THE HARBOR SEAL

He was driving up the California coast when what he like to call jokingly The Ultimate Driving Machine veered off the PCH and skidded off at full speed. In the last minutes before death he recalled something peaceful, it had something to do with the ocean.

What happened next was blurry, he saw white lights which then turned kaleidoscopic, and then he came to the feet of the of the Lord Vishnu. The Lord spoke to him but he couldn’t understand him, so blinded he was by the divinity. He thought about his mother – there’s no one like a mother – and tried to mouth his thoughts. He remembered that after his own mother died, he and his wife went to Santa Monica beach and threw flowers in the water and within minutes a baby sea lion washed up on the shore. Then he realized that the Lord was asking him what he wished to come back as. He told the Lord that when he couldn’t find a clean memory he would focus on being a seal or a seal lion diving in a kelp forest off the California coast. And then the Lord put his hands on his eyelids and closed his eyes.

When he woke up, he was a harbor seal. For the first time he wasn’t cold when swimming in the freezing California waters. He loved diving into the kelp forests, for the kelp forests were something he tried to picture when trying to sleep when he was a human, because all other images came to be loaded with regret.

He didn’t know how many other seals were humans before. He suspected that they were in the minority because he struggled to find his way up and down the California coast and the lions didn’t understand him nor could he fully understand their language. One time he got lost and made his way all the way up to San Francisco where he kept getting barked at. At that point he started to develop a sense of direction and knew north from south – and so he turned back towards Los Angeles.

Santa Monica was disgusting. Like Marina del Rey it was covered with oil and excrement. He went to Catalina for a bit but soon decided to swim back to the coast. He felt something was waiting for him.

“Laguna Beach,” he thought and started to cry. “I remember that place.” His salty tears meant nothing to the ocean, for the ocean was made of tears anyway.

He swam and swam. All the seaside towns looked to the same to him until he found Laguna Beach.

“We had been here, I remember it….” And he climbed on a pillar and rested and soon fell asleep from exhaustion.

The morning sun was brutal and he was roused from his sleep violently. California was going through a heat wave. He dove for breakfast of sardines and kelp and then returned to his perch.

“I remember my wife and daughter used to go to Laguna Beach. Sometimes the three of us would go. They won’t recognize me now, of course” he thought. “And I won’t recognize them anymore either. My kid is probably all grown up now. A grown woman. I won’t recognize her. But I’ll wait… I’ll wait, just to see them again, just to see them once more…”

And so, he sits on the rocks or on a buoy, periodically diving down for food, hoping and waiting to see his family for the final time.

EUROPEAN GASTRONOMY

The Ortolan, blinded, soused and fattened
Is consumed under a veil.
It’s not just Paris that is rotten
It’s now on a commercial scale
And veils are everywhere now
Just look and see and
If too drunk or blinded like the tiny bird,
Allez, venez, Milord,
Use your other senses,
Smell burning smoke, and other things olfactory.
Pas de crème brûlée, des villes brûlées
And so long, Marianne.

Ali said fifty years
Ago when fear was eating the soul
That he wanted Cous-Cous
In München.
Now justice is served.

And in the disunited kingdom,
A million rabbit-hearted Andy Capps,
Now fully gelded, hop to the pubs
Not away from Flo, she’s getting ready to
Go to the protest to scream
“I Stand with Ukraine!”
If the pub still stands and when the enemy
Says raise your hands,
He’ll say “What hands?”
For they were amputated.
He uses a straw to sip Old Speckled Hen,
Eats steak and kidney pie out of a trough
And all their fat psychopathic wives
Scream “Free Palestine!”

Out on the streets, there are
Bestial wails as the
Arabian Knights conquer all.
The English crouch and kneel,
The knights stand tall.
Instead of “Call for a good time,”
“Kill Jews!” is written on
The bathroom wall.

The Dutchman and the German
Are pleased that they don’t need to
Take the Tripper Clipper anymore,
The boys are now in their backyard.
The country sold for sex and curry.
The history of weakness,
Full of sound and fury.

The Swede might take umbrage
At Halal meatballs which he
Slurps on his knees, more than
His daughter’s violation,
But he hates no one, and to
Hell with the nation.
Swede also means rutabaga.
Stuck deep in earth, unlike
The mandrake it doesn’t
Scream when it’s uprooted.

And the last living Spaniard does
Not dream of jamón, but instead
Tries to yell in his last hoarse breath:
“¿LE GUSTA ESTE JARDÍN QUE ES SUYO?
¡EVITE QUE SUS HIJOS LO DESTRUYAN!”

But those hijos, amigo!
Those children that come at you with knives—
They are not your children, and you have no sons.
You have forgotten everything.
And the angels forgot to pray for you.
¡Vaya, vaya! ¡Qué porquería!
So long, Hispania. And so long, Marianne.

UN RÊVE

I get off work,
Go guzzle a beer by myself
Then hit the bookshop,
Browsing the shelves
And then come early
To the outdoor bar,
Order cold white wine
In the sweaty summer heat
To wait for friends.

They arrive, we laugh,
Make dirty jokes,
Even the women who we
Might sleep with later that night
Are keen on the laughter.

After the early booze we go to a movie,
Something poignant
Vivre sa vie or something
With a c’est la vie refrain,
We cry or weep
But laughter soon returns
And also soon the bedroom yearns.

Why this so simple is so hard?
The movie theater no longer exists,
It’s shuttered.
All the new films are shit
And there are no more stories.
The cold white wine is now an iced Starbucks.
And as for wine, women and song,
The wine ran out, so did the women.
And all the old songs now sound wrong.

WHEN WE DEAD AWAKEN

I was discharged just over a month later and sent home without having to “betray Julia” or admit that “I love Big Brother.” I exited into a warm, banal twilight. The clinic was walking distance from home. I told Charlotte that I wanted to walk home and so I walked.

As I passed Caltech—the leafy, placid campus where all manner of things were being studied and researched—subjects and theorems and formulas all beyond my grasp—I made a detour and went into Tournament Park, where I would sometimes take my daughter before this wretched and amazing adventure in Brooklyn. I walked past the orange tennis courts, past the running track, and entered the green playground. I was the only one there and I sat on a bench and immediately burst into tears. What a stupid path of life I had chosen in my youth—the path of no path, the path of no direction. What I wouldn’t do, who I wouldn’t murder, to go back in time, to be an undergrad once again, to have a goal and at least a modicum of talent, to be healthy, to be sober. Oh, how I pined to be twenty again, attending lectures, composing papers, running the track, playing tennis, looking forward to grad school and a career. How simple it would have been to do that. But there is nothing one can do to alleviate such regret except perhaps believe in parallel universes and accept that one tiny failure can often lead to a whole life of subsequent failures and the subsequent contrition and remorse. I dried my tears and continued walking home.

After the dread subsided, I began to experience a type of calm, something like the blissful feeling one has before an epileptic fit or after an insulin low. I started to feel that in these months of madness, my screenplays somehow came to life, that I lived them, that I lived Stacy, that I lived Betty, and that all was not for naught. For a second I thought that I too had had a “rich life,” albeit one compacted into a hallucinatory three months in Brooklyn.

All my dreams and all my fantasies and all my nightmares came alive during that summer. And in the end, “the book” that I was trying to write was not the story of Stacy Fox but rather this very case study you are reading. A case study on the process of giving up, on failure and accomplishment, on the strange mess of memory.

I am forty-nine now, and I lived thirty years in those short three months. Finally, I had accomplished something, and this is the record of that journey. It was as if I had finally taken the proverbial “trip of a lifetime.”

In a few years, or hopefully, since I do still wish to live, in a few decades, I will die. I will cease to exist. Those remaining years, be they short or long, all point in one direction—the graveyard. But apart from the dreadful desire to be remembered and the utter fear of oblivion, there is the vulgar reality that it was all for naught, and the question remains: why continue in the face of impending obliteration? That is not for me to ponder if I wish to live out my life without taking it by my own hand.

As I reached the end of my own pathetic odyssey, I recognized those suitors that I need to kill: my youth, my ambitions, my white shoes, Betty, Stacy. It is a relief to bury the dead. A friend of mine called it the “death peace.”

Though my life could never come close in stature to the lives of many others, though I could not and never will achieve even the petty bliss and horror of my characters, though my life will never be as stunning as my father’s or other friends and relatives who lived through unimaginable times, what I managed to accomplish that summer was, in many ways, enough to put an end to the dream. Dreamers and madmen live the richest of lives.

There is no need for any more poems. Safely wrapped up in memories and in the California yellow, I have my thoughts, my recollections and my madeleines to keep me warm until the curtain falls.

People like to forget. I too will be forgotten, perhaps much sooner than later, even if people read this book. Most of our lives are spent in times of forgetting and laughter in between deaths and funerals, not just the “flashing lights of God the Father.” It goes the same for wars and genocides, cataclysms and paroxysms. Those books that were on my shelves, those people who lived through world wars, through cold wars, they now seem as distant as the notes of Roman soldiers despite being not that many decades ago from the present. But unlike my father—better than nothing as I said before—at least my internment has given me the time to write down this autobiography of sorts, truncated as it is.

There is a branch of Hindu philosophy—Advaita Vedanta—that has a simple and poignant explanation for understanding the worst excesses of mankind. In Vedanta, there is no reason for the existence of good and evil. Since we are part of the universe, and therefore part of God, everything that causes us pain brings pain to God as well. When we seek an understanding of the Holocaust, the Gulags, the Khmer Rouge, so does God. When we weep, scream, cry or bawl, so does God. And so I, too, a petty god in my own right, wept. And I wept when I understood that when I created Betty I also doomed her to her fate, exactly the same way that the Moon, unknowingly, ruined Glasha the Mole’s life. I saw Betty departing, ascending into black space, trying to find her way back to her tiny little planet, always eclipsed by some bright and beautiful sun.

Like God, like a parent, by giving her life I also sentenced her to death. And by giving her all the joys that life can hold I also gifted her breathtaking suffering. By lying to her and writing this book, I sentenced her to die each time someone reads this story, and if this book is still around years or decades or centuries from now, she will die again and again and again. Time heals all, they say. Once this book is forgotten, her torturous story will cease to be remembered and Betty will finally find peace.

Soon I started to forget Betty. I let her fade away just as I had let my parents fade away, just as I had let my youth and my dreams dissolve. There is much to be said for the “process of giving up”—the toil is worth it at the end. Yes, Betty would still come to me once in a while, with a siren call deep in my dreams, but she was disappearing with each nightly visit as her visitations became less frequent. I saw her pulled away by gravity further and further, and soon even the echo began to fade. And then, out of the ashes of a crippled phoenix, a semblance of love was reborn.

My wife and I finally went on a date. We got a babysitter and walked to the movie theater up the block and I was finally able to put my arm around her waist. And so Charlotte and I walked, towing our memories and broken dreams like tin cans from a marital bumper. I was hoping the movie playing she was taking me to was perhaps ‘L’Atalante’ or ‘Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans’—something dealing with a reconciliation. Instead we sat in the dark and watched apes taking over the world. I didn’t mind.

We walked back home in silence but at least she squeezed my hand, and when we went to bed and got under the covers, I could picture her thinking “It is okay... I will learn to live with you... I have already learned to live with you, for many years...” and so I closed my eyes. My nightmare was over, and so was my dream. Sleep masks on to shield us from the early morning California sunlight, we held each other tight at last.

THE END

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THE ETERNAL RETURN

The printers are already halfway through their typesetting of The Goat Song and the author and his true friends walk out of a pub into a wonderful Petersburg spring night. A night that makes souls soar up over the Neva River, above the palaces, the cathedrals, a night rustling like a garden, singing like youth, and shooting past like an arrow, which for them, has already flown.

—Konstantin Vaginov, The Goat Song

The end of summer, the first taste of autumn, is the most poignant time of year in New York. The trees explode with color and there is warmth and mist. But there is also, at some point, a bleak, frigid interlude that reminds you that all of this will soon end—even starting in mid-August, the cold wind makes you shudder and you know that soon you will enter what Bill Faulkner called the season of rain and death. On the subways people shiver, sweat turning into icicles on our backs, the AC too much now. Samhain is coming, the end of the bliss and madness. People talk about the end of their holidays, going back to work, back to school, back out onto the cold street, and the days get shorter as we reach November.

The dead technicolor leaves make small tornados in the street, the night wind carries in the final warmth before the cold, before hibernation... It was time for me to leave New York, possibly forever. I understood that this adventure was finally over. A maturing. A little death. I would return to California’s “endless summer,” where time passes way too quickly and where the days and months and years are a hazy blur. New York’s Indian summers were something I had always wished to escape, but whenever I left them behind, I missed them dearly. Here I was, leaving New York yet again. New York of the blue light of possibility. New York of the yellow light of defeat. Secrets and confessions oscillate between shoddy and vile, and in the light of life, we oscillate between pain and sleep.

I surveyed the place, my apartment of dreams. Standing in the center, I turned in circles, waiting for something to come to me, some kind of magical clue. I spun around waiting for the room to start moving, for a vortex to open, for some kind of understanding of what happened to me this summer. But nothing happened, and I only ended up making myself dizzy.

I packed clothes, wrapped my good shoes in a supermarket bag as if they were the white shoes that never arrived and were never purchased and glanced around once more. No, nothing. The whole place felt unlived-in now, as if I had never been there. Or as if I were just passing through another moonlit motel, one guest amid thousands, like Stacy did when she tried to find California and found a dead end. Or was that Betty? I didn’t care anymore. She was disappearing, the memory was fading. And I never will be caught. There is no body. Cherchez la femme...

