by Hank Moody
We stop for the wine and plastic cutlery, as I have no silverware. Tana dishes out the servings onto paper plates. When she produces two candles from her jacket, I raid the communal bathroom for two rolls of toilet paper to use as holders. We light the candles and toast with plastic cups. I dig greedily into the meal. Tana makes up for my lack of conversation with a series of thoughtful questions about my mother, which I answer mainly with nods and shrugs. “How about your dad?” she asks. “Is he still going to leave her for Janine?”
“I don’t have any idea,” I confess, having temporarily broken from the meal for a cigarette next to the open window.
“Aren’t you freezing? You’re not going to want any ice cream.”
It dawns on me for the first time that Tana is wearing makeup, as she had at the Christmas party. And while she hasn’t repeated the dramatic cleavage, she still looks good in designer jeans and a tight sweater that doesn’t hide her curves. “I do declare, Miss Kirschenbaum, that someday you’re going to make one of those sorry excuses for men you like to date a very, very happy camper.”
Tana sighs. “I’m so done with sorry excuses for men.”
I lift my cup. “Here, here. To muffdiving.” She laughs, spitting out some of her wine. I tear off a piece of one of the candleholders and hand it to her.
“At least I’d be getting some,” she says.
“Come on. It’s not that bad, is it?” I ask. Her expression is half-quizzical. And half something else. “How bad is it?”
“You know I’ve never gone all the way, right?”
“With a woman? Hey, homosexuality’s not for everyone.”
“I mean with anyone.”
“Wai … Wha … Never?”
“I was kind of thinking,” she says, her voice barely a whisper, “that maybe it should be you who initiates me.”
A thought pops into my brain. “The other night, when you said you wanted to talk to me …” She nods shyly. I’ve never seen Tana so vulnerable. I pull her close for a hug, and another thought creeps into my head.
Oh. So close. But.
“First of all,” I say, “I’m incredibly flattered….”
“Oh God,” says Tana. She’s already pushing away from me. “Here we go.”
“You’re taking this the wrong way. You are a brilliant, incredibly sexy woman, Tana Kirschenbaum. But you’re also my sister—maybe not by blood, but you know what I mean. Sex for me is …”
I stop. I don’t have any idea how to finish the sentence. What does sex mean to me? Why don’t I want to have it with Tana?
She’s cleaning up dinner. “I can do that,” I say. Tana puts down a plate and grabs her coat off the bed. “Can we talk about this?”
She’s putting on her jacket. “There isn’t anything to talk about,” she says. “You’re right. Bad idea. Totally retarded.”
“I don’t remember saying any of those things.”
She’s walking out the door. “I should go.”
“Can I at least walk you to the station?” I follow after her, hoping the cold air will clear my head and let me undo what-ever damage I’ve done. She pauses in the hallway, waiting for me to catch up.
But she changes her mind the moment we reach the street. “You know what? It’s too cold. I’ll just get a cab.” Tana flags a cab before I can offer a counterargument.
“Thanks for dinner.”
“Tell your mom I’m going to come see her,” Tana says. Then she closes the door and the cab pulls away.
13
I HAVE NO INTEREST IN RETURNING to the coffin I call home and besides, I’m feeling pretty goddamn sorry for myself. At times like these, there’s really no substitute for getting good and drunk. Out of convenience, I choose the Mexican place next door.
I’m throwing back my first shot of tequila when I remember I’m still broke. I find a ten in my pocket, money I’ve budgeted for the weekend’s food. I work through the math—spacing out the left overs from Tana’s meal, I should survive through Monday. So now I’ve got three shots and a tip. Enough for a buzz, maybe, but not quite the obliteration I’d been hoping for.
By the time the third shot is blazing down my food pipe, I’m pouring my troubles out to the bartender. Ernesto from Nicaragua. Who is, right now, the wisest man in the world.
“So what can you tell me, Ernesto? That I’m an idiot? That love is impossible? That I’m a stupid gringo whose problems don’t amount to a hill of beans?”
