Songs of the Maniacs

by Mickey J Corrigan

  I hear him shuffle away.

  The photo in my hands is an original. The same one that appeared in my college yearbook. In the photo I am smiling and, honestly, I am a pretty little coed.

  What is chilling is how I look. I look so sure of myself.

  5.

  A good bartender has to have a certain kind of personality. He or she must be friendly, open to all kinds of people and their intimate talk, and willing to listen to all sorts of crazy drunken stories.

  I have that kind of personality.

  To pay my way through college, I worked downtown at McGoren’s Neighborhood Bar. I poured generous drinks and earned generous tips, especially from the male customers. I met my lovers at work. I rarely went to their homes or got to know their families, friends, and favorite dogs. A night with one of my lovers consisted of drinking and screwing in my rundown studio apartment.

  Sound boring? It wasn’t.

  Some of my lovers didn’t like my appetites, my limitations. Some of them never came into the bar again after a night of panting and slobbering all over my naked body. Some of the men I took home for beers and fancy finger work would continue to hang around the bar on the nights when I was on. Some of these men would drink together, and eventually they would end up talking to one another. I developed a reputation.

  Perhaps I should say I earned a reputation.

  I cannot tell you any of their names. I cannot recall a single one of their faces. My lovers from the neighborhood bar were interchangeable.

  So I know exactly what Justin means. And I am a smart girl. So I will think about this more. I will think about how a shrunken head, a yellow creature with Saran Wrap for flesh, a walking dead man, could have come into possession of a photo of me. A portrait of me from that time, the time in my life when I listened to men talk at night under dim lights in rooms that smelled of cigarettes, whiskey, and nervous sweat. And sex. And me, these rooms smelled of me.

  I will think about this. But not right now. Right now, I am walking across the quad to the café. I plan to buy a chicken salad plate and a large glass of Diet-Sweet iced tea. I plan to sit outside at a small round cement table and enjoy what is left of the sunlight before the thick paste of grey cloud that is headed this way descends on us.

  The wind has stiffened and the coconut palms bow toward me in the push of warm wet air. I have to veer off the sidewalk here and there to avoid the scattered iguanas sprawling about in the diminishing sunshine. It smells faintly of grapefruit blossoms and baked asphalt. I wish I felt hungry, but I do not.

  I cannot remember the last time I ate anything that tasted memorable.

  “If there is a God upstairs,” Justin had said. But upstairs from where he had been sitting, upstairs from where he lay down on his bony back on the couch, there is only another room, another office of some sort. A room where something is leaking onto the floor.

  This image bothers me. If all people are interchangeable, maybe all rooms are as well.

  The café is empty and the glass doors to the cafeteria inside are locked. Aluminum shutters cover the outdoor counters. Administration must be concerned about the coming storm, so they’ve let all the employees go home. The vending machines are operational, of course, so I feed them dollar bills until they give me back a package of peanut butter crackers and a plastic bottle of Diet-Sweet iced tea. The wind lifts my hair around my head and my skirt flies up in a sort of Marilyn Monroe arc.

  The cement picnic bench is still warm but the clouds have closed in overhead. I like to watch the pretty blue sky disappear on days like this. I like to see the innocent blue get swallowed up in greedy bites by the mean blackness. I eat a few crackers and watch the advancing darkness begin to change the landscape before me. Everything is gradually altered from pleasant to eerie. The transformation only takes a few minutes.

  All the iguanas scurry up the trunks of the sea grape trees to hide as the first few drops of rain splatter onto the sidewalk. I can smell the cool air rushing in to fill some type of vacuum. The wind whips the palm fronds back and forth like windshield wipers on the sky.

  I should run back across the quad, but I don’t. I feel like I am locked in a room, a glass room with no exit.

  I stand up and move to shelter myself against the doors of the cafeteria. I am huddling under the café’s perky red and white striped awning. My white blouse is soaked through in spots and sticking to my flesh. I won’t be able to make it back to my office without looking like I’ve been in a wet T-shirt contest.