I went out to the balcony and lit a final cigarette. I stared at the perfect row of streetlights stretching down Ocean Parkway. And beyond that was the ocean. I considered going down to the beach one last time to bid farewell to New York and the summer, and I suppose also to Betty herself. But I was frightened. A shiver ran down my spine as I considered the possibility. I knew there were no lighthouses down there by Brighton Beach but I felt that if I went to the boardwalk one would magically appear, tall and erect, casting a beam of light across the water and illuminating Betty’s silhouette, perhaps as a mermaid, perhaps a rusalka, diving into the black waters of the night. I put out my cigarette, turned off the lights and sank into a deep, dark sleep.

In the morning, at the airport, I was mostly hangover free, and so it was a perfect time to replenish all the toxins I lost over the course of non-boozy sleep. First a couple of “Cadillac” Bloody Marys at the sports bar where I carried my McDonald’s breakfast, then a pint of horrible beer at another pub closer to the gate until I was sufficiently primed to handle the flight.

The airplane rose gently up into the late afternoon sky, avoided Manhattan and ascended into the pink clouds. I had rough, fleeting flashbacks of other flights I had taken in the past, in my youth. I flipped through magazines, stared at the menagerie of grotesque travelers, but I was focused on only one thing—my hapless Betty, and how by creating her, I simultaneously destroyed her. It did not matter to me at this point that she never “lived.” She was more alive than you and I will ever be, even as a paper doll of my imagination. And I wept because I realized I sentenced both myself and Betty to damnation because by writing this book, I lied to her. I did not in fact kill her, but instead kept her alive to live in eternal hell. I created her, and she will always, thanks to me, be sentenced to live her fate over and over again with each reader, just the way we, as living humans, once we expire, will continue to live solely as characters in annals and memories. But while memories fade, we who are written about are doomed to be read and re-read, and thus repeat our lives infinitely. It is the heaviest burden. The eternal return.

I ordered a weak drink and closed my eyes after a few sips. As the plane ascended and circled around old brown New York, I finally saw it for what it is—a sad, vinegary city whose horrors lie under the pavements, under the grass in the parks, in the trash cans, at the bottom of the rivers, in tenements and housing projects, and all with little redemption. Rome may be a graveyard, Toledo may be famous for ripping out tongues, Geneva for live cats scratching you to death as you drown... but there is a particular terror that New York always had and which persists for me. LA has its ghosts and goblins and it terrifies me too, but maybe the atrocities are too recent for the blood to truly seep through and poison the entire water table.

I made some small talk with a French girl to my right. She wanted to know what to see in Los Angeles. I mumbled something—I was beginning to fade—and soon, after a few polite words of broken French, I was asleep.

When I awoke, I thought I was hugging a skeleton but it was only the brittle sheets that they give me in this place, the place where I eat bland food but receive some very delicious drugs. Every morning, after breakfast, we do a little dance. They keep trying to find out why I murdered my wife and I keep telling them that I was in New York when it happened and that I don’t know what they’re talking about. They keep telling me I never went to New York and that there was a “crime of passion” right here in Pasadena, California, and that I was found not guilty by reason of insanity. I tell them again that I was in New York. They tell me about a strangled body, they say they have no record of me getting on a plane. What can I say? I am trying to prove to them that I’m not a camel. There is comfort here, most of the doctors are nice to me, although the beery California sky breaks my heart. I suppose that this is the end now, that I am indeed king of infinite space.

“Do you know where you are?” someone asks me each morning. It makes the mind reel how they insist on playing this game of checkers with me.

“What day is today?” says another.
“Who is the president of the United States?”
I answer correctly and diligently each time, but every time I have to fight the urge to answer: “Ulaanbaatar. April 6, 1683. I am.” Would it have made a difference? Would they increase my medication or give me something new? Perhaps I’ll try it sometime soon just to see what would happen. ECT can be a rather euphoric experience and I generally look forward to those treatments. What I don’t understand is what exactly they want from me. I don’t see things differently than they, or you. And besides, if I did, how would they know?

Since drinking is no longer an option and the drugs have rid me of my sexual desire, instead of looking forward to the female ghosts that filled the night, I would instead go to sleep looking forward to breakfast. A cheese omelet, coffee, followed by a banana muffin took the place of early morning erections and fleeting embraces with liminal beings. At least the eggs and bread were tangible, digestible, something that I could empirically state that I experienced “in real life.” And they actually served fresh eggs, too.

Once in a blue moon, variations on old dreams still return. In one recent dream I was young, wealthy, and able to drink alcohol. My girlfriend was Isabelle Adjani of the times of The Tenant. This time though the sex was more passive. I performed oral on her and did not have the chance to copulate. I was giving her pleasure as if I was atoning for something. And with all the drugs that were flowing through my body, an erection was only a distant memory. In another I was walking through Hyde Park in London, along the Serpentine. It is the 17th century, perhaps earlier, and the courtly ladies are preparing the gentlemen for a unicorn hunt. The dazzle of the sun and bursting green and yellow wakes me up.

I also still dream of New York often. I still picture myself drinking cold white wine with my dad at an outdoor café on Columbus Avenue in warm, green spring. I have just been accepted to NYU film school and we are celebrating my success. I awake excited only to find myself in a mental hospital. I will never go to film school or make a film and two thirds of my life are gone and I have nothing to show for them.

Perhaps I have always been mad, or at least imbecilic. I have always tried to excuse my failure by blaming the changing times. Truth is, now that I am now rediscovering literature—the library here is wonderful—I wonder why I couldn’t have been a better learner in high school or college. If only I could go back in time and devote myself to studies in earnest!

I am in a warm, safe place, back in my adopted hometown of Pasadena. In the winter, I can see a sprinkling of snow on the mountains. In late spring, I can see the marine fog coming in from the ocean. In the summer, I am protected from the blazing heat of the valley through double-glazed windows and I look at those same mountains, now a burnt amber. In the case of an earthquake, I have been told that the building is reinforced and there is nothing to fear.

But one morning something strange happened. I awoke and instinctively reached over for a glass of water on my nightstand, where I found a handkerchief. At first I thought it must have been an old t-shirt that I had thrown off in the middle of the night when breaking into a sweat, but this was a tiny square shape that I did not remember owning. I turned on the bedside lamp to examine it. It was a piece of crimson velvet, and on the corner there was one word embroidered in cursive: “Betty G.” I picked up the cloth, crumpled it in my hand, put it next to my cheek and began to cry.

The next night I again woke up in need of water and heard laughter, again a cackling laughter. I reached over to the nightstand. There was the same embroidered crimson cloth. It looked as though my water had spilled on it, but when I squeezed the kerchief it dripped blood. Then the rag grew tiny little legs, feet, arms and hands, a little fetus that I squeezed across the midsection, one whose fate and life I held in my hand, and this little piece of hell actually started crying, and the tears were dripping out of this satanic little marmoset, weeping “Don’t hurt me, please stop it, you’re hurting me, you’re hurting me, honey!”

This thing couldn’t decide whether it was laughing or crying, whether it was asking for pity or asking me to pull its guts out and I threw the piece of shit against the wall as fast and hard as I could. It bounced back, then bounced back again, bouncing like a ping-pong ball back and forth until I could not even keep pace with the movement until it landed right back in my palm and again took the form of a handkerchief carefully folded. I opened up the crimson cloth and again saw the embroidery in the corner of the cloth: “Betty.” I crumpled it up and threw it against the wall again but the whimpering persisted so I put a pillow over my head to drown it out.

“Something great is going to happen to you this year, I can just feel it!” my mother would say to me each year and nothing of the sort ever occurred. There are no happy endings for most. The best we can hope for is acquiescence or the simple return of the waist—but at least for now, I felt somewhat certain that this time a dream was finally just a dream.

Then I woke up again. I thought I was clutching a skeleton but it was only the arm rest and the fold-out tray. My airplane food spilled all over the French girl. I apologized repeatedly and clumsily wiped the crumbs of muffin and cheese from her dress, unsure how to dab the wine stains on her blouse without touching her tits. A stewardess turned up and gave the girl a wet cloth and soon the captain announced that we were starting our descent into Los Angeles International Airport. We sat for the remaining forty-five minutes of the flight in awkward silence and I tried my best to avoid eye contact.

As the plane descended down to LAX I saw the white anthill. Those millions of souls who will soon be dead and forgotten, replaced by another swarm, repeating the process until we finally kill off everything on this planet, including ourselves.

My wife picked me up. I was crying. We drove directly to the psychiatric clinic.

GRAND CENTRAL STATION

I don’t wish to wish
Sadness on anyone,
Especially the so-called fairer sex.
And yet how I envy the men
Over whom women cried or died.
How in the cruel, humid
New York afternoon
The women sat down and wept
In front of Grand Central Station
Completing another
Tear-soaked perambulation
Around Vanderbilt Avenue
Until exhaustion set in
And the tears flowed.

Forget the grandeur of the station,
Not even a dirty Greyhound bus
Terminal was an option.
And no one examined and
Fawned over the angularity
Of my hand, for starters,
And no one wrote about it.
Although someone once
A long time ago told me
That I have a beautiful cock.

A CHEESY TALE

It must have been nineteen ninety-three
Or somewhere around that time
And I was twenty-four or three.
I was starting to make a movie and
I had my own office, down on Varick Street.
I couldn’t believe my luck and at night or
Twilight I would look out the window
And see a brilliant illuminated billboard
A hundred feet tall which read “Grana Padano”
All gold and yellow and the colors went
So well with the city, matching
The yellow cabs and taillights as they
Sat stuck in traffic by the Holland Tunnel
And the smoke from the manholes
Added gorgeous streaks of grey in the silver night.
I was alive with possibility.

Well, that didn’t last long.
The film was never finished
And it took me years to realize
That Grana Padano was actually
A type of cheese.
I kid you not, I thought it
Was something different:
Maybe a sparkling wine, or
A sparkling new place in Italy to visit.
And the films have now become
What we call cheese,
Playing on tiny screens to please
The tiny people and besides,
There are no movie theaters anymore.

THE RETURN OF THE GIRL FROM BELOW

When Betty left without a word, she left a hole in my life. The fact that we had consummated our relationship right here on Ocean Parkway brought back unwelcome memories of Wendy Novak, to whom I had lost my virginity decades earlier on that same stretch of Brooklyn’s grand boulevard.

Yes, I was devastated by Betty’s sudden departure, but as much as I wished for her to return I knew that it was over. The autumnal chill that hits New York in late August had arrived. Before the glorious orange and yellow of an Indian Summer there is always this blast of cold, a harbinger of the season of death.

I had no more business in Brooklyn, or anywhere in New York for that matter. It was time to pay penance for my folly and return to sunny California, to Charlotte, and after Betty’s departure I felt that this whole experiment had been a grave error.

What had Betty meant when she said that she would help me finish my book? The manuscript was complete—or so I thought. But right now the manuscript was the least of my concerns. I had now not just sunk but dived into darkness. With Betty gone, what was left? Somehow I was not yet ready to return to LA. The lease on my rental wasn’t up, and though I didn’t know precisely what it was that I had to finish, I felt there was something yet to be written.

During these long days I would entertain the idea of visiting a prostitute. Not for sex or companionship or succor—all of which had amused me at some point in the past—but to somehow make the hooker feel like shit, and to drive her to tears, to somehow take revenge at least on someone, even in exchange for money. The very inconceivable thing I had never wished to ever entertain even in my most ugliest of thoughts.

I became driven to violent ideas and I realized I wanted to insult someone, a woman. I wanted to make a woman cry. If I could no longer fuck then I could at least resort to petty sadism. I wanted to grab this imaginary hooker by her tiny wrists and force her to shake her tiny fists at a silent sky, to wake up, to stop being a character fucked not just by disgusting hoary cocks but fate itself! To get her to understand her own despair, and then after driving her to hysterics to demean her and to destroy her further, perhaps forever... But I imagined that if I grabbed her little wrists she would look at me with disgust in turn and scream, “So what?! Who are you to talk? So what if I use these hands to pull back pubic hair and foreskins to check for scabs before I suck repulsive little dicks and spit out sperm that I hope isn’t diseased? You want me to play a Chopin nocturne instead? Everyone has their lot in life. What do you do? Can you play Chopin?” And my throat would close up and my fantasy would become even sweatier and even more repulsive.

Of course, I didn’t do it. I couldn’t. I wandered the streets in search of the deepest, sweatiest, most disease-ridden quilombo I could imagine, as if to dive into the same depths as Betty, but it was to no avail. Everything nasty had been sanitized, where a place of despair once stood there was now a pharmacy or coffee shop. And even if the chance had presented itself, even if I had been miraculously transported into that desperate world my poor Stacy inhabited, I would not have had the balls to be unfaithful to my wife. But I had already been unfaithful and my mind battled itself. And despair, once she puts a spell on you is a witch you can never truly get rid of.

These nightmares pushed away the dreams I once had about imaginary lovers or my parents. I stopped hearing the sounds of Slavic voices in my sleep. I knew that in some ways the death of my parents had liberated me as a person, and that I now had time to come into my own as a late bloomer, but there were some problems. For starters I was much more than a late bloomer; having squandered my youth, I was now firmly entrenched in middle age. And though I felt as if I was shaking off some parental yoke, there was still something else, another rope or oxbow that I was not able to release myself from. I knew what it was but I was not ready to admit it. I sensed that I was approaching something that would make sense of these things, though I did not know yet what it was.