“Ah.” Ernesto nods sagely. “Dios nos odia todos.”
“That’s pretty,” says a voice from behind me. It’s K. She looks like she’s been crying. “What does it mean?”
“I’m pretty sure he said that ‘God hates us all.’ But I flunked Spanish so who knows for sure. Are you okay?”
“I’m fine,” she replies. “Just fine. Nate and I broke up.”
I’ve just broken my best friend’s heart. My mother is dying in the hospital while my father cheats on her with a bottle blonde. Yet the news from K. makes me bite my lip to keep from smiling. “Well, pull up a seat, lady. The lonely hearts club is in session.”
“Why?” asks K. “What’s going on with you?” I bring her up to speed about Tana and my mother, adding that I’m too broke to get drunk. “You poor baby,” she says. “Let me take care of you.”
We order another round of drinks from Ernesto, who frankly looks relieved to be done with me. I tell K. about the Christmas party and the hospital. She tells me about her breakup with Nate.
She’d been offered what she called an “obscene” amount of money for two weeks of shoots in Southeast Asia. Victoria’s Secret was starting a new ad campaign there and K., as it turned out, still had a devoted following among red-blooded Asian men. She’d intended to turn the job down—the money would be nice, but she didn’t need it, and did she really want to go back to the loneliness, even if it was only for two weeks? But when she told Nate about the offer, he freaked out. Taking advantage of Scott the Drummer’s winter break, Venomous Iris planned to take up residence in the studio for as long as it took to finish the album. Nate insisted he needed her for emotional support. But after one day in the studio, she realized that her real job was to remind them to eat in the midst of a collective heroin binge and, when supplies ran low, to score some more.
“I mean, I’m not a fucking drug dealer,” she says.
“Thanks,” I reply with the appropriate sarcasm.
“You’re different,” she says. “Pot’s not a drug. It’s a survival tool. Anyway, he said that if I wouldn’t do it, he could find some other slut who would. And that maybe he’d finally get a decent blow job. Can you believe him?”
“What an asshole,” I say.
“What an asshole,” she says.
An hour later, K. and I are having sex in my room. It’s drunk and sloppy and I’m not really sure that I’m not dreaming the whole thing until I wake up the next morning and she’s still there. Then she wakes up and we do it again, almost completely curing my hangover.
We walk glove-inmitten down the street to a French bistro. K. insists on paying for the eggs Benedict and Bloody Marys. “A hard-luck case” is how she describes me to the waiter, but the food’s restorative powers temper any injury to my masculine pride. We return to my room, where, this time, we get it right. The sex begins tenderly, the mystery of the new mixed with an intimacy that’s just starting to feel familiar, and ends athletically, our two bodies moving like pistons.
Now we’re holding hands on the elevator, our fingers intertwined. We ride to the fourteenth floor, where Roscoe Trune’s annual New Year’s Eve party is under way. There is no official ownership of rooms at the Chelsea, but the suite might as well belong to Roscoe, an openly gay poet from Savannah, Georgia, who’s resided there for almost as long as I’ve been alive. K., the invited guest, is greeted with kisses on each cheek; I’m treated cordially, but with the subtly raised eye-brows that benefit the arrival of a scandalous home-wrecker. They’d expected to see Nate.
The exception is Ray, who eyes me with a newfound re-spect. “I’ve got to hand it to you,” he tells me. “I didn’t think anyone was breaking that ice.” The pupils of his eyes look like Oreo cookies. I’ll later find out that he—along with most of the party—is on something called “Adam,” a psychedelic that by the time I get around to trying it, a few years later, is better known as “Ecstasy.” What I know now is that every conversation seems to wind up with someone rubbing my sleeves to feel the texture or offering a non sequitur commentary on the shine of my hair. Undue credit, I think, for a guy who simply hasn’t bothered to shower.