  A man is coming across the quad wearing a bulky black raincoat and a yellow plastic hat. When he has the wind at his back he runs toward me. But then the wind shifts itself and he seems to pause and waver before pushing ahead once more. I fold my arms across my chest to cover myself, but the wind lifts my skirt again. The situation is hopeless. Dignity is not going to happen for me out here. I guess it has come to this.

  The man comes closer, pushing and swimming through the heavy air, breast-stroking his way against the western wind.

  Breast-stroking? Of course. It’s Victor in the rain gear, Victor with an extra rain poncho in his hands and a big grin on his wet face. He can laugh all he wants to, I am grateful to him for rescuing me.

  “Didn’t your parents ever teach you to come in out of the rain?” he snickers as I slip the plastic coat over my head. I grab his arm and we brace ourselves to head back across the quad. The clouds bear down on us and the wind smacks our bare faces with an icy rain. The air is at least ten degrees colder than when I came across the grass to the café. Behind us, the glass doors rattle loudly, shaking in their aluminum frames in the face of the gusting storm.

  Looks like the tropical wave is here. I ask Victor what his plans are for the next few hours of wind and rain and night-time skies. He puts his arm around me as we wade through the streaming puddles that suddenly swamp the low sides of the sidewalk. My pumps are ruined. My teeth are chattering.

  “Maybe you ought to come up to my place and we can dry off. Together,” he yells into my ear.

  The wind screeches through the ficus hedges and under the eaves of my building. The street is empty except for rushing water with its catch of swirling leaves. Multicolored hibiscus blooms swirl across a river of rainwater.

  When the street lamps switch on automatically in the premature darkness, we are at the front door. Victor opens it and I pass through. “I’m right upstairs from your office,” he says with an odd smile. Before I am able to respond he reaches for my hand. “You never asked where I lived. All this time and you never asked.”

  6.

  Anders mows the lawn at the big hotel for sick people. It‘s a good job. Anders is grateful for his job. He has been working at the big hotel since he was just twenty. That was a long time ago. Anders is not sure how long, but now he is older than that, older and more mature. And bigger.

  Anders is a big eater. He likes his food, yes, he does. He likes cheese fries and cheeseburgers and cheesecake too. Anders eats at the cafeteria every day. He is allowed to eat only one serving, he can’t come back up to the counter for more.

  Where the hotel is, the weather is almost always warm. And the grounds are huge. He is responsible (yes, he has responsibilities) for trimming the ficus hedges and the brown branches on the palm trees. So, by the time he mows all the grass and then goes all around the hotel grounds trimming, it is almost time for Anders to start cutting the grass again.

  Anders works weekends. But that’s okay because he takes Wednesdays off. He hangs out with the dorm advisors whenever he can.

  The dorm advisors like to hang out in the gym together. They live in The City like Anders does, but when they work the night shift they go to the gym and hang around. They let him listen while they sit by the ice machine, drinking can after can of beer and talking. Talking trash, the dorm advisors call it.

  Anders likes to listen to that kind of trash. H
e likes to listen while the dorm advisors discuss the things in life he knows very little about. Like women. And what to do with them when everyone has their clothes off. And money, how to make more of it or lose it all. They talk about the doctors and the sick people. Who is hot and who is gonzo. How they are changing and what this looks like close up.

  Anders cannot tell them apart, the sick people and the doctors. Only some of the sick people wear hospital pajamas, and only some of the doctors wear white hospital coats. So Anders can never be sure about most of the people he sees wandering around the hotel grounds.

  But Anders likes to watch the sick people change. He is continuously amazed at how this happens. First they look like anybody staying at a hotel. Slowly they start to change, they grow thin and weak, like a person does who is sick. They look half dead! Anders gives up hope. But then (and this is the amazing part) they start to look healthy again. But different than when they arrived. Totally different.