After her disappearance I continued to explore New York and find remnants of my past. And then something very strange happened. She started to come back, but in many different ways.

The first time she reappeared was in the subway. I was returning to Brooklyn from another solitary walk through Washington Heights, going through a literal walk down memory lane and the whole memory game and remembering things from childhood.

The A train was crowded and smelled rank as usual. I could not wait to obtain at least a tiny respite and freedom from the bodies pushing against me when I would change trains at 59th Street. As the train screeched to a halt and the bell sounded and the doors opened—there she was; sitting down, but without wheelchair. As I struggled to push myself out onto the platform she looked up and like the first meeting in Primorski, her laser eyes met mine and she smiled and opened her mouth to say something. I could not hear it precisely but it sounded like “I’ll be seeing you again.” I wanted to turn around but by this point the doors had already closed and the A train sped away. Where was her chair? Why was she on the A train instead of the D? Was it really her? I felt a sharp pain in my lower back, a spasm I get sometimes when I suffer an extreme shock or fright. The D train was not there and I was too shaken up to endure another forty-minute journey so I exited the subway and rushed to the nearest Korean bodega and grabbed a bottle of Grolsch which I promptly pounded down. This was repeated several times. Each time I saw a subway entrance, I opted to keep walking as I felt I was not ready to board yet. My mind and heart were both racing. How could she be there? Was the wheelchair thing some kind of trick? A weird fetish perhaps? Or did I imagine the whole thing? Was the woman on the train really her or just a lookalike, a doppelganger? No, that couldn’t be because she looked straight at me and said something. I thought it must have been a hallucination so I decided that the minute I returned home, I would drink myself sober. But currently, the bladder was groaning from however many beers I pounded down on my escape walk and I needed to piss. At this point I was approaching Times Square. All the dive bars were gone of course, so I went into the nearest hotel bar, relieved myself, drank an overpriced martini and only then, I was finally ready to face the agonizing train ride with nothing but my thoughts and paranoia for company.

After the sweaty journey, back in my Ocean Parkway apartment, I poured myself a straight vodka and tried to make sense of what happened. I could not call anyone to discuss it. I had very few friends left in New York or LA, and I could not reveal my infidelity to those that remained. I thought about emailing someone I had not spoken to in years, but that would have been selfish—too many people have come out of the woodwork after not speaking to me for years when they needed something, which I found detestable and I swore I would never do that. Perhaps there was some type of chat room or forum I could anonymously post on to get some advice.

Once, when I was a child, I asked my grandmother, “Do devils exist?” to which she most astutely replied, “They do for those who believe they do.”

I suppose the rest was inevitable; once she had materialized there was nothing I could have done to prevent it from happening again.

I did not come to New York to have an affair and I was never one for infidelity, even when circumstances in a troubled relationship would have somehow justified it in the eyes of the cheater. But here there was no justification—and yet while moral principles should have prevailed I could not stop thinking about Betty. I poured a drink and looked over the printout of my manuscript. Sure enough, it was still there. I opened my laptop to check my emails. The one at the top was from Betty G with the subject “MEET SOON.” I opened the message hesitantly. It did not name the time and place and nothing else but simply said “I will see you soon.” I felt like everything had already been decided for me.

“Meet soon,” ha! Soon indeed for she started to appear everywhere—climbing down trees and lampposts, leaping out of magazine pages. She would step out from billboards and paintings, emerge from hidden doorways. One day, to distract myself, I took another trip to the Met Museum. Things began melting as if I was on psychotropic drugs. The Ikebana arrangement at the information desk seemed to flow up to the ceiling, like a tropical jungle, shooting up to the top with pythons and flesh-eating plants, poisonous chameleons and impish looking howler monkeys in between the branches while a foxtrot played in the background. Something was not right. They explained to me later, much later, what was happening, though they couldn’t quite pinpoint which part of my brain was responsible for it. That would mean nothing to me anyway. When my dad was told to quit smoking, they told him, “Sir, when they do an autopsy your lungs will be black!” To which he rightly replied, “Sir, when I’m dead I won’t care if my lungs are rainbow and polka dot.”

I controlled myself and went over to the American Wing and there she was, in a Sargent painting, and she stepped directly out of the canvas and followed me through the galleries. I walked faster and faster until I was almost running and while searching for an exit I encountered her again at the Information Desk, now donned in a conservative brown suit, her hair tied smartly in a bun. I escaped and immediately looked for the nearest bar. Luckily I found one and quaffed vodkas until I felt more sane.

Sometimes she would appear out of thin air and press herself against me while my erect cock almost blew a hole in my pants.

One episode affected me quite badly. She appeared and said, “I thought we were going to fuck, Lucky,” and before I could answer she followed up with, “That’s okay. I know—your wife and all that. That’s fine. I’ll just find someone else to fuck tonight. I was invited to a group thing this evening, might do that. You only live once, right?” And at that she turned around and walked away. I told her to wait, to listen to me, but when I tried to grab her and stop her, she vanished.

Was she the devil, I began to wonder? Someone pushing onto me the idea that it is necessary, in my case, to learn how to live without hope? That my book is pointless? Was she trying to prevent me from finishing the book? But I thought my book was finished.

“O what a black, dark hill is yon, “That looks so dark to me?”
“O it is the hill of hell,” she said, “Where you and I shall be.”

Or was she an angel who, to prevent further disappointments, was teaching me, in her own punitive Christian fashion how to abandon all hope, and how to live without it?

As I was entering the last third of my life, perhaps even the last quarter, I became obsessed with leaving something behind— something my father failed to do. Not financially—both of my parents died in penury—but something like a book, a work of art. Yet I was totally unqualified. Gradually I began to lose all interest in the books. Who needs more sordid stories? I would say and the metaphorical writing pen would turn to lead and drop. But I did see that there was another story forming somewhere beneath the surface of my Brooklyn retreat.

One evening, I remembered that quite some time before her demonic/symphonic unmasking, she would repeat that uncanny statement. I should have paid more attention at the time but I chose to ignore it, just as I ignored so many comments made by past lovers. She said, “You know, Lucky, sometimes I feel like my life is like a movie that someone wrote but no one’s ever seen.”

Had I not been so willfully blind, had I paid more attention, I would have recognized that those words were from a song I tried writing a number of years ago called “The Road to Hollywood,” which had a verse containing those exact words. How had I missed it? I suppose I ignored it because I wanted her, and wanted to forget that one can never really own a woman. But I never sung that for her.

Everyone dies differently. Some quickly, some slowly, some searching, some hiding. Some even go to California, some to New York. Just as many are born in New York in order to die there as well. All cities are graveyards, but each graveyard is different in its own special way. I started to think that the best and possibly only solution was to pack my bags and go back to California immediately. I did not want to die in New York. I did not want to die without seeing my family again. There was no immediate reason for my demise but I felt it hovering at every waking minute.

And yet I could not leave. I was stuck, immobilized by a dread as heavy as eyelids so long they fell to the floor, like those of Gogol’s demon. Betty was everywhere. Like a filthy, plague-ridden Laura to my Petrarch she followed me in shadows from behind housing projects, subway passages, trash cans, from underneath the Brighton Beach boardwalk, riding naked on the back of a garbage truck... I began to realize that there was something profoundly wrong with me. Betty was the girl from below. The question was: how to exorcise her, how to get rid of her? Yet I was still uncertain whether her existence was corporeal or not.

And then one evening, as I was escaping these furies a follow-up appeared on my computer, via a message on the screen. User name: “Betty G.” It said “Meet me.”

That did it. I now thought I was officially out of my mind. What did she want? Why couldn’t she just call me, or come over, after disappearing the way she did? It was too much. I pounded down more scotch and returned to the laptop. Another message popped up on the screen.

“Meet me at pier 45. The pier where the fags used to lie around and fuck all night long. Bring a nail with you, bring rope. The pier where the fags used to spread AIDS, you know the one. I want to see you, Lucky. One hour.”

I called her but it went to voicemail as it had been. The bellyful of scotch gave me the courage to reply by text message. I was drawn to the madness.

I texted her back: “One hour.”

When my taxi dropped me off by the Christopher Street Pier, now redeveloped with no sign of the cruising “fags” she talked about, Betty was waiting right in front as if she knew exactly where the driver would drop me off. Dressed to the nines in a short leather mini skirt with hooker rouge lipstick, she guided me towards the water. We walked hand-in-hand like lovers and it never crossed my mind the very basic and most essential problem and question: “Why is she walking now?”

As she walked, she sang. I listened to her footsteps. High heels on the pavement but it took a minute to make out the words of her song that accompanied a familiar melody, something close to “Hush, Little Baby” but the lyrics... oh her lyrics, her lyrics went like this:

Under the swaying green palm tree
I dumped you and you pushed me
Now you write shit and here I sit
In the black wheelchair you gifted me

I tried ignoring it. I was too obsessed with holding the palm of her hand and feeling her pulse. At times I tried to put my hand across her waist. I was too enthralled, too enchanted with forgiveness. I remembered being young, when holding hands was just what it was. And then everything about her changed. The innocent smile turned first wry then frightening as she waltzed into her Totentanz:

“I saw a slut dangling from a lamppost on my way over here. How I wish that I was her. You forgot the rope didn’t you? I wonder what she did to deserve it.”

She stopped. I stopped. She grabbed my face with her paw and squeezed my cheeks and screamed “YOU LITTLE SHIT!”

“There was a boy I had once,” she laughed. “When I told him how many diseases I had he stabbed himself in the heart with a kitchen knife. You’re a boy, too, Lucky. You’re not a man if you can’t handle what you did to me. Did I tell you about my little sister? Of course I did. I told you how I gave her as a present to my boyfriend so he could fuck her in the ass, didn’t I? But I gave her too many drugs to knock her out and the little bitch died that night when I was holding her ass cheeks open for Paul to shove his dick inside. I was proud of what I did for him. I think he had one of the greatest orgasms of his life!”

I wished I could die, right there and then.

“And what about you?” she went on. “How were your orgasms when you wrote all that fucked up shit about me? It definitely gave you a hardon but you wanted to cry into your pillow while stroking your cock and never giving yourself the release. When will you release me?”

I was paralyzed but she kept going.

“Remember how at one point I became an abortion addict? It’s hard to explain but it was so thrilling! Oh, the excitement of getting pregnant and knowing that I was going to abort! And it was almost as good as when I would pick up those little spic cunts, fuck them and then turn them in to the cops. Oh you can’t imagine what a kick I’d get out of it all. It was like drowning a little nest of rats and hearing their little squeals! If I knew one was actually going to get fried I’d even take a plane down to Texas and jerk off like crazy especially when I’d see the drugs starting to get pumped through that sad sack of shit’s veins!”

I was trembling with fear but I tried to think of the situation at hand, that the choice of the Piers that I found odd now that everything in New York had changed so much. I was in the back of my mind expecting a sinister place, given the history of that city, given the history of my life and all I told her about, given the history of Betty and now, when all of New York had become sanitized it was as if she wanted to return to a familiar place, another return as if she wanted to revisit a place that was no more, which made sense as it was precisely the same as what I had embarked on. The piers: a place which at one point was as she correctly pointed out filled with a hundred homosexuals lying naked on the pier, a place when murder and rape were quotidian and drugs were as easily bought as candy, a place where the warm, eel-like black water of the polluted Hudson stank equally with hope and sleaze and where the future shone through youth while you were sucking cock be it for fun or remuneration. That was in the past, the sleaze had been paved over but not for my Betty. Bereft of any excitement of the above sort, it was as if she wanted to take a trip down memory lane, and was on the verge of getting misty eyed under a strip joint sign. Betty wanted to see her past, a past that remained for me in a deep well, a sticky black pool of women firmly stuck in the molasses of the NYC summer night with one leg in the scum, the other in redemption and the cunt open to the flames of hell. Now she walked down Theresienstadt with bat wings neatly folded. And she terrified me more than anything I had ever known.

“This is your last chance, Lucky,” she said. “We’re going to do this once and for all.”

She dropped her hand from my cheek.
“Let’s do it, honey,” she told me. “I want you to kill me.”
I was ready to shit my pants but my sphincter muscle tightened when she added:
“You’ve been killing me for thirty years!”
I had no idea what was actually happening. Who was Betty? Where was I? Where was my home?
She pulled me closer.
Why was she walking? Why was I awake?
“Don’t do it anymore, Lucky... don’t talk about me anymore. Don’t write the book that you have in mind. It’s not worth it. It hurts too much. You’re shoving knitting needles in my heart and cunt. I am filth. Filth through and through and you made me this way. I want you to let me go and...”

“I can’t... Stop...”

“You have to stop, Lucky. You have to. I have suffered. I have suffered too much. And I have suffered enough.”

“I can’t!” I pleaded. “I’m in... I’m in love with you, Betty...”

“You’re not in love with me, Lucky. You’re in love with the idea of a teenage whore with a heart of gold or a heart of shit who somehow flies like a bird right into the sky. A perfect romantic scenario from an underdeveloped virgin. Well here’s your answer: I’m a whore, you little shit, and I’m rotten through and through—there are no whores with hearts of gold. There are whores with diseased hearts and there are whores with diseased cunts, that is all of us. Your fantasy hooker, your little Iris or Sonia, is a fiction, Lucky. Whores are whores and you are still a little boy. We want to fuck. We like money too. We don’t care about any of that crap you wrote about, about “art” or “suffering,” we take our suffering in stride. When you wrote about me, when you created me, you were lying to yourself. I was never a whore with a heart of gold, I was degradation and you know it. You lied to yourself and you’re lying to yourself now, that’s why you gave me that goddamn fucking wheelchair, you son of a bitch. What the fuck was that all about? To torture me even more?”

