“You piece of shit, you’re a fucking doorman,” the drunk chick said, her lip curling with contempt around the last word as she swayed in front of me. “Is this what you wanted to do with your life? Check fucking IDs and be an asshole?”
Point taken. It was pitiable, indeed, to be a thirty-two-year-old doorman on Ludlow Street in February. I’d lorded over Pianos four years earlier, a night manager high on power, drunk on top-shelf liquor. I’d had to beg the guy who fired me for a gig as a lowly doorman, like a dog returning to its vomit. Was I going to be that guy and inform her of my scholarly achievements? “Ivy League doorman” was like a garnish of edible orchids and coils of paper-thin-sliced blood oranges placed next to a huge, steaming dog turd.
I reached for the most sarcastic tone I could muster.
“Okay, I was kinda undecided before, but now I’m definitely going to let you in.”
A stupid line, less than I wanted to say and more than I should have. I stood between the girl and the door, so there was absolutely no confusion. Working in bars for ten years, you learn that monosyllabic grunts and hard stares are the best way to deal with irate partygoers denied entry. If everyone hated me, well, it was my job to be hated, and I was good at it.
The drunk chick—short with flat, dead-looking mousy brown hair, wearing an ill-fitting green party dress with a parka thrown over it to combat the cold weather—mad-dogged me as her boyfriend tugged meekly on her tiny arm. All her color, even the color of her clothes, was washed out, as if she were just a crappy, sun-bleached, low-rez printout of herself.
“This is your life? This is what you do?” she said. “Stand out in the cold and watch everybody else party and get fucked up and dance and get laid while you stand here? Are you happy? Are you happy with your life? Is this what you came to New York to do, to be a fucking doorman?”
Which finally hit a nerve.
It came out half hiss and half growl, the most cutting thing I could think of to say.
“You have bad skin.”
The nearby eavesdroppers recoiled. It was true; her skin was pitted and pallid and uneven. Sometimes cruelty flows through me unchecked.
The chick took an unsteady half step back with a huff of pain, then lunged at me. I swept her to the side with one arm, and she stumbled into her boyfriend.
Themy and Jimmy, the two bouncers, Greeks with chests so thick their girth must have exceeded their height, stepped in and quickly moved the girl and her boyfriend down the block.
The Greeks were old-school mafia strongmen. They liked me because, unlike most of the other doormen, I was comfortable with violence. Getting jumped was the only redeeming part of the job. I was allowed to fight back, spinning some frat boy’s head with a hook or just dropping him with a kick to the side of his knee before the Greeks moved in. When a guy with his foot in a cast menaced me with an upraised crutch, I told him that if he hit me with that crutch, I would break his other leg, and he would crawl home. The Greeks laughed about that all night.
My right sinus, the one behind my preferred coke nostril, throbbed like someone was trying to jam a pencil into my brain. “Folks, please have your IDs out!” I called to the line and started shuffling more people into Pianos. My fingers were sticky with snot on their IDs. Weekend nights like this, all the fucking amateurs were out. Gone were the day-trader financial slime and their sublime, disgusting plastic porno angel dates. Even the clubby Israelis and Eurotrash had fled, replaced with fattening sorority girls, short men with adult acne, glasses, and black Amex cards, and foreign tourists, flabbergasted to be expected to both carry ID and tip their bartenders. I hoped I got every one of them sick.
I glanced at my cell phone to check the time while a chubby girl in leopard print, stinking of garlic, nicotine, and bubble gum, rooted sloppily in her purse for her ID. A text had come in from Oksana: “im pregnant. its yours. thought it wld be selfish to tell you but fuck that. so tx a fuckin ton. i hate you with all my heart.”
I didn’t get off until 4 a.m. It wasn’t even midnight. Looking like a long night.
Shuffling back to Brooklyn, 4:30 in the morning, four miles to my Bukowskian alcoholic flop in Greenpoint. This was a measure of the progress I’d made from walking to my job at the pizza place in Massachusetts in February when I was seventeen: my frigid winter’s walk was now two miles longer.