Later, while K. dances with a shirtless, muscled man who Ray reassures me is “one of Roscoe’s boy toys,” he proposes that I join him on a weekend trip to South Korea. “I’m going to see a goddess,” Ray says.
“You’re on drugs, Ray. Try to keep it on Earth for us in the cheap seats.”
“I shit you not, man. She’s a real live goddess.”
“Really? Does she ride a unicorn?”
“She’s a Kumari, man. A bodily incarnation of the goddess Taleju.”
“Tally who?”
“Taleju. It’s the Nepalese name for the goddess Durga. A total bad-ass. Like, she’s got ten arms and carries swords and shit. She rides a fucking tiger.”
“I’ll admit that the ten arms present some interesting possibilities, but take it from me: Women and sharp objects, they do not mix well.”
Ray claps his hands. “I’m not saying she is Durga. The point is that Devi—that’s her name, Devi—was chosen from like thousands of girls to be Durga’s earthly incarnation.”
“Kind of like the Miss Universe pageant,” I suggest.
“Exactly! Only a lot more hardcore. She had to have what they call ‘the Thirty-Two Perfections.’ A voice as soft and clear as a duck’s. A chest like a lion. A neck like a conch shell.”
“Every time I start to take you seriously, I remember you’re on drugs.”
“I am being totally serious, man. For ten years, her feet were not allowed to touch the ground. Some dudes carried her everywhere in one of those, you know, canopy things. People lined up to touch them—her fucking feet!—for good luck. Even the king of Nepal, once a year he got down on his knees and kissed those hoofers.”
“And you think she’ll slum with a mortal like you?”
“That’s the best part. She’s not technically a goddess anymore. Taleju means ‘virgin.’ Once she, you know, bleeds, the gig is up—Durga’s got to find herself a new host. And Devi? One day she’s a goddess, the next she’s a woman with serious selfesteem issues. Or what I like to call my wheelhouse!”
“You’re kind of a fucked-up guy, Ray.”
“I know. But what can I do?” He grins evilly. “How’d we get started on Devi?”
“You were going to Korea …”
“Korea!”
“… to see a goddess from Nepal who … Why is she in Korea again?”
“She’s a model. Vicky’s hired her for the same campaign as K. Which is why we’re going to Korea. You can surprise her. Chicks love that shit. It overloads their brain so much that they can only think with their pussies.”
“As tempting as it might be to turn K. into a drooling sex zombie, I don’t exactly have the fundage for international jetsetting.”
“Nobody pays for travel. You can fly for free.”
“No, you fly for free. You’re a photographer. Drug dealers pay full fare.”
“You go as a courier. There are a bunch of places down-town that will hook you up. You find someone that needs something delivered to Korea, and they pay for the trip.”
“A courier? Doesn’t exactly sound like it’s on the up-and-up.”
Ray laughs. “Didn’t you just say you were a drug dealer?”
“The redistribution of certain herbal products is one thing. International smuggling, that’s an entirely different cup of tea. I take it you’ve never seen Midnight Express?”
“I’m talking about legitimate businessmen. A buddy of mine does it all the time. Important documents—contracts and shit. You take ten minutes to drop them off, the rest of the trip is free.”
“Isn’t it, like, a ten-hour flight?” I say. My resistance is starting to soften. “I can’t exactly ask for any more time off from work.”
“Ten hours? More like twenty.”
“I’ve got to be back on Monday. Unless I’m missing some-thing, a day there and a day back leaves me zero time there.”
“You’re missing something,” he says with a stupid grin. “The international date line.”
“Spell it out for a college dropout who’s never been farther than Canada?”
“You’ve got to fly across the date line, which, I don’t know exactly how, but it turns back time. You leave Korea at six o’clock Monday morning, you get back to New York at six o’clock Monday morning. Maybe even earlier.”
“That doesn’t sound possible.”
“Neither did you nailing K. But look what happened.” We both turn toward the dance floor. K. catches us looking at her and smiles back, rolling her eyes at her partner’s enthusiastic interpretation of MC Hammer.