But I couldn’t let go, couldn’t say anything in defense and that was when the anger erupted further.

“Do you know why I’m walking now? Because I threw you away, Lucky! At least to get to this point, I made myself walk when you were too weak and started to imagine me differently. Maybe it was after you fucked me that I got this strength to do it, to throw away the wheelchair you gave me. You gave me this wheelchair, Lucky. For my birthday. Now it’s your turn to throw me away! Dispose of me in the garbage dump, Lucky. I can’t take it anymore! All those gangbangs, all those orgies... at the end of the night I’d look like someone vomited on me. All that sperm. I wanted to sew my cunt shut but I kept coming back for more, always returning for more. The parties I would go to, my god! Coming home at dawn, my silk shirt soaked with sperm and piss. I would wake up in the afternoon and would want to slash my wrists over the shame and disgust of what I’d done, but life went on. You know why? Because I can’t kill myself, Lucky. You have to do it for me. You have to end this charade now. You have to end it. It was you who made me!”

I could no longer speak a single word.

“You didn’t finish your book, did you?” she asked, and her lips formed a smile that was both wincing and bittersweet. How did she know?

“You pushed me under the car, Lucky! Don’t you remember? Why did you do it? Why did you cripple me?”

And so she spoke and sang like a siren, reciting the verses that I did not want to write, the verses that I did not include in this book when I inserted The New World Symphony but which I knew I was intentionally leaving out. I did write those lines and she recited them to me, word for word.

“You fucking little shit! You left out the juiciest bits. You didn’t tell your readers what you wanted to write, did you? You’re just as much scum as I am! Wanna hear it?” And so she orated like a Greek poet, and I had to listen for I was her captive audience.

“Here, Lucky. This is the part you didn’t really complete. Now you listen...”

In San Francisco, under the white sky
Did she become a whore after all?
What is whoredom anyway?
When does pleasure take over from survival?
Can we combine?

The corner office, yes, but something gnawed
Between Stacy’s thighs no matter how
The days and works, the days and years passed by.
But the itch went past happy hour or
Blind drunk on Friday night with
Co-workers or clients from out of town.

There were trysts with strangers in
The most disgusting of places,
Flophouses on O’Farrell Street,
Lunchtimes spent sucking cock,
Or walking down Broadway like
A stuck-up bitch who needed to suck off
Some black dicks even at noon.
Black sperm tasted the best to her because
She found it fucking disgusting.
As with her eating shit, it was a sacrament,
The body, the shit, the taking the blood of Christ,
The mandingo Jesus spurting down her white throat,
And then with an embroidered napkin wiping off her mouth.

Then putting on lipstick, making herself prim
And walking proudly back to the hardon
Of the Transamerica Tower.

There were some close calls,
When she played cat and mouse
In the sack with her version of “trade.”
“Come on, fuck me you spic, you greasy beaner shit!”
(That was on a side street off of Mission).
Sometimes she let them play rough.
“Fucking white bitch, take this in your fucking mouth.”
“Give it to me!”
Poor Stacy should have never uttered
The word “nigger,” it led to a fat lip
That was hard to disguise
Like the black eye Stu gave her back in LA.
It wasn’t a nigger who sealed her fate
But a little shit reappearing again.

Even though she loved African sperm down
Her white throat, and nigger baby batter sliding down
Her legs and into the gutter drain.
The nigger’s name was Gabriel, like the Archangel.
And NIGGER! NIGGER! NIGGER!
Started to rhyme with EDEN, EDEN, EDEN!
She met one guy who wanted to shit in her mouth.
“You’re kidding,” she laughed, but the next day
She started training, first eating a bit of her own shit,
Then a bit more...
Until she was ready to open her mouth
Underneath his stinking asshole and swallow the whole load.
She gagged and puked;
Covered in vomit and feces
Her face was radiant, magnificent.
They shared a shit-stained kiss before
She had to wash up and return to the office.

But it wasn’t only blacks or shit eaters
Who sealed her unlucky fate
But a little wooden Pinocchio,
Flat, made of plywood, with geek glasses and
A skinny frame, all sensitivity, neuroses and insecurity,
Who hid like a plank within the walls of Stacy’s secret life.
Within the cracks, within the keyholes,
Snug with the wood lice, he lived and eavesdropped.
He waits with the termites and
Sees her in her intimate moments
And wants to cut himself, but he refrains,
Knows that he’s a paper soldier.
And so he grinds his teeth and waits
Behind the wallpaper, sharpening his paper knife.
He’s stained with wood glue, his little fingers
Sticky with the wrong substance,
Not something that he wishes to smell.
He drills keyholes, eyeholes, spy holes into Stacy’s life.

He is her boyfriend, so she introduces
Him to others, or started to.
And what did poor little Stacy end up as?
Pushed under the streetcar by her Petrushka,
The jealous boyfriend.
And then Stacy loses her legs
And pisses and shits her pants
But she still wants to somehow
Get laid, despite her condition.

And the bed feels moist while Dvořák
And Stravinski play in her creator’s head
While she can’t move her legs.

“Who do you think Petrushka is? It’s you, you son of a bitch! You created me solely to make me suffer forever!” she screamed. “You killed me once on paper, Lucky. Now have the balls to kill me in real life. Go ahead! Fuck me and kill me!”

“Betty, please, please,” I begged. I thought I was about to die.

“WHO THE FUCK IS BETTY?! MY NAME IS STACY!!” she screamed.

I was afraid—afraid of her, afraid of the truth. I had hid behind the bottle so many times so as not to deal with the unknown, with the things that sometimes should never be talked about, just like my mother. But here I was, standing in front of Betty as in front of St. Peter with his keys all bloody, or face to face with the Grand Inquisitor. I was now finally forced to take off the many masks I wore and those I painted on people I knew; forced to admit how like a hare I always ran away from fixing a broken mirror. But I could also sense she held no evil in her, that she only wanted freedom—freedom from this loathsome city, freedom from the purgatory known as life, be it fictional or carbon-based.

The world was spinning: the piers, the lights of New Jersey, the faint sounds of people and taxicabs, the honking of car horns. Queer thoughts were popping into my mind, random memories: my mom making an omelet, me pining for a set of white shoes, Easter bells, “don’t skimp on the butter,” a brochure for the poor about how to raise a healthy baby, Orthodox cheesecake, blood on the panties, the grotesque cycle of creation and destruction, conception and demise, the image of a she-bear eating her young, Saturn eating his sons, mothers devouring their offspring. My heart was pounding like a subway train. Blood shot up into my nose and throat. I swallowed blood as she spoke.

“Kill me, Lucky,” she pleaded. “Kill me and get me out of your mind forever so I can finally sleep! Just promise me one thing. Please don’t ever write another screenplay or story about me again. I am so tired. Fuck me for the last time, Lucky. Rapefuck me and then kill me, strangle me, murder me, in the name of Christ murder me, but promise me one thing—do not ever, ever write anything about me again. I want to die, Lucky. Don’t do this to me anymore. Murder me...” Her voice rose and wilted and then she put her arms around my neck and in a whisper repeated: “Murder me. Murder me...”

“Betty!” I sobbed, “I want you to live. I want both of us to live and...”

“Shut up and kill me, Lucky” she said. I saw how unimaginably tired she was, how tired she was of existing. “Remember how many times you wanted to kill yourself? If you brought me back then I would have told you ‘just do it, what are you waiting for?’ But you left me buried in your desk drawer gathering dust and silverfish, and you didn’t bring me back until you started thinking about ‘the book’ and then you woke me up from my sleep when I was suspended at the bottom of the ocean. But you never killed me and now you have put me back into purgatory, wide awake. Oh, to die! I would have done you that favor, I promise, if I was a so-called writer. But you didn’t. You crippled me instead. Don’t you understand that I can’t kill myself? It’s you who needs to murder me. Go ahead, finish what you started!”

Reluctantly I reached for her neck, and when I had my hands around her throat and her big blue eyes looked up at me pleading for me to snuff her, I tightened my grip and squeezed harder. The very thought of murder always seemed so alien and so horrifying to me, but at that moment something snapped. I had three conflicting ideas running through my head—I wanted to punish her, I wanted to put her out of her misery as she had begged me to do, and I wanted, by killing her, to finally make her mine.

As my grip tightened I saw the fear in her eyes, her utter terror of everything going black forever but still I kept choking her, watching her spirit leave her body until suddenly everything started turning black for me as well and I collapsed on top of her. I felt her body growing cold underneath me and I drifted off into the dreamless sleep of a horrible sinner.

When I awoke I thought what I was lying on top of was her lifeless corpse, but it was only the Manhattan pavement. Betty was gone, once again. No wheelchair, no crutches, no trails. A light cold drizzle started. I picked myself up and began walking to the nearest subway station.

Inside the subway car I shook and shuddered and though I tried to hold it in, eventually I broke down and started crying like a baby. There never was any Betty. I finally accepted it. Like all writers, I had played God. In creating her I also damned her and I finally saw it.

As I tried desperately to keep sane, the doors opened and in walked a tall black man impeccably dressed in a white suit, red shirt and white hat, carrying a briefcase. The subway car was mostly empty. He started to preach.

“It’s an abomination—an a-bom-i-nation—to stick your penis in another man’s anus. And they call it love!”

Betty melted away for a moment, let loose her sticky grip, and I chuckled to myself: “Something you see every day, a well-dressed NYC lunatic...”

The preacher got off at the next stop and I returned to my crazy thoughts. “When I die, will the world disappear with me? Have I imagined not just Betty but everything around me as well? Did I also dream up continents? Did I create Jesus, Hitler?” There were still too many things for me to come to terms with, not just Betty but also the ghosts of my parents. I had to accept that time was running out, to resign myself to the process of ageing, of dying. To accept that I will die and that everything I have done will be forgotten.

When I arrived home, the pink dawn was also helping me lift my own Veil of Maya. The moist, humid night back at the piers was caking and the cool autumn breeze returned—that breeze, the most melancholy of New York weathers, which signals the end of summer.

The first thing that I did was call Charlotte to tell her I was coming home, and to ask her to order me a plane ticket for the next day. Hesitantly, tremulously, I also asked her to find me a psychiatric facility. I had always feared both therapy and chemical treatments but now I knew I had no choice if I was going to survive, and despite my penchant for tortured writing, survival was now a priority, if for nothing else then for the sake of my daughter, so that she could have me around a bit longer.

Charlotte agreed to all of this and was, if not particularly elated, then at least pleasantly surprised that I had finally decided to seek treatment. I feared, deeply, that I would be lobotomized, but I had no other choice.

THE DISCOVERY OF HELL

If there is anything more bizarre than the actual process of death, it is the fact that once there was a human and now he or she is no more. It is the disappearance.

Thus with my mom’s death, the rich and queer experience of Russian emigration simply disappeared like falling leaves. With my dad’s death, the entire world of ballet disintegrated as if it never existed. Granted, I was peripheral to both these worlds, but these sandcastles did indeed crumble in a nanosecond the moment these people died.

One evening, in a mild stupor, my dad said, “The purpose of life is to die.” For some, it is comforting to think of death as the final adventure; no one who died ever came back to tell us what it’s like. But that sentiment is only possible when one is not afraid of death. I was, and continue to be, afraid.

Did Betty exist? Yes, she did. She existed like my dead parents, like my dreams, like ballet.

Betty was still gone. After the book was finished, she should have been back in Brooklyn but there were no calls, nothing. Just as I feared and suspected, I knew that the minuscule separation could widen into a chasm and I would be stuck at the bottom, trying to clamber out of this canyon I built with my own mind. But there was no respite. She was nowhere to be found. And so I waited, soaked in drink and sweat, waiting for her return. The “book” was finished, but I felt that I had left something out.

My nightmares became worse and worse. The placid dreams of a picnic with my dad, fishing in a stream (although I had never fished in my life), or the turquoise water on a trip to Miami Beach were replaced with images of me descending a labyrinthine maze while stepping over crocodiles and lizards. In one dream I was chopping up a live cat, a plump female tabby, with a meat cleaver. The bloody chunks of cat meat parts turned into kittens who hissed at me and bounced away, while their mother meowed horribly. In another horrible nightmare, my father was pregnant with sextuplets and miscarried the entire litter.

I would awake screaming, go to the sink to pour a glass of water with my useless hands—the beautiful trembling, tarantula hands of an alcoholic—and then force myself to go to sleep. But another nightmare would begin the second I dozed off.

My sleeping mind would bring up horrible, nasty little visions. I would be walking through a desert, parched, all bones and rags and would see an oasis up ahead, and when I would reach it I would bend down to drink from a pool I thought would be refreshing and cool but which turned out to be a green standing pond from which a slithering little imp would rise to the surface and stick his tongue out at me.

Sometimes it was a demon, disguised as a ragged old man who would chortle and remind me of my own impending death, and would pronounce filthy thoughts and tell me I had been, in fact, washing his ass my entire life.

I decided to look for Betty, for I had no other choice. I had only seen her house a few times—a somewhat grimy brick structure a few blocks from the boardwalk. Many of the buildings look identical around there and I made many misses until I entered the lobby of what I thought was the right one, and then it struck me that I didn’t know her surname. She was just “Betty G.” I looked at the names on the intercom and found only one G—a Gromyko. Russian? Ukrainian? I had entertained her with stories of Russia and she would surely have told me if her background was Slavic.