The Williamsburg Bridge alone remains undiminished after ten years in the city. As you climb, all you can see in front of you is the cracked gray asphalt lit orange by the sodium streetlights, the growl of trucks rumbling up from either side. But when you pass the juncture where the bridge splits in two, glance back over your left shoulder: the night city yawns open with promise, glittering orange and black. If your eyes are blurred with tears, the city dissolves into a series of shiny orbs centered on the glow of the streetlights and neon signs, like alien eggs, a tiny, bright speck surrounded by a sphere of shimmering amniotic fluid, glimmering with hope, soon to burst open with new life.
Then the great gulf of swirling black water—the bridge is high enough that the impact of your body hitting the surface is usually enough to kill you—and the sight line narrows again to gray asphalt ringed by chain-link fencing, the path now angled down, down into Brooklyn.
Morning came late in the afternoon. My skin felt slick and greasy against the bare mattress. In the shower, I made the water as hot as I could stand it, then gingerly lowered myself into the bathtub.
As I lay there, I realized it was bullshit. No fucking way Oksana was pregnant. How many nights had we been together in total? Five? Seven? She told me she went on the pill like two days after the second time we fucked. Which was both too late and jumping the gun, if you thought about it.
Though I couldn’t pinpoint exactly the last time we had got it on before I’d left town, I knew she’d been on the rag. I remember being surprised when Oksana offered up her ass without preamble. Afterward, I was kind of stunned when I rolled off her to go to the bathroom and noticed the white cotton string hanging from her crotch. It was increasingly rare for me to encounter someone more debased than I was, but that moment with her, well, it had saddened me.
I remembered cleaning up her blood in the bathroom the morning after. Jesus, the bulk of my life seemed to involve cleaning up blood in the bathroom the morning after. So she’d been on the rag then and couldn’t have gotten pregnant. And that was when? The night before I left for the Virgin Islands.
Lying in the bathtub, the water hammering down, I tried to count the weeks on my fingers like some big dumb monkey. Okay, four weeks. She wouldn’t have even missed a period yet. It was impossible for her to be pregnant! An awful accusation to make, faking a pregnancy, but Oksana had lied at every opportunity, lied with passion and conviction and boundless creativity, anything to manipulate a situation to maximize the attention she got.
Oksana had modeled nude for a painter friend of mine but swore she hadn’t fucked him. I kept texting her about it until she thought she was busted. I had been kidding around. I had no inkling she’d actually done it until she confessed. The first time she went home with me, she said it was just to get a rise out of Aaron, who had turned her down. After the third time, she declared that she wasn’t just in love but that she had loved me from the moment she saw me. Didn’t seem fair that love could be retroactive like that.
I had gingerly removed her from Pianos one night when I was working. The next day, her hand was in a splint—she spread the word that she’d had to make a trip to the ER for a sprained wrist. But she hadn’t fallen when I carefully carried her out. And the splint disappeared after a day or two. And, shit, that night I’d expressed concern to a friend of Oksana’s about Oksana’s mother’s death, the friend rolled her eyes and said, “She cooked us dinner last week.” Lie after lie after lie.
This pregnancy thing had to be bullshit. I hoisted myself out of the shower, dried off, and wandered to the window.
Brooklyn in winter is the only thing that makes both Los Angeles and su
icide seem equally appetizing. My building faces the highway, the front windows opening onto the brick balustrades of the majestic Brooklyn-Queens Expressway. We are in the last dying breath of Greenpoint, a jumping-off point, the last way station before you finally give up completely. Immediately to our left is a string of crumbling industrial buildings stinking of rotting lettuce and raw chicken parts, with decrepit RVs permanently parked in front, tiny, stooped men emerging from them late at night to empty white plastic buckets of human waste into the street. Somehow, I still manage to get my car towed every couple of months.
Beyond that, over the bridge to Queens, is a huge graveyard, First Cavalry Cemetery. Driving past it, what you notice first is that the skyscrapers in Manhattan are the same size and shape as the tombstones.