  Sometimes they become better looking, sometimes uglier. Sometimes they end up looking so bad it’s scary. But they always end up different.

  Anders doesn’t understand how it works, but he would like to try it. He would like to change too. Not that he is sick. He isn’t. Still, Anders would like to be one of the people who change.

  Who would he change into if he could change? Anders has someone picked out. The perfect person to change into.

  Anders would like to be a listener. In a skirt that blows up, up, up in the wind. He would like to become a woman who gets rescued in a storm when she is all wet and cold.

  He hasn’t figured out yet how he might do this, how he might change. He only wishes that this could happen to him one day. So far, he is still Anders. Big eating, hotel lawn mowing, slow thinking and never changing, Anders.

  7.

  His office is like mine in dimension and location above the quad, but there the similarities end. I stand stunned, glancing around what appears to be a cozy apartment. His place is so homey. A living space that feels well lived in.

  I am dripping on his thick pile carpeting, so I remove the loaner poncho, my sodden shoes and hose. I stare out the window at a familiar view. It is my view, but from a higher angle. Everything below looks a bit smaller and just a little farther away.

  Suddenly the window looks out through a waterfall. The rain is heavier, torrential, splashing itself against the bricks of the building with a barrage of resounding slaps.

  Victor returns to the living room and hands me a thick black towel, a plaid cotton bathrobe. He turns his back while I remove my blouse and skirt, which I drop on top of my other clothes on the carpet. The pile is growing. So is the puddle of water underneath the pile.

  Victor turns back with a lewd grin. Then he strips off his rain gear and plops down on one of the two powder blue couches facing one another in the center of the room. He bends down to remove his basketball shoes. When he motions to the couch behind me, I back up to it, then sit. The upholstery is puffy and warm.

  “While you and your clothes dry off, why don’t I tell you what I’m doing here,” Victor says.

  My hair is dripping down the back of my neck, down the slope of my spine. And my clothes will stay wet if we leave the pile sitting in the center of the barfy green carpeting, where the rainwater has formed a shallow lake.

  We stare at one another. Neither of us moves to pick up the clothes, to wring them out properly and hang them up to dry in the bathroom. I lean my wet head against the fat pillows of the powder blue couch.

  “Go ahead,” I say. “Try me.”

  Even without my clothes, or maybe especially without my clothes, I am the one with the upper hand here. I cross my legs and wriggle my chilly toes.

  Predictably, Victor stares at my legs. The rain pelts the glass, the bricks, the tiles on the roof. Time passes this way. Time often passes this way.

  “Do you look at a bagel and think how there is something lacking because there is a hole in the middle of it? Or do you wonder instead about the absence of dough that has made the bagel into what it is?” Victor pauses and we stare at one another. “I need to tell you about your dreams,” he says.

  I uncross my legs. What about telling me what you’re doing here, like you said? And without speaking in riddles, I want to say. What I am thinking is, what am I doing here? But I say nothing.

  “You dream about mowing the grass,” he tells me. “You dream about an endless landscape of lush wild greenery that you must cut back and reduce and change endlessly. It is what you do. You are like the absence of dough. You are nothing, yet you are important. You have important work to do. You work to modify everything in order to meet the demands and expectations of an unknown God.”

  Victor gets up and goes into another room, a small kitchenette. Why doesn’t my office have a cute little kitchen? He runs the water, opens and closes the cabinets.

  Soon I can smell the rich brew, a dark roast coffee. Then he stands before me like a waiter in a fancy French restaurant. Two oversized mugs of steaming java sit on a mucous green plastic tray I recognize from the residents’ dining hall. The mugs are from Big Boy Bagel Deli downtown, so there are pink cartoonish bagel faces on the white ceramic. In the place of a bagel hole, these hideous bagel faces each have a wide open mouth. Each bagel eats another bagel. Russian dolls in a fun house mirror.

  I reach for a coffee mug and thank Victor.