I pushed the buzzer nonetheless in some vain hope.

“Allo? Da?” the speaker answered in a Slavic accent. I could picture who was behind the buzzer, a typical Brighton Beach resident in her bathrobe, cooking cabbage soup and dumplings. I walked out dejected, then from somewhere in the building I heard mocking laughter. I was sure it wasn’t directed at me, someone had probably cracked open the vodka on the early side, and yet as I walked away from the building my dejection turned into fear as the cackling seemed to follow me down the street until it was drowned out by the sound of vehicles and what I believed was the surf of the ocean despite that it was far from earshot.

And so the days went on, in loneliness and emptiness. There were a few torturous times when I felt completely bereft of all sensation, and not even the bottle of Smirnoff helped to relieve me of the pain. The summer was coming to an end.

One night, halfway through a bottle of vodka, the phone rang. “Betty!”
“I’m coming over. I’ll be there in ten.” Then she hung up. I scrambled around furiously, trying to make the place a bit tidier. For some reason it felt like a first date all over again. I put all my nervous energy into putting the empties into a plastic bag, throwing away the leftovers still in their takeaway containers, and emptying the ashtrays. I was going to meet her downstairs, wait for her to call, and hold the door open in the lobby now that the concierge had gone to sleep (it was coming on close to midnight). Then the doorbell rang.

There was something about the light, perhaps my borderline synesthesia, perhaps jaundice from my humors, but she stood out against the green carpet of the flooring, the greenish tinge of the fluorescents in the kitchen, her black hair so striking against it that it took me a moment to notice that her eyes were completely red.

But she wasn’t crying. It looked like she had already finished crying, and she had the particular menace of someone preparing to throw the hurt back at the guilty party.

“Move!” she said, and I moved out of her way as she wheeled herself in. I did not know how to act, what to say. I had never seen her like this before.

“Where were you?” I asked her. “I was...”
“You were what?” she interrupted.
“I was waiting for you to come. I went looking for you and...”
“You went looking for me?” she snorted. “The more you keep looking for me, the more you’ll never find me. Why the fuck were you looking for me?”

I was up against a wall. I had seen this behavior before, I had seen women—and to be fair, men too—being irrational, odd, confrontational in the way she barked that sentence at me. But Betty, despite her secrecy, despite the darkness that she never revealed to me, always seemed like a rock. Not anymore.

“I’m back now. Are you happy?”
“I am,” I said sheepishly, treading with caution. “I’m happy you’re back. I’m very happy, very happy to see you.”
“Good. You should be.” She winced. “Did you manage to get a lot of work done?”
“Yes,” I stuttered. “I managed to...” I didn’t know what to tell her but she spoke for me again.
“You managed to write your book. Is that right?”
“Yes. Sort of...”
“Good,” she smiled. “I’m excited for you. Seriously, I truly am. I’m going to help you finish it. Because I don’t think you’re done yet.” Before I could process this, she asked for a drink—vodka, neat. I got up to fetch her one from what was now a full bar in my flat. “Now sit,” she said. I grabbed my drink and plopped myself back down on the ridiculous couch. Of course she wanted me to sit, not only to be at eye level but to see things from her perspective, to see the world the way she wanted me to.

“It’s finally time to talk. What do you want to know?” she asked. But before I had a chance to answer, she interrupted.

“You jealous little shit!” she started, and my ears rang.

It is true that I was jealous, jealous as I had never been in my life—but jealous of whom, of what? I was, as I always had been, not so much jealous as scared of betrayal. I kept quiet, and decided to let her do the talking. I had learned from marital experience not to upset the crockery, not to break my hand against the refrigerator door. Talk, then. So she did.

“You want to know if I fucked him? Of course I did. You knew that. I’ve fucked the entire planet, Lucky. And not just this planet, but the whole goddamn galaxy.”

I downed my glass in one gulp. Why had my dream, my last dream, been ripped from me? I knew nothing about her, and yet she gave me the illusion of love, the mirage of hope.

“What do you want to know about me, Lucky?” she said. I swallowed hard. Why now, I thought.

“I’m a whore from upstate New York, Lucky. I grew up walking past dogs and sprinklers but I was always filthy through and through. I would suck truckers’ cocks in parking lots in order to get to California. When I was hungry and no one wanted to fuck me even for five bucks I would eat out of garbage cans, finding a crust that had the least hair and shit on it and bite into it the way I would swallow disgusting pricks so I could live.”

I was about to vomit but she kept going.

“You know who I am, Lucky. You know damn well. I am death. I am scum.”

“Stop it!” I shook her, bawling uncontrollably, minding not to shake her so hard that she fell out of her chair. She spat at me.

“Fuck you, Lucky! You don’t know the first thing about me! You don’t know about Gus—the guy I met on the road, the guy who gave me my first heroin shot, the guy I married. Yes, the guy I married! And we lived together in LA and when I tried to make some extra money, I ended up doing porn and when Gus found out he beat the living shit out of me! And that’s when I left him and went up to San Francisco, and I was doing well for a bit and then... It was that motherfucker who pushed me. And that fucking nigger Gabriel also, he was...”

The hair on the back of my neck stood up. Was she fucking with me? How on earth could she have read my poem? She kept going.

“I managed to get a job in San Francisco, you know.” She started sobbing. “I had a good job, a really good job, for the first time in my life. And yet...”

“And yet what!?” I yelled.

“Something happened. I had another lover there. It didn’t work out.”

“And?”

“And this is why I am like I am, Lucky. He pushed me under the trolley. I was wearing a scarf, it snapped my vertebrae. It’s a miracle that I lived. But that’s why I’m in a wheelchair, honey. Now you know.”

“Please. No more.” I told her, wiping away tears. “I am sorry. I am truly sorry.” She raised her hands from her chair to embrace me. I knelt down. She struggled to lift herself towards me as far as she could and in our crooked embrace she whispered, “Lucky, I do love you. Don’t hate me anymore.”

“I do love you” she repeated though with reservation, “And I want you to make love to me,” she said.

This was my one chance, my one and only chance to make love to Betty. After some struggling with her vehicle I put the brakes on her chair when we made our way toward the bed and lifted her up out of her phaeton. Betty was crying and smiling at the same time. I actually picked her up and kicked the chair away and carried her as if over the threshold and I threw her on my sweaty bed. I was terrified. I was worried that taking her to bed and undressing her would be like uncorking a funerary urn and decanting the ashes. “You people, your species sings songs and writes poetry with lines like ‘we’ll live forever’ and bullshit like that,” she struggled.

“Do you know what it’s like to live forever? It’s dreadful, Lucky.” And then she said it:
“Moist. The bed feels moist...”

It was when she said the same words I wrote twenty years ago that I tore into her body. With an equal dose of fury and pity—a nauseating emotional cocktail—I ripped off her clothes and penetrated her at once and her response was ecstatic. I was entering another world. My cock raged to both save her and destroy her —Vishnu and Shiva, Brahma and Kalki all entangled in a frightful battle. And just before I came I heard the final lines of the screen direction in my script for The New World Symphony: I actually saw the finished print as the camera cuts from Stacy’s bed to the outside of her building, and then pans wider and dissolves into an aerial shot of Pacific Heights, then San Francisco, then California, then America from space, then Earth from afar... and then I collapsed on top of her. We did not speak. I squeezed her. Then things went black.

When I woke up I could not remember if we actually made love or not. She was gone and so was her chair, which I had kicked away in passion. That morning was the worst morning of my life. Eyes closed, still coming back from a dream, in vain I tried reaching for her, looking for her and just like in those lucid dreams I had no idea where I was. Betty wasn’t there. Betty was gone.

THE SKY WAS AS BLUE AS TRAGEDY

What a perfect day it was!
That warm autumnal haze,
Those few rare days in New York City
Before the season of rain and death
Comes ripping with bronchial wheezing.
Autumn in New York felt too inviting.

On the Upper West Side, the bars
Were packed, and packed
With laughter too.
That morning made morning drinkers
Of us all, and gallows humorists as well.
What else were we to do?

It made me think of April 1945
As champagne flowed,
Brains splattered walls of Berlin
Apartments and storks
In the countryside threw their hatchlings
Overboard from their nests
Down to their deaths.

And the sky was as blue as tragedy.

Lucky’s book continues and so does Stacy’s journey into hell:

Part Three: Allegro

Shall I talk about my love or
My imaginary mistresses?
Shall I describe the beating of the heart
That is forgotten as quickly as a funeral?
Did my love settle into suburban or rural
Mediocrity with just a tingling in between
Her thighs to remind her
Of her lovely, hot transgressions?
Will she dote on children and be a good mom?
Will her new lover forgive her and forget?
There is still a long road ahead, the highway
Is still unfolding, the road to nowhere
Still being paved with red adventures.

In Staten Island, or Red Hook, under a purple sky,
The wind howls among the bare
Trees in the housing projects.
New skeletons awaken from the deep freeze as
The first buds shiver when the dew turns to frost.

All things happen at once, for everyone
Both alive and dead.
Somewhere Oksana Makar and Tralala are
Princesses and the cripple dances the jitterbug
And the Lindy hop, and I write songs sitting
At an outdoor café, wearing white shoes.

Oh, Stacy. Don’t you know that
On your walk home after your tryst
You were on your way to becoming
The girl who trod on the loaf, and
The bread gods weren’t pleased.
Jesus wept and snotted in his shroud.
It wasn’t too long before that itch got itchier.
Graduation was fast approaching.
Meanwhile, it was time to screw.
Stacy explores,
While I sit in my uncanny valley
Unscathed for now, enjoying
The view, don’t let’s forget
About the views...
It’s okay.
We’ll grant Stacy all
The views she ever hoped for when
She dreamt of California in a bit.
God is not dead for you yet.
You will ask, “Who’s God?” and
Laugh in due course.
But you can see him slipping away,
You stand on the edge of the ocean, upon
Homeric shores, feeling the exhilaration
Of possibility.
Even a little storm can be
Monumental in a little life,
a little love.
No need to watch Europe burn
From the White Cliffs of Dover
To feel the same profound sense
Of openness.
This one is just your size, Stacy.
Sized for everyone.

I wrote incessantly and until I passed out. After the morning haze I was about to start writing again when I received a phone call. Stupidly, I picked up without knowing who it was. It was the red-haired demoness, Shelly Farrington. How on earth did she find me?

“I’m outside. Can I come upstairs?” she asked. I don’t know why I buzzed her in. Decency perhaps, or curiosity, since I was stealing some of her genes and implanting them into Stacy.

Decked out in red leather pants with the glazed look of a crazy person, she waltzed in as if neither time nor her heinous past mattered one bit. She would do this to me when we were a couple and seemed to have not changed. Her ass, that ass... she’d ruined it by tattooing “Chico” or “Tito” or some other spic’s name on one of her butt cheeks, which bulged under the red leather. In a few years she would be grotesque. Just like old times she grabbed the cigarette out of my mouth.

“Can I have this? Thanks.”

The immediate desire was to hatefuck the living daylights out of her—emphasis on “hate” rather than “fuck.” But the repulsion from all the deceit and nastiness luckily got in the way of what would have been a horrible scenario. She ripped through my morning like a pavement saw. What was there to talk about, anyway?

“Shelly...” I started. “How did you—?”

“I’ve been stalking you for years. You know that, don’t you? How’s your wife and daughter?”

She gulped down my glass of vodka and immediately gagged.

“What the fuck is this? Straight vodka? You know, you’re gonna fucking die,” she smiled.

I stared at her eyes, which had grown heavy and wrinkled. How the fuck did she know about my wife and daughter? I tried to remember her age. She couldn’t have been over forty, or not by much. I stared at her and seethed. There was a tickle in my groin because despite the horror she was... if not a good lay, at least a rough and stormy one, something I did enjoy. When we fucked it felt like we were wrestling. I could have easily done it; that is what she wanted me to do. But to my surprise I managed to make my hardon shrink, and the blood cells from the penis rushed back into my brain, which, in the process, made it hard to breathe. I wanted to kick her out at once but I was in a state of paralyzed panic. I stood there looking at her witless face, and it was clear from her dumb expression that she was plotting something. There is nothing in the world so bad that cannot be made worse. I started to seethe. What right did this creature (whose pussy, ass, and mouth I had shoved my cock into without much emotional satisfaction) have to interrupt me, just as I was finally getting to work? For a second it seemed as if her entire face was a swarm of maggots, her too-tight auburn leather jacket bulging from bat wings. If she’d had a car parked outside, it would have been a milk truck made entirely of vultures. I wanted to gag. Each movement of her face threatened to unleash a swarm of bugs into the air. She sneered for no apparent reason. She should have put her goddamn red hair up into a beehive “do” so that all the little insects could have a permanent nest. I tried to think of something nice to say but came up empty-handed. All I felt was repulsion, with just a tiny tingling in my groin which was rapidly dissipating. She came here to have sex with me, it was clear, but it was more than the desire to go to bed with me, it was that indescribable something, that evil, that brought her here.

The humane thing to do, if it were possible, would have been simply to “wish her away” by clicking my heels but I felt a mix of passion, hatred and that “terrible sympathy” that had plagued me my entire life.

“One more time, Shelly...” I said as I bit my lip, held my hands in check and struggled not to attempt to choke her. “What are you doing here?”

“I wanted to check up on you,” she smirked again, nonchalantly. “To see how you were doing, that’s all.”