Behind us are yards that process scrap metal—the heavy grilles from abandoned air conditioners, copper wiring from abandoned buildings, junk cars, stolen catalytic converters. The monolithic upright teats of the sewage treatment plant glisten behind the scrap yards. Men covered in grease, stinking of alcohol and other chemicals, their humanity well atrophied, haul shopping carts overflowing with metal viscera in that direction every late afternoon, their daily pilgrimage. There but for the grace of Mom go I.
Escape in front of me, salvage behind me, death to the left, and to my right, The City That Can’t Get to Sleep. Sometimes you don’t need to reach for a metaphor because you live right in the center of it.
Have you seen me? You may have, driving by my apartment one late night or early morning. My window flashes by too quickly, just a glimpse of a troubling tableau: a naked man with a pale, hollow chest and raccoon eyes, his hand clutching something dark that you can’t quite make out: A bottle? A knife? A gun? Did it worry you? Did it register at all?
I did not disappear because I was moving past you with tremendous speed. I disappeared because your world is flowing past me as I stand here—drinking, watching, waiting—absolutely still.
I called Oksana. She’d already made an appointment with Planned Parenthood. So it was real.
I heard myself offering to sell a guitar to pay for the abortion. Such a dick move. Broke as I was, I had enough money left over from my old construction job to just cut her a check.
She sounded surprised that I had offered money, even in a shitty, reluctant way. She said the pregnancy was her fault and her responsibility. If I would just pick her up at the clinic afterward and let her recover at my house, that would be fine.
That snowy first Monday in March, I drove slowly into Manhattan, feeling like a villain. There was no parking by the clinic. I parked illegally around the corner and put my hazard lights on. Then I paced back and forth in the falling snow, from my car to the entrance of the clinic, trying to scoop Oksana up quickly so she wouldn’t have to walk far in the snow while I avoided getting a parking ticket.
I had almost given up when I saw her, a block away from the exit, walking toward the clinic, looking vacant and confused. I called to her, wondering how I could have missed her, got her seated in my car, and then drove her to my place. She slept most of the day. I dropped her off that night when I headed into the city to cover another door shift at the bar. I told her I would get her safely to her door, but she insisted I just drop her at the subway. It occurred to me that I’d never been to her apartment, that I had no idea where she lived, not even the neighborhood.
“Will you call me?” she said mournfully after she got out. She looked so pitiable there with the snow coming down.
“No,” I said. “I can’t. This mistake we’ve been making . . . we can’t make it anymore. We’ve done something we can’t undo.” Cruel? Yes. But less cruel than letting her continue to injure herself on me.
She gave me one last mournful look, then hunched up her shoulders and trudged away.
Three days later, I met up with Chen at a show. He didn’t have rent money for his rehearsal space. Some money had cleared from eBaying a guitar, so I brought him $250 so he could get current.
I got a text from Oksana, inviting me to her birthday party down at Lit Lounge.
“Jesus, Chen, look at this,” I said, showing him her text. It had only been three days since I’d picked her up from the clinic. Were we now supposed to do shots together?
“I know, I know. I just got the same text.”
I texted her back and politely but firmly declined. I’d been serious when I said we could no longer see each other, I told her. Yes, I’d hurt her, and that sucked, but it was also inevitable. It happened to everyone who touched me.
But, together, we had crossed a line. We had come too close to a seriously untenable situation: an unstable cokehead and a morose drunk with zero real affection for one another, bound together forever by an unforgivable sin: the thoughtless creation of another unwanted human being.
That’s how I had started. And now . . . well, I wasn’t a monster. Monsters did things. Bad things, true, but I didn’t do anything. I was more akin to a catfish—a mundane scavenger, a bottom-feeder, nosing around in the dark, living off anything dead and rotting, primitive and ugly, with no conscience or even consciousness, living just to fruitlessly copulate and consume. The best thing—the only good thing—I was capable of was making sure my father’s mistake ended with me.
My phone buzzed angrily in my pocket, a flurry of caustic texts from Oksana. I read them all, one after another, but didn’t respond. If I had learned anything from this life, it was how to absorb an attack without reacting.
