen is a hooker. She is moist with semen and wine, saturated with it in that darkness of hers. She has a kind of crazy, lyrical, elegiac sentimentality.

  She is blonde and Hungarian and thirty-three. She has beautiful large breasts, with hard dark nipples, big blue eyes, and a voice with music, childhood and womanhood in it.

  I had met her in 1985 in a room of sage and chimes and bells. Her mother was in the hospital dying of leukemia. Helen was vulnerable. We stood on her terrace in early February sipping wine. “Don’t you go falling for me,” she said. “Michael, do you know what I’m going to do up here when the weather gets warm? I’m gonna get some trees and some Chinese lanterns. I can have my kerosene lamps out here. It will be beautiful. I love fixing the place up. I love having friends over and making things really nice for them and having parties, but I can’t do that right now. Michael, are you Jewish?”

  “Uh huh.”

  “Because over in Jersey, my Mom said her first love was a Jewish boy, Morty. A candy store boy. Her grandfather wouldn’t let her see Morty unless she screwed him first. That was his trip.”

  Her puppy, J.J., barked.

  “What are you doing, you busybody? He has such a manly bark.”

  Later she said, “I’m on a death trip. I left home at sixteen and went to Chicago. My father calls me a stupid failure. I’ve been through a paper shredder. I ate out of garbage cans. I was afraid for so much of my life. I’ve done nine porn films. I’ve fucked men as a way of getting rid of them.”

  When I was leaving, she did somersaults with J.J. on the floor.

  At the door, she said of the two of us, “We’re like twins.”

  Waving, she said, “Please don’t ever laugh at me or try to change me.”

  On the day her mother died, she called me from her car after the funeral. “I won’t be able to work for three or four days. Michael, I brought heather for my mother. It was her favorite flower. To honor her as my mother and as a woman. I should be home in a couple of hours.”

  All these strangers, paying her. At the end of our session, she walks around the room with the phone, answering her messages, whispering, purring and laughing. She complained that my messages on her machine are too long. “That one about Celine and Gogol took up half my tape,” Helen said. “Michael, you’re in my head all the time. I put my energy into you and I lose my concentration in other areas where I have to survive. This business can be pretty horrendous. A guy made me be a dog today.”

  I asked her that we see each other outside the apartment, that we walk on the beach, see a movie, even have breakfast (the only free time she said she had). I had never been with her outside her apartment. When I walked on Riverside Drive or on the green Columbia campus, I thought of her, stuck in that room day and night.

  She was afraid of leaving that apartment and that structure. “A guy in the gym was talking to me while I was riding the bike. I know what he wants! But I was nice to him. Otherwise when I leave the gym I might find my car smashed or dented or defaced.” She laughed. “Well, I guess I had a crazy father.”

  But this afternoon I finally took her out. There was a chink in her armor. She was busted this week and she has to move.

  In the restaurant, she was a new Helen. I knew this mood of hers. Having been busted, she was on a new quest to change her life. In addition to seeing her psychic and her healer, now she would go into Reichian therapy and also learn Tantra on top of it.

  She said the therapy groups met on each floor of a large building. “As I walk by, I hear people from every floor crying out, ‘No, no, no, no!’” She seemed to find this thrilling. And then there was Tantra, a refined form of massage, legitimate, spiritual, classy. She would even get a license. I wanted to ask if she would not have to jerk guys off anymore, but she’d hate the question.

  Helen put on a serious look, and said she was thinking of a deeper relationship with me. I knew it was bullshit. When the wine came, she hooked arms with me and I drank out of her glass and she drank out of mine. I wondered who taught her that.

  Back in the apartment, she said, “I’m turning off the phones,” as if that was a permanent move. She paused. “But I do have one call I’ll have to make later.”

  Afterwards, she was on the phone in the corner, whispering and laughing.

  In the garage, I sit in the car. I wedge my way out of the structure and call Helen on the intercom in front of the building. Her line is busy for a long time. She finally answers. “My car is locked in. Buzz me out.”

  “I was buzzing you,” she said impatiently. “I never heard of anybody taking so long to get out of a garage.”

  V

  The next day, Danny and I walk on the beach, looking at the girls in bikinis.

  We pass a pretty girl.

  Danny says “Hi” to her, and she smiles.

  He turns to me. “See how appropriate I was, Michael?” he asks.

  Scraps

  I look at the tattered snapshot of Rachel’s parents, and wonder how I came to have it. Had I stolen it in 1958? It appears out of a time warp: the father, Julius Rosenberg’s look-alike, the light of the flashbulb reflected in his glasses, short-sleeved Klein’s Hawaiian shirt, little double chin, mustache, thinning hair, about forty. Unsmiling, smug, belly extended, his arm casually slung across the shoulder of Rachel’s mother. Thinking: spaghetti for dinner again tonight. In every way his wife looks more animated, as if it’s an occasion. Her wedding-ring hand reaches up to cover her husband’s hand over her shoulder. There is a slab of red lipstick across her smiling, eager, alert face. She wears a dark, respectable dress with a belt, she appears to be on tiptoe, perhaps one foot raised in back. They stand close together, in front of a framed picture of trees, in poverty, in confusion, in need, in love.

  I love them, as they were then
. Unconditionally.

  They had a copy of Jews Without Money, the classic proletarian novel by Mike Gold.

  They were Jews without money.

  The photo album, with its musty smell of crumbling paper, tells the story of my relationship with Rachel, my first girlfriend, starting in 1956. These are the pictures. There’s a photograph of a corner of the tarred Elmhurst rooftop, a lone TV aerial. I recognize the trestles and brick sidings. I took Rachel up there, above her parents’ and her apartment, with a blanket. The flapping of clotheslines, the trees and houses and Newtown High School, where we were both students, below us in the distance. There’s a date on the back of the snapshot: September 1958. After I had lost her, I took the photograph. This was a year after Rachel went off to summer camp and left me behind. I was 15.

  Pictures of Rachel when we were still together. Rachel backstage: posing with Zero Mostel, with Tom Ewell at The Seven Year Itch. Rachel, her hair long and dark, holding a black and white cat in the moonlight, on concrete. On the fire escape, beside the milk bottles at her door, perched on the upright piano. Behind the stairwell of the apartment house (we heard the click of heels as people walked up and down, not knowing we were there, holding each other), Rachel posing with the down-and-out troopers who made up the 8-act bill when the Palace revived vaudeville. The vaudevillians (like Frank Marlowe, who wound up his act at every show by plunging into the orchestra pit) lived in the side street hotels off Times Square.

  On the Palace stage we saw Buck and Bubbles, Belle Baker, Pigmeat Markham, Gus Van, Whispering Jack Smith, Cliff Edwards, (Ukelele Ike), Helen Kane (the Boop-Boop-a-Doop Girl), Butterbeans and Suzie, Smith and Dale. (“I am da doctor,” said Doctor Kronkeit—Smith, in a filthy frock. “I’m dubious,” said Dale. “Glad to meet you, Mr. Dubious,” said Kronkeit.) Strutting in rented tuxedos, looking back over their shoulders, waving their hats, at their finales, flashing million-dollar grins at the audience from on top of the world. And back to the Strand Hotel, a steam pipe, tuna fish and bread on the crumbling window sill.