In less than a minute, she was out the door, kicking and screaming with my hand forcing her out by her upper arm. “It hurts! Let go!” she pleaded as I dragged her out of the flat and just like the last time I threw her out all those years ago, I felt absolutely no sympathy for this mendacious wreck of a human being. There was no time to lose in getting rid of her, no time to wait for the elevator to come. I opened the fire door and pushed her down the stairs, saw her fall and I immediately felt fear and regret and a terrific pity for her as she got up and pawed her bruised ass. She might even have whimpered. I wanted only to make sure that she didn’t suffer any injury, god forbid to the spine... When I saw her walking I went back up and slammed the door to the stairwell as loudly as possible. It was time to get back to work.

I tried to pick up where I left off.

The second part of the story of Stacy Fox, our lady and savior who died for her creator’s sins, sees her back at home in Cortland. It’s spring again. It’s been over a year since she returned from New York, and though the memory of her summer of love and hate remains fresh, the concerns of the day are elsewhere. Stacy has a boyfriend, Danny, who knows nothing about that summer of sleeping on the rooftop, watching airplanes. She meets him most days after school and they watch porn together at his parents’ house. He fucks her regularly in the rec room. I’ll spare the other details of Stacy’s misery but let’s just say she’s finally fed up and on impulse she throws off her graduation gown and gets in the “man in the park’s” brother’s truck and decides to go god knows where. She had dreamt of California, after all.

The next day there was nothing to do other than write although inertia was setting in and it was difficult to fight against it. There was no one I could really call, no one to speak with, no parents or relatives—I wanted Betty, and I wanted a walking Betty. I could not call my wife—that would have been a concession of defeat—so I decided to force myself to write down what I had in mind regarding The New World Symphony and the tragic story of Stacy Fox.

So to pick up where I left off, back in Cortland, Stacy is fed up. Fed up with the dogs and sprinklers, with the graduation ceremonies, with the cocks that are too big for her to swallow as they’re shoved down her throat. She’s fed up with mild venereal diseases, with chlamydia, with blackout drunk fucks behind dumpsters. She’s fed up of waking up with the same trucke lying on top of her semi-raped, semi-innocent body. She’s fed up with gazing at the ceiling of the bar through tear-stained eyes, its lights like a kaleidoscope of chandeliers crashing all over her. She’s fed up with the bartender’s pitying eyes.

The next day is graduation and Stacy, with an itchy pussy, throws on her cap and gown and runs to the stadium while the Bacchanale from Saint-Saëns’ Samson and Delilah is blasted across the football field by the high school marching band.

She walks to the graduation
Amid dogs and sprinklers yet again
And in the auditorium, the band plays
The Bacchanale from Saint-Saëns’ Samson and Delilah.

In a dirty hallway with her boyfriend,
She picks herself up and walks
Outside to freedom, which came
Rolling in on eighteen wheels.

As the poem continues, it turns out the “Man in the Park” has a brother, a trucker. He sees Stacy and she sees him. The “Man in the Park” pins Stacy up against a wall and screams in her face. After that she runs to his brother.

“Where you going?” she shouts.

“What do you care? Get in!” he laughs. She jumps in and says goodbye to upstate New York forever.

But it doesn’t turn out all rosy. Somewhere by Kalamazoo or Dubuque they need to take a break. Stacy doesn’t even know the name of the man at this point, he’s just the brother of the “Man in the Park,” and when they check into the motel attached to the truck stop, well, let’s say she’s not into him but they do it. He pushes her down into the rancid sheets, makes her suck his hoary cock, fucks her and passes out.

It wasn’t a big deal for her. She had been raped before.

As the trucker sleeps, covered in sweat and dried semen, Stacy goes outside to look at the night sky. She looks at the trucks—they are disgusting. She looks at the sky and imagines she is on her way to the promised West. She’s hungry and has no idea what she’s doing, so she goes into the truck stop diner, orders a coffee and a bun. She has no money. There’s a greasy guy looking at her, greasy but handsome. He winks. She doesn’t know how to wink... He’s eating split pea soup. He moves closer.

“Gus,” he says. “It’s short for Gustav. Part of my family’s Swedish.” Gus is going to California, and Stacy wants to go to California. “I have an idea,” she says. Gus fires up his car while she runs upstairs to the motel room and steals the trucker’s wallet. She jumps in and Gus puts the pedal to the metal and they ride into the night, excited as young Turks. She likes Gus.

But what happens later? Oh, well, first they drive cross-country, star-crossed, see shooting stars and meteor showers from Gus’s car window. They sleep in fleabag motels and make love but Gus keeps popping little pills “to take the edge off” and Stacy starts eating them too. At another shithole motel on Santa Monica Boulevard, Gus—who dreamed of coming here to be a filmmaker—is popping those colorful little pills all day long and they’re running out of money and Stacy is sick of it and she wants to make a little money of her own, so she answers an ad in the paper for adult modeling. “Gus doesn’t need to know. His dick can’t get hard anyway and he’s always sleeping.” So there goes our Stacy, drives herself to Van Nuys and sucks off a dozen cocks in ninety minutes for five hundred dollars.

Somehow Gus finds out about Stacy’s little “job” and when he does, he beats her to a bloody pulp, beats her black and blue, gives her shiners and knocks out a tooth. When he passes out, Stacy controls her whimpering enough to do what she was good at before and she steals Gus’s wallet and takes the next bus up to San Francisco, where the next stage of her life begins.

And inspects her black eye in the mirror: all those little red canals of blood breaking and branching. She keeps hearing: “My name’s Gus. Short for Gustav. Part of my family is Swedish.”

“Your name is short for dumbass,” she thinks.
Soon she’s ready. A little makeup on the shiner
And she’s shining again.
A spew of grey smoke from the bus’s exhaust
And she’s on her way.
“What happened to you?” asks the
Young man next to her, grinning.

“I walked into a wall,” she says, and blows
Smoke in his face and soon the bus rolls
Up north, to the city on the bay,
For another glorious dead end.

Suddenly the telephone rang with a 212 area code. Without thinking, I picked it up. In LA I would usually avoid answering unfamiliar numbers as they were most likely either spam or creditors. Another unwanted interruption: someone named Deirdre O’Brien, who I apparently went to high school with, inviting me to the 30th reunion of the class of 1987. I had no recollection of this Deirdre person and promptly declined. I needed this, as the Russians say, like I needed a second asshole, or to be less vulgar like a fish needs an umbrella. How had she found my number? Someone must have leaked it, but who? I tried to shoo away my paranoia but it persisted for an hour or so until I realized I needed to get back to work on the book, yet I’d lost my train of thought.

What had thrown me was the notion of a reunion after all these years. Thirty years ago I had looked forward to life with a mix of fatalism, fantasy and genuine excitement. Now I looked on the next thirty years of life with a mix of failure, regret and an extremely vague wonder. A wonder about what else is in store, how it will end, what death will feel like. I did not see much happening except hopefully a peaceful feeling of these little fading photographs and videos stored somewhere within my brain, saved for one final viewing.

For those of us who struggle between hope and regret, between pain and sleep, we oscillate between a tiny bright star at the end of the tunnel and a black hole. We maintain a hope that on our deathbed we might just get a glimpse of what it all means. So, Stacy leaves LA. But she doesn’t wonder all about that yet.

San Francisco has a blinding white
Light that’s always cold.
But Stacy finds warmth soon enough.
She isn’t going back.
And the white days and blue nights
Pass so quickly, and past times are forgotten
As best they can be.

The white light suits her and
She slithers in this time, before
Demons came barging through.
And up she climbs up on the ladder, slowly but surely,
And within a few years
We find a different Stacy,
Or should I say Ms Fox.
Or so she’d have us believe.

There are people who claim that it is possible to leave the past behind. They are liars. And Stacy was just such a liar. For though she starts a new life in San Francisco, her buried past was always going to come back to bite her on the ass because she missed what she had lost, she missed diving into the dumpster, she missed sin. And so even on her lunch breaks, as she worked herself up to become some type of financial services professional in the Transamerica Tower, she would sneak out and give blowjobs to random strangers, would seek out glory holes, would put ads on Craigslist, would pretend to be a hooker—during these flings she was, of course, a hooker, but she wasn’t in it for the money but for the thrill. She could not resist. The fire in her garbage can still burned.

And then, one day, she meets an innocent young man. Perhaps in a coffee shop or waiting for a bus. Another Gus, perhaps, but Stacy has been in San Francisco for a dozen years now and this guy is much, much younger...

In the white city, Stacy gets a job and
In her Maria Braun way quickly moves up the ladder.
But if there’s one thing she still can’t
Get enough of, it’s cock.
How quickly she applied herself and went
From turning tricks on O’Farrell Street
To answering phones in
The Transamerica Pyramid
To having her own corner office overseeing
A gaggle of fresh-faced employees.

And then... something happened to her. Something awful happened to her in San Francisco. I don’t remember if I wrote it that night or whether I had to wait for Betty to tell me what actually happened.

I dreamed I finished the book. Or a book. I remember the final line: “as the moths and fireflies danced outside our window in the moonlight.” And then I was hit by the horrible realization that I had no one to share this joy with, and that no one was going to read it. That I wouldn’t be able to tell my mom about it, or to discuss it with her. And where Charlotte was, I had no idea. I was struck by an intense loneliness, an almost unreal sense of isolation as if I was on a rocky planet of my own, somewhere in the depths of space. In fact, I was sitting in my mom’s apartment, now empty, and with no one to call. A friend from long ago, Gregory, knocked at my door and I let him in and let him see myself crying. I told him how I missed speaking Russian; not just speaking it but speaking it with someone I knew and who cared about me. He confirmed. “It’s not enough to speak it. You need to speak it to a truly close friend.” He left me alone to stare at the empty walls. Then I woke up.

After the accident and being bound to wheels, Stacy’s appetite for both sex and degradation reaches its apotheosis. One day she wheels herself into a pub on Market Street, not far from her former office at the Pyramid, and orders a drink. A group of “bros” are drinking pitchers of Anchor Steam at the other end of the bar. They haven’t failed to notice: there is a gorgeous girl sitting alone, drinking by herself... except she’s in a wheelchair.

And then the pea brains get to work. Bets were placed—who would approach her first? What reward may be in store?

“She’s moving around okay in that chair,” says one, snickering. “Who wants to see if her internal organs work?”

One of the bros stands up, winks at his audience, without a word to the others, and stumbles over to Stacy. The other bros fall silent as they watch the sly brown fox pull up a chair.

“She can’t feel anything in her pussy!”
“Who cares? A cunt’s a cunt.”
“He won’t feel anything on his dick either”
“Guy can bang a bitch and not even remember the next day”
“Hope he sobers up to tell us tomorrow”
“Tell us what?”
“What it’s like to fuck a cripple. You know what we used to say eight to eighty, black, crippled, or crazy”
“Fuck that!” another meathead chimed in. “We used to say if there’s grass on the field, play ball!”
Everyone laughed.

Meanwhile Bro Gallant stands up and pushes Stacy in her wheelchair right out of the door and into the street, into the blinding white and yellow of the San Francisco afternoon.

It is all done with great precision. Stacy knows how to work the wheelchair to get inside a cab. The bro stands there grinning, excited by his bizarre conquest, by the prospect of unusual sex, and by the thought of telling the other bros about it. He thinks of a stupid joke he made up once “I had a blind date that I took ice skating, but her dog had a hard time on the ice.”

In a few minutes they are at Stacy’s place, high above the city in Russian Hill. The bro is growing anxious. He’s afraid she’s about to tell him she actually has no legs, ask him “Do you want the legs on or off?” But it is too late now.

“Come on, come on,” says Stacy as they cross from the elevator to her door. The bro follows nervously. The scotch is wearing off and the sheer weirdness of the situation is getting to him. He blacked out for an hour or so and now he is trying to remember how he got here and what he said to her. He somehow recalls that it was she who asked him to come see her place before he had a chance to be a stud and so he went along with it. And now it is all different from how he imagined it. Stacy wheels herself over to the bed and raises herself onto the mattress. “Come here. Fuck me,” she says in monotone. Bro is speechless.

“Come, kiss me... And fuck me!”

She pulls his arms around her and sticks her tongue in his mouth and moans.

“Ugh... why does the bed feel moist?”

The bro, now sober and genuinely alarmed, tries to pull away but Stacy only holds him tighter, in search of anybody, any body... When she closes her eyes the whole universe seems to be pulling away from her. She pictures herself lying on the bed, she pictures her street from above, she pictures San Francisco from the air, pictures America from space, pictures the Earth from afar, and then everything goes dark.

Everything went dark for me too. Exhausted, I fell asleep in my clothes and had crazy, disturbing dreams that thankfully were wiped out within minutes of waking.

I woke around noon when a car horn playing the theme from “The Godfather” jerked me out of sleep. I was annoyed and amused in equal measure. I recalled how that car horn was popular in the 90s and wondered just what kind of idiot would still use such a thing. I walked out onto the balcony and my mind was blown. It was Peter Sanchez, a friend from high school who was by all accounts mentally ill. After years of drug and alcohol addiction he turned to evangelical Christianity, only to relapse. It got to the point where it was practically impossible to have a conversation with him as he veered from one topic to another, his mind addled by poison. He was also a bodybuilder. I had once seen him drinking vodka from a half-gallon Tropicana carton of orange juice mixed with weight gain protein powder and exercising on his home weights machine while tripping on LSD. What was this idiot doing here?