Chen said that he’d try to calm her down. He was headed in that direction anyway, so he’d stop off for one drink and placate her. He could do that, have just one drink. What a friend he was to sign up for dealing with a drunken, angry Oksana.
I got drunk. I met another girl, Laura. We got drunker in some shitty fake-Irish Midtown bar. She stayed over. We made out but didn’t sleep together. I was supposed to want it. That was all there was, right? The Wetness and the Darkness, liquor and pussy, animal pleasure and oblivion? This was what I did; I got drunk and slept with women. That night, I just couldn’t force myself to do it. There was a gaping chasm inside me. You could throw woman after woman into that pit. Hundreds! Thousands! You’d never even hear them hit bottom.
The next day, Laura and I were heading to my car so I could drive her to the subway. I unlocked her car door and held it open for her. I heard a yell.
“Hey, asshole!”
I looked up and instantly recoiled: Oksana. Rumpled party dress, fishnets in shreds, her mascara dripping onto her cheeks like black fangs. Jesus, had she slept at all?
“Oh boy,” I said to Laura. “Um . . . just get in the car and lock your door, okay?”
I slipped around to the other side and managed to get inside and get my door locked before Oksana reached the car. She hammered on my window, howling.
“I can explain, I swear,” I said to Laura. We both knew I couldn’t.
When it was clear the glass wasn’t going to break, Oksana planted herself in front of my car so we couldn’t leave. I turned my wheel to the right, and she moved to my right, her hands on the hood. I cranked the wheel to the left, and she moved to my left. Shit. Drunk and in high heels, Oksana was still pretty quick.
I slid my hands on the wheel like I was turning right and again, she moved to the right. But the wheels were still pointed to the left, so I pinned the accelerator and peeled out.
Oksana squawked and flung her hot coffee at my windshield as we were escaping. I blew through a stop sign, then turned the windshield wipers on, which just smeared the coffee across the whole windshield.
“This happen to you often?” Laura asked with a wry smile.
When I dropped Laura off at the Bedford L, I had another text from Oksana: “Just so you know, I fucked Chen last night. U r the biggest asshole I have ever known.”
Chen and I had been through all kinds of shit together. He’d played drums for me on my first tour six years earlier. He’d lived with me when his marriage was falling apar
t. He’d driven ten hours through the middle of the night to pick me up when my van died in Athens, Ohio, on tour.
We were thick as thieves. The winter before, I’d worked some ridiculous security gig for a Hennessy party one night and nicked a $300 bottle of cognac on my way out. Chen and I had worked our way through the bottle together, him on the floor and me in my bed, sipping it out of coffee cups and giggling in the dark.
Jacob had told me, before he died, that he was honest about different things with different people in his life—his mother, his girlfriend, his drug counselor. But there was no one person with whom he was totally honest about everything. If he had just one person with whom he was totally honest, he was sure he could kick heroin. Chen was that person for me. We told each other the stuff we couldn’t tell anyone else, not just our triumphant nights or petty struggles but the real shit, the fear, the weakness, the mounting darkness.
Chen had plenty of girls. Ladies loved him. That he would take my loan and then go sleep with a girl with whom I was embroiled in such an acrimonious separation, three days after she’d had an abortion—impossible.
As I was walking into my building, my eighty-year-old landlady peeked her head out of her apartment.
“Um, hi, honey, I’m sorry to bother you . . .”
“Oh, no bother, Doris, what’s up?”
She tottered out into the hallway, clinging to the door frame for support. She had been quick and spry when I moved in but lately had been going downhill quickly. I did everything I could not to bother her, even slipping my rent under her door so she wouldn’t have to climb the stairs to my apartment.
“Well, your girlfriend rang my bell this morning. She said she had to get into your apartment. I don’t have a key so I couldn’t let her in.”
Good God.
“Uh . . . wow. Um . . . you did the right thing, Doris. I don’t have a girlfriend. No one should be going into my apartment other than me and Esteban.”
I Swear I'll Make It Up to You Page 18