A few minutes before midnight Roscoe throws open the windows. I’m finally in a room with balconies, à la Sid and Nancy. The cold air is bracing, but thick with anticipation rising from the millions of revelers in the streets. Good-bye, 1980s; the ’90s have got to be an improvement. K. finds my hand and holds on to it, and when the clock strikes twelve, we engage in a very public display of affection. A few minutes later, we return to my room and do a few more things in private.
14
NEW YEAR’S DAY TURNS OUT TO BE work as usual, or unusual, as the Motorola buzzes all day. Everyone in New York City has a hangover to nurse, and it’s on me to play Doctor Feelgood. I reluctantly leave K. in my bed and try to lose myself in the flow.
I probably would have forgotten all about Ray’s proposed adventure if chance hadn’t intervened.
A lot of artists take crap for their “creative temperament,” and probably rightly so. But in a city like New York, the cost of living requires its starving artists to be true pioneers: It takes real guts to settle the kinds of neighborhoods where most right-thinking folks would soil their pants if they were caught there past sundown. That’s what I’m thinking, anyway, as a delivery to a metal sculptor south of Houston leads me through what not too long ago must have felt like a combat zone. Only now I see trendy boutiques popping up like weeds through the cracks in the sidewalks. Maybe art really can change the world.
After the Meet-Up, I pass a travel agency that looks like it caters to the NYU crowd. An easel in front lists international fares to exotic cities that sound only vaguely familiar. Where the hell is Machu Picchu? Christchurch? I know from a music video that a night in Bangkok can “make a hard man humble,” but that doesn’t mean I could find it on a globe. Seoul, Korea, is about three-quarters of the way down the list and, at $599, well out of financial reach. But a sign in the window promises passport photos, immunization cards, and air courier jobs. Ten minutes, five missed pages, and ninety-nine dollars later, I leave the agency with instructions to pick up an expedited passport and to meet a Mr. Yi, this Friday night at eight P.M., in front of the Korean Air desk at Kennedy’s International Terminal. The agent warns me not to be late. “Mr. Yi is a stickler for schedule.”
The night before K. departs, we go out for a farewell dinner in the West Village. It’s a nook on Barrow Street, the kind of place that only last week I would have mocked without mercy, full of violins and suggestive artwork to serve up manufactured romance for moneyed stiffs lacking passion or originality. Instead, I feel myself smiling along with the rest of the suckers as two couples become engaged before we’ve had a chance to see the menu. After dinner, K. and I walk back to the hotel. She wraps her arm in mine and leans against my shoulder like an old lover. I feel like I’m floating in a warm bath of endorphins. Less cynically, I am falling in love.
When I wake the next morning, she’s already left for the airport. A funny and sentimental note promises more good times upon her return. Then my pager buzzes, another unfamiliar number from Long Island. It turns out to be Danny Carr.
“Welcome back, Danny. How was Florida?”
“Too much snow,” Danny replies, clearly not meaning precipitation. “A lot of fake tits. When did that happen? Not that I’m complaining. A lot of girls, it makes them fuckable, you know? I need double this week.”
“Double? I don’t know that I can even give you the regular. You didn’t exactly tell me when you were coming back.”
“You’ve got to think ahead, man. Look, I’ll pay you triple.”
“Even if I could, Danny, I don’t have that kind of money to lay out for you.”
“Quadruple. Come meet me in Bridgehampton and I’ll front you what you need.”
I call Billy and tell him that I can’t make it in to work, using my mother as an excuse. An hour later, I’m on the train to Long Island, continuing past Levittown to the Hamptons. I exit to weather cold and unbeachlike and take a taxi to the address Danny gave me. When I ring the doorbell, I’m greeted by a distinguished old man who might have been the butler, had he been wearing something more than a banana hammock.
“Yello!” I say, startled by the sight of so much wrinkled skin.