  “You think you are saying something but you aren’t. You think I am seductive but I am not. You think you might help me by listening to me like you do with the others but this is an illusion.” Victor sits down across from me and rests the tray on his knees. Steam is rising from his lap. I have a slight urge to snicker. “Your cognition is a dream, an elaborate hallucination,” he states. His voice is so ominous I want to jeer and roar with laughter. But I don’t.

  He sets the tray on the rug between us. Too much green, both items the particular shade I think of as hospital green. It has always made me sad, that vomitous color. The mirth slips away and I look beyond Victor to the wetness outside while I sip my coffee.

  “Everyone changes places eventually,” Victor says. “We all start out small and helpless. All around us are people with more power. Time goes by. At some point we find that we are in charge of our lives. Sometimes we have power over others. We do a good job, we fuck up. No matter what, eventually we are back where we started. Small and helpless once again.”

  Victor looks at me over the top of his coffee mug. “I’m going to tell you about myself,” he says. “I need you to listen. Only I can help you.”

  I don’t laugh at him, but I could. Sometimes the people who come to me are under the illusion they are there to help me. But Victor’s apartment is something else. He lives like a dorm advisor in a building I believed was set aside for professional offices. I’m confused about this, and mildly upset. Why does he get two couches and a kitchenette? Is he a professional who lives here, or is he some sort of VIP resident? Who is this guy?

  Victor stares into my eyes for a moment, then looks away. “You’ve got this all wrong. I really do want to help you. Can you try to listen to what I’m saying? I’d like to get through to you.” He seems angry now, his voice too loud.

  I draw my legs up into the lotus position and Victor sighs. Then he comes over to the couch and bends down to reach for me. I close my eyes and wait. A man like all men. Sometimes certain steps must be taken, specific things must be completed, before anyone is ready to listen.

  After a minute, I open my eyes. Victor is kneeling before me. We look into one another’s eyes. I can see my reflection in the glassy shine of his pupils. There I am, a tiny white flicker in the deep pools of an unknowable man. I feel something ticklish in the back of my throat.

  Victor returns to the other couch, talks without looking at me. “I grew up in a small town north of Boston. My parents were school teachers in a small private boys’
school and we lived in a nice apartment on campus. I was smart but not exceptional.”

  I sip my coffee and listen. I have heard it all before, different versions of the same story. Same story, different men telling it. Sometimes women. It does not matter in the long run, the story will have an unhappy ending. Maybe after he finishes talking he will tell me something I don’t already know. It doesn’t matter to me either way.

  Whatever. At least the coffee is good.

  “At UMass I majored in psychology because I liked medicine and people, but I knew I would never be able to afford medical school. I worked as a resident advisor in the dorms all the way through my Ph.D.” Victor sweeps his right hand to indicate the apartment. “So I’ve lived in places like this all my life. This is home to me. That explains why I’m here. I understand this now. But it took me a while to realize where I was and why I was here. I can see you’re struggling too. I want to help you out. Maybe together we can move beyond this.”

  I have no idea what Victor is talking about. But this doesn’t surprise me. He has told me what I wanted to know. He is a resident. He must have received special permission due to his training in psychology to live here in the office building.

  I nod encouragement. “Go on,” I tell him. My face is a tall clear glass. Pour in your story, it says.

  “The night of the drive to The City, that’s where it ends and begins,” Victor says quietly. “And all I was doing was going to see a chick. I felt good, the wind in my hair and the sunset a hot red, the big sky and my cool car and everything. We were going to hear music at one of those hip hotels on South Beach. Some band she liked, reggae. I remember her name but not her face. Usually it’s the other way around.”

  I tighten the bathrobe belt at my waist. Victor asks, “Are you with me?” He doesn’t wait for an answer but continues to talk. “At first I thought the trip itself had something to do with it. But I could never figure out how I went wrong. Driving down I-95, there are just so many wrong turns you can make. And none of them end up here.”