What had happened during those twenty plus years since Peter lost his mind for good? Oh, nothing, nothing at all—same as me, I suppose. Those dreadful twenty years, two decades that went by in a snap. Other people our age had accomplished amazing things—became doctors, lawyers, politicians, journalists, artists, scientists... Whereas I, like Peter, squandered all my precious time on trying to get laid. We wasted our time for different reasons—he had gone insane, I had tried to write screenplays. Peter’s arrival was like me looking at a funhouse mirror, an even greater distortion of what I felt I had become. He was the last person I wanted to see. How did he know my address? Why hadn’t he called ahead?

“Heeeey! Luckyyyyyyyy! It’s Peter, man!” I heard him yell from the street below. Then he threw a frisbee up at the balcony. I ducked, ran into the house and hid from him the way Elizabeth hides when she sees Hyacinth approaching. I closed the blinds and prayed he would go away. Eventually he gave up and I returned to my desk. I had half a mind to pick up a bottle and throw on his windshield.

How wonderful would it be if even the most pedestrian lives and littlest of loves could simply be bottled like a little flacon of perfume to be put on a wall shelf for us, the living, to sample at our leisure. And though I never made the film, I put Stacy’s ashes in a little perfume bottle on my brain’s shelf to sniff whenever I wanted to get a whiff of one of my favorite little corpses.

Up on the shelf in LA was the unproduced screenplay, bound in card stock and the requisite brass brads puncturing her story. I felt that at any given moment she might unfold greasy black wings and jump right down from the shelf either to dig talons into my neck or simply to sit on my chest until I was unable to breathe.

So, the book, or a book, was finished. Now what? Sure, I put down her story—but verse, poetry? Who would publish it? Who would read it? Who would read my squalid little Totentanz penned by a middle-aged fuckup such as yours truly, with no connection to any literary worlds?

So I immediately put it aside. Suddenly, the only thing on my mind was a desire to see Betty.

I walked over to the kitchen to pour a glass of water when, out of the blue, the phone rang. Impatient, besotted, I rushed over to pick up without looking at the caller ID. It was my wife.

“Well?”
“Hi.”
“Well?”
“What do you mean ‘well’?”
“Well, how’s the book going? Are you writing? Is that why you haven’t been calling? Don’t you want to know how your daughter’s doing? Or how I’m doing?”

“I’ve been working. I’m sorry, I...”
“I don’t believe you.”
“Why not?”
“I just don’t. I think you’re out there, fucking around with the idea of writing while you’re spending my money on alcohol. I think you’re too brain damaged to write anything at this point and I wish you’d finish whatever it is you’re up to over there and come home, get a job, be normal. Act your age, Lucky. You’re not getting any younger.”

While the mention of “brain damage” was insulting, I wondered for a second whether she might be right. Then I remembered that I had just managed to write The New World Symphony in a matter of days. I didn’t need this shit from anyone.

“Look, I can’t talk right now, I’m sorry,” I said somewhat sheepishly. I did not wish to engage in conflict. Strangely she must have been thinking the same thing.

“Fine. Call me later,” she said and hung up.

It was after that night that the nightmares went on steroids. I started having dreams about shit. Defecation. A mountain of shit was coming out of my ass in my sleep. I wasn’t crapping the bed but I started wearing two pairs of underwear at night to be safe.

(CONTINUED FROM BOOK I)

Thus I would form her, shape her, take a piece of Vainonen, a piece of The Girl from Below, roll around that ball of clay between forefinger and thumb and let my creation sleepwalk. I backtracked as my own world was spinning, the poem kept being rewritten, there is no right way to write it. I keep repeating and going back because I didn’t know how to end it. Repetitions. I’m only aware of them now but I’m putting it all down as it was written.

The engine spews white smoke,
The harbinger of steamy nights.
But for now, skeletons old and cold
Or young sit and wait to sprout
Their shoots and leaves, expanding,
Filling up with shit and fertilizer.
Here on Broadway, it isn’t the
Flickering lights of strange interludes, it’s
RAPE screaming across the violet sky
While secrets are huddled in slums
And housing projects you want to look out for.

Stacy sees an Eraserhead world outside,
The way God sees the world.
A man smashes a man in the face
With fist, with broken beer bottle, fists, bottles...
Crowds gather, ribs are kicked and teeth are spat.
Around the corner in an alley someone
Complains that the car smells like cunt.

Jerry complains about the blacks and Stacy
Looks at this philosopher and like
Xanthippe wants to empty
The chamber pot over his head.
Must wait.
See what he’s up to first.
In my mind, the Vltava is turning from a
Burbling brook into a swell, soon to pass
A peasant wedding, sifting brutally into C# minor.
Wait until spring, Stacy. Wait until rebirth.
But first some self-immolation.

Oh, I forget.
Did I tell you that Stacy ran away
From home again and spent a summer
On a roof in Astoria or Long Island City and
Would wake up to the sound of airplanes landing
Ar LaGuardia?
But that glorious blue and yellow summer
Was just a blip on the radar.
For now, let’s deal with cards.
The deck is stacked, the deck is loaded.
So let’s get fucked up.
Stacy comes down from the relative north
And other girls come from crisscross applesauce
Down on Minnesota Mile.

Some only have to cross the water
On the Staten Island Ferry to fall,
Or to become nothing at all.

This loaded deck.
They wake, the dreams of innocents give way
To raging hangover hardon.
“What did I do? Why the fuck am I here?”
She lets Socrates sleep, goes downstairs to
The street, “Orders a coffee and a bun...”
Then what?
Abraham sleeps again
She tries to rouse him
“Get up! Get up you fucker!”
He only snores and rolls over.
And a light comes shining in from
The greasy window.
Shine a light on me...

They’re walking like a couple
Through the crowds in Times Square

“I’ve never seen so many people
At once!” She squeezes his arm,
He’s wondering what the fuck he’s doing
And who he’s stuck with.
They dodge the passersby and the cold
Air pushes them back.
They struggle, pushing on.
Your author here’s smug as a bug
In a cunt, but for these two “loss of innocence”
Is a loaded term.
Let’s go deeper for now
Into this dark lake.
The wind whips up trash,
Whistles up filth and whatever else it can
While we huddle.
What’s Jerry gonna do?
Where’s he gonna take her?
At least buy her a hot dog.
She needs to get away again.
I have to get away.

Jerry’s friend who can get him a job at the MTA
Is M.I.A. so they lie around a lot,
Sipping from pint bottles watching the news.
God, she’s bored.
No calls for Jerry, he fucks her but
It’s not the same because it’s quite
The same in the faded grey of the hotel room...
Smoking cigarettes, burning holes,
“C’mon let’s go to a movie. Get up!”

“A movie!?” Stacy laughs, rolls over on the bed.
She smiles bitterly.
“I really don’t care for movies,
They have nothing to do with life.”

She’s seeing things she’s never
Seen, for sure.
She was always too smart
To end up filling gas, serving burgers
Or working the tills, but she was sheltered,
As she herself admitted.
Rotary Club took her to Sweden
And her big sister went all the way to Zimbabwe,
But she has only gone as far as New York (twice)
And now she witnesses
How ripe it is with desperation, the rivers of
The Hudson and the East and Harlem heaving,
Ready to spill their guts.
A young bum picks through the trash
To reach a hair-encrusted crust.
“Look!” she pulls Jerry close and points,
As though at an animal in a torture garden.
“Look. He’s hungry...”

So they walk around for days, waiting for spring.
Meanwhile Stacy’s own spring is coming.

Oh Stacy, Stacy, let me buy you
A little black house on the edge
Of a dark planet, where I can come
In every night and cover you with
A smallpox blanket.

Whose shadows do you see downstairs when looking down onto the street from your room in the Hotel Carter? “Wait, wait... you look like my rape baby, as if the other man that I despise is always in your eyes, you might have his eyes...”

Wait, Stacy, in a week or just a few
Days, the trees will look like they’re exploding!
And the nights melting with possibility!
But now a storm is brewing inside your
Little heart and in between your thighs,
I know, I know...
Soon, when the lime trees are aglow
And blossoms look like pompoms,
You will peek through like a monk
Pushing away the branches to see
A pagan orgy, except you’ll find
Something too horrible to warrant
Contemplation: you’ll see a slut,
Her bloodied panties still around her
Ankles while monsters pounce,
Won’t leave her alone even among the garbage.
Go, see, go see from sea to sea, I will
Be waiting, I will be with you always,
And I will dream of holding your hand as we walk along
The sand and smell the sewage from the
Water in Santa Monica.
But you still have unfinished business in New York.
Amid the shadows there’s
A man or two waiting to truly seduce you.
I watch from side stage and direct
While you oscillate between pain and sleep,
From thinking about dog food to thoughts of God.

Jerry’s thoughts are elsewhere too.

“I gotta call Rudy tomorrow”
“What does Rudy do again?”
“Works in sanitation, promised he could hook me up.”
Sanitation. Jerry’s dream is garbage.

My ugly cygnet, my beautiful duckling,
You don’t know this but I raised you.
You don’t know that, how would you?
Even Christ learned too late.
My little gosling, my fragile bird
Borne of fever dreams and aborted loves.
I nursed you and gave you duck feet
And flightless wings.
And if it walks like a duck...

Hey Stacy, have you been to
The outer boroughs yet?
How about some Harlem projects?
This is before the yuppies moved in,
When fat negroes squatted at their TVs,
Sweating out fried foods, drinking Hennessy
In their steaming government apartments,
Turning up the set when there’s screaming
In the hallway, throwing trash and fetuses
Out the window or the garbage chute.
Have you seen that yet?
Go on, Stacy, explore to your heart’s content.
Jerry will be there snoring, waiting for a call
For a garbage man job.

And so we come to the part of the story where Stacy meets someone we’ll call the Underground Man.

Stumbling around Manhattan’s west side, Stacy is mistaken for a streetwalker. And she almost goes for it, but the kindly, romantic young man named Brian wants instead to show her how she would ruin her life if she went along with it. So he invites her to come see him instead. What a coincidence that he lives in Coney Island.

He confides in her, tells her how miserable he is. She takes pity on him and is rewarded by a date rape, after which as a final insult he throws her a greasy twenty dollar bill. In a perverse way, the lesson he tried to teach her works.

Brian runs after her. “Wait!” But it’s too late and though he runs in circles around his Coney Island block and the blue hairs stare and wonder what he’s doing and laughter echoes from his own building, he’s lost now, spinning. Doesn’t matter, he’ll be dead prematurely. Guys like him don’t last too long, they end up in prison over a broken heart. Meanwhile Stacy’s on her way, away away, in a cab, the windowpanes streaked with tears. She doesn’t want to be there, she closes her eyes. Wake up, Stacy!

She decides to leave New York, drop Jerry and return home. As a reward, Jerry beats the crap out of her on the street and is promptly arrested while she goes back to Cortland, the way Iris goes back to Pittsburgh.

She climbs up the stairs of the hotel
For one last blinding morning,
Just as the garbage smells rise
So does the sun along with
The workers and the coffee trucks.

“It’s over,” she says. “I’m going home.”

In a second she’s on her back,
Jerry’s hands around her throat, legs kicking
Like a child learning to ride a bike.
Spit and blood coming from her nose and mouth.
“I’ll kill you! I’ll fucking kill you!”

She’s struggling to breathe.
Eventually an NYPD truncheon
Puts a stop to it.

Jerry would later send her a drawing of his cock from prison by tracing the outline of his hardon with a prison-regulation golf pencil.

Her story picks up a year later when she’s graduating from high school and getting ready for another journey, this time all the way to the West Coast, the other edge of the continent.

TO BE CONTINUED

THE NEW WORLD SYMPHONY

It all came to me almost automatically. I did not care anymore about form or length. I had no hopes of it being published anymore. I only wanted to capture a feeling and I found my calling in the verse form. I wanted “it” to somehow exist, not as a screenplay for those are impossible to read for pleasure but as something more concrete. And so a poem formed as if Gabriel dictated the Quran to me, the Prophet. But more about Gabriel later. I had wanted to write Stacy’s misadventures as a prose novel, but the poetry took over and within a few days I had a verse narrative. I have condensed my long poem for the purpose of this novel.

As a symphony, the story is told in three or four distinct parts: a lento, an allegro, and at least one scherzo before the coda. A scherzo was imperative because that is what God pulls on you: a joke. The symphony could just as well have gone: I. Scherzo II. Scherzo, III. Scherzo and IV. Coda. To make a short, sordid story even shorter, here’s what happened in that script, to repeat what I had already written earlier in this book.

Stacy Fox returns home—to Del Mar, Cortland, Albany, New Paltz, Watertown... take your pick—but she doesn’t stay long. After a summer spent sleeping on a roof in Queens, in which she did not so much dip her toes in filth as dive head-first into a quagmire, Cortland, Albany or New Paltz just don’t pass muster. Frankly, she is bored.

It was no surprise that sooner or later I had to kill her off. But what could I do to her to still warrant that “terrible sympathy” which I thought she possessed? The sympathy lay only in romanticism,

Jose and Carmen, Reinhold and Mieze… Before I killed her off I had to give her more life, let her live and fuck and eat for a while. Thus I extended Stacy’s life, after she came home to Cortland with a black eye and Jerry ended up in the slammer.

The blackwalled tires of the Greyhound bus, illuminated by the red taillights and the exhaust smoke, formed a mild kaleidoscope against the humid black of the night and the silhouettes of the green trees. Stacy had come home. The prodigal daughter. But this was not the end of her story... Rather, her life adventure, her “big dramatic moment,” was still to come, years later, at the climax of the New World Symphony.

But yet again I get ahead of myself. Here is how I started the poem.

THE NEW WORLD SYMPHONY
1. Lento
2. Allegro
3. Scherzo

So here it goes:

Part One: Lento

I write this sober now,
Older but not much wiser,
Though sadder and more numb.
But with what intoxication,
In my youth, I slurped up
All the flies that landed in my soup,
Two decades ago or more,
Drunk on whiskey and little loves.

And though my salad days have wilted,
She remains, immortal, and stays with me
Even when she sleeps alone.

For my last birthday, my wife
Bought me an hourglass.
How apropos.
For I’ve got some cobwebs in
My mind now and my teeth are longer.

Not Stacy, though. No spiders up her fanny.
She still gives to the poor her all,
Just like the leading lady of
A movie that someone wrote
But no one’s ever seen.

Ah, film, the temptress.
Arch Priestess Celluloid
Of the unholiest of unholies,
Inviting us to play God and mold
Golems, turning words into pictures moving.

I did manage to animate poor Stacy in a
Short film, but fifteen minutes wasn’t enough.
All this was a screenplay once, that someone
Wrote but no one’s ever filmed.
How I wished to bring her to life eternal.
This poem, then, is the closest we
Can come to a realization of her story, something
That someone may actually read and verse be damned.

I did raise you, after all, my darling.
My lovely duckling, my ugly cygnet.
And you still live, my dirty innocent love,
And we meet each other when our dreams
Collide from time to time.
You in your gulag of spacetime,
Me in my California exile and purgatory
On the isle of Circe, pining for a non-existent Ithaca.
We will be bound together until
We’re both forgotten, and hopefully
And probably you will outlive me.

Aeaea, Aeaea, Aeaea!
I hear the sound, the fading echo
Of times past, loves lost.

St. Stacy of Rivington Street or Red Hook.
How I wanted to throw you
Under the rails somewhere in
Loisaida: Essex, Attorney, Orchard...
When New York was such a sweet hell.
How mother night would make or break you.
Maybe Delancey, where Hasids from
Williamsburg drive over to get blowjobs from
Five dollar crack whores.
But it was Rivington Street
That gave me the sweetest pain.
But let me start back in Cortland, New York.

After her summer adventure, Stacy’s last
School semester was uneventful,
As if nothing had happened.
And while the closets were
Always ready to swing open
For a skeletal embrace, life went on.

Spring in upstate New York
Comes in not like a lamb
But like a stoat, doing its weasel war dance
Before killing a beast ten times its size.
The skies are so cold, so purple,
It might as well be winter.
Stacy’s story begins in the purple and black spring
And ends in the red and green of
A Greyhound’s tail lights illuminating
The trees at the Cortland bus stop.

There was nothing unusual about Stacy.
She sure was good looking, always would be,
Even much later when the world
Would spin out of control.
For now, through the cracks of the cold spring,
Through the long, grey line of suburbia
Stretching from coast to coast, perfect weather comes,
An unseasonably warm night, moist with
The first breath of vernal longing.
Let us follow her on her travels through
The spring exultances, as Stacy walks
To her after school waitressing job.

There’s Jerry, outside the diner,
Eating an apple like Adam as she approaches.
It’s hot in the kitchen where
He’s washing dishes and he’s got his shirt off.

Diner’s empty, no one will notice or care—
Could wring out his wifebeater from all the sweat.
God, he’s handsome, she thinks, and blurts out,
“You’re gonna catch cold with your shirt off like that!”
And swiftly enters the diner.
And the moon, peeking through the blinds,
Was getting out her binoculars.

“Is it true none of you made it with that girl?”
Jerry asks, sweating again over the dishwasher.

It was too early to guess
What she would become, and her face...
Why, there is only one woman with so many faces.
How to describe her? Fleeting, at times icy.
But she would melt when God would stick
Razor blades in her candy apple.
Blonde hair and sky-blue eyes, an attitude at times
That cloaked whatever spiny things were hidden in her heart.
So I molded her, before I tried to murder her.
For now, her crimson merrymaking was just beginning.
But imagine her any way you wish,
Put her on autoplay, autoamerican,
While I blow under her sails and gently
Pull her strings and guide her to sweet hell
In this tears-and-sperm soaked story.
I held her like a dove, not so lightly that she could
Fly away, not so tightly that she would die.
But let’s go back to the diner, where six men and
A girl are taking up their positions.

She changes into her waitressing skirt but her
Head and heart are aflutter: God, he’s handsome.
All thoughts of Mike, her boyfriend, are out the window.
Meanwhile Don Jerry is making his own inquiry,
Which is met by “Don’t even try it”
And “She’s got a boyfriend.”
To these poor devils, she’s the zephyr of spring, their
Break from the monotony, from the dirty diner,
From their bleak lives.
She comes in like tonight’s west wind,
Breaking a crack of warmth and moisture
To signal winter’s end.

“They’re all the same...” Jerry laughs off her defenders.
“Ain’t nothing to it. Take her out, buy her a beer
And lay her down. Or bend her over a garbage can.”

“Wanna make a bet?”
Soon enough the kitty’s full and
Stacy’s shift is over.
Everyone looks on
While Jerry stalks his prey.

Rape! Rape! Rape!
The dirty angels trumpet,
But that’s not how our Jerry does it.
What words does he use to enchant
Her as she’s leaving? It’s hard to tell—
The others are huddled in the kitchen,
Struggling to hear and see the rake’s progress.
And that ancient heartbreaker, the moon,
Illuminates their tryst.
Right in the fucking mud.

“You bastard... You poor bastards...” she smiles bitterly
When exposed at the finale.
“What do you know?” spits Jerry.
”I gotta go” says Stacy.
Walking home she thinks, “Mike’s gonna kill me.”

And so the little creatures here they hear
The highway screaming... Awake or
Barely dead, they crawl, they learn
To crawl off to the nearby factories, diners, 7-11’s
And the spring of green when there’s an
Itch that you can’t scratch, an itch
That will last for decades never leaving.
Why should it? “It’s such a small town.”
Well, word gets around.

Everyone waiting for that magic moment,
Passed out in the bar, with bartender
Waking you up and telling you you’re the
Only one left, tits in your beer, sloshed,
Probably pissed your pants, or
The magic moment under the bleachers
Of the football field where word
Gets around quicker than fist meets nose
And produces blood and snot, where you protest and say
“I didn’t do anything” when your
Football star boyfriend beats you black and blue,
The same knight or prince valiant who
Played a part taking his own turn
In the round table of a daisy chain of gang rape
Just the night before.
It was all in good fun, just a kegger, etc etc etc.

“Did you lick his ass too? You got shit in your teeth?”
He pries her lips and jaw apart and
Spits in her mouth and walks away.

“What do you know?” she thinks,
And bloodied and muddied,
Sullied and disgraced, but not as yet unbound,
She walks back home.
Now what to do?

Soon enough she picks up her shoes
And is on the road to nowhere.
She’s already kissed her little sister goodbye.

What a perfect spot to meet, if not
At the railroad yard then at the Greyhound stop.

“Going somewhere?”
A startled pause. A rush of blood.
“I’m running away from home.”

Run, Stacy. Run, run, run.

“The bus is here,” he says.
“Looks like we’re going together.”
“After you.”
“No, after you.”
He smiles and smacks her ass.

They both laugh.

Well, as your friends, we wanna say,
He’ll break your heart one day
So you’d better run, run, run. Yeah yeah yeah.
Oh, but he’s such a quiet kind of guy.
How he thrills me, my oh my.
Maybe it isn’t true
what they say about him.
Don’t be fooled by the shyness in his eyes.
And don’t you know he’s just a devil in disguise?
You’d better run, run, run. Yeah yeah yeah,

Oh, Stacy, Stacy, you’ll be singing
That tune many more times, don’t you worry.
That Greyhound Bus is like Al-Buraq,
Carrying Stacy and Jerry through the Lincoln Tunnel
Toward their own personal New Jerusalem.
Their night journey, their Isra and Mi’raj,
Carries them into a little hell while they
Are unsure what to do, but fucking hell
They’re stuck together at that moment
Until the bus exhales its fumes.
Where are they headed, anyway?
Jerry tells her he might have a job with
The Sanitation Department, a friend of his
From Queens was always telling him he
Could hook him up.
“And you?”
She can’t fully answer.
Only been to NYC once on
A school trip...
When the bus doors open
the sky is black and purple.
A streak of red light above
The Port Authority Bus Terminal.
“Come on,” he says, and she takes his hand
“He took me this far. And I didn’t say
anything to my parents. God damn.
But what was I going to do?
If word got around that he fucked me in the mud?
But what do my parents care, or my classmates.
I want to have a little fun without
Everyone judging me.
Leave me be, I’m on a journey.”

“OK Jerry. You lead the way, you brought me.”
“Da fuck? I found you on the bus.”
“Not what I mean, I mean we’re here now,
So come on, lead the way.”

Maybe he’s sobered up, or something’s changed
Over the course of their bus ride from upstate.
Out in the street, the manholes
Shrouded in white steam remind her of Santa hats.
Where to now, prince and princess?

Molto vivace

Avoid the dog shit. Ignore the bums.
Don’t buy drugs from strangers.
“Come on, keep up!”
It’s all too much for her—the dirty spring,
The bearded plumes of smoke, the itch
Between her thighs, the guy
She follows without knowing why.
“Come on, keep up...”
“Hey!” she stops and yells. “Hey!”
“Where are you taking me?”
“Come on.”

They end up in a shit hotel
With a view of brick on one side
And a view of an alley from the toilet window.
She goes to brush her teeth.
Jerry is asleep.
Abraham slept, Noah too...

Jerry, who had delivered Stacy from Canaan,
Presented her then to some fleabag and
An Egyptian falafel stand.

Stacy emerged from the bathroom,
Saw his paunch bulging under his wifebeater,
Traveling toward his own dreams, passed out,
And so she too closed her eyes and hoped
Tomorrow would be the start of something new.

And they’re in the city, after all.
Sometimes she couldn’t even contain
Her excitement and would wake up
In the middle of the night
And smile.

In the morning, the yolk of the sun
explodes, bleeds out, runs down
her thighs.
Hungry, she gets an egg sandwich
On the street, and munches on
Some leftover popcorn from
The trip, while Jerry sleeps.
Run, Stacy. Run, run, run.

I would run too, if I were you.
But where is it that you so wish to go?
You made your bed in this flophouse.
Jerry is snoring.
Who is this prick?
Why’d you run away with him
On nothing but a whim?

“Oh, I don’t know” you’d tell me
if we could truly talk, but you are
my marionette, so, darling, I’ll guide you
back along the string and rails.
Go back inside, my dear. See what Jerry has to say.

He wakes, winces at an empty bottle of Popov.
“God damn, got a little fucked up last night, huh?”
But you hardly drank, Stacy.
It’s he who’s got the pounding head.
Lie down with him, please, my love.
Stroke his chest, rest your head on him and smile.
This is what you wanted.
Soon, soon, my dear.
Wings ripped off flies—that is
your future. But why?
Because I love all my corpses
And all my cripples.
But there’s still time for that.

Now, let’s go.
It’s hot in the city,
Amid the trash and broken dreams.

And my dream always comes back
To the same ending, which is also just the beginning:
The Greyhound takes her back
And the green and red tail lights
Are a painting across the white
Exhaust fumes.
Stacy came home,
But not for long.
God wanted to surprise her.

TO BE CONTINUED

LENIN LIVES!

Lenin lived, Lenin lives, Lenin will live!
Can we alter time and death?
Do we have all the time in the world?
Lenin’s a mummy now.
And he’s not getting any better.
So what’s the point?

Lenin lives!
We of Soviet descent
Remember well what
The ghoul Lenin said.

Allegedly his quote was:
”Live for a century, learn for a century!”
And the people would add:
“And die an idiot!”

So what’s the point?

But here’s the real problem:
The sight fades, the curtain
Slowly drops, and more importantly,
When the hand can no longer hold the chisel
And the children can’t or refuse
To read what you have chiseled,
Then maybe they don’t need to do much
Other than pull your beard and run away laughing,
Choosing something new to believe.
Technology will tuck them into bed via
Mommy Robbie Robot.

And history’s forgotten too.
The Tsar’s potatoes and champagne
Or his langoustines and lobsters
Are cold as death.
And love is colder than death.

History’s in the basement of
The Ipatiev House basement,
Wallpaper covered in brains, or maybe
In the crow field where Van Gogh
Loaded his revolver.

Lenin lives, Lenin will live!
He lived indeed
As a syphilitic, bloodthirsty madman|
And in the end, he would shit his pants
With the bourgeoisie wiping his ass,
Paralyzed on his rattan wheelchair.
His statues are mostly toppled now.
What was the point, Mr Lenin,
Other than destruction and revenge?

We become wiser only
To realize that not only can’t
We take it with us but that
The purpose is obscure.
Might as well remain idiots,
And screw the next generations.
At least for idiots, the outcome’s assured.

This whole charade reminds me
Of a distant episode back in New York.
An aging homosexual named Stanley
Was sexually harassing my friend
Claude at work.

Claude, he said, I heard that
You have a big cock so
I think we should fuck.
Don’t worry, I have lots of experience,
I’ll slide it in your ass and
You won’t feel a thing.
The premise made no sense,
And so I said to Claude
Why didn’t you ask Stanley:
If you won’t feel a thing, then
What’s the point?

BIG SUR

I’ve been told that
There’s a killer on the road
Or hiding in the Ventana Wilderness
They haven’t found him.
A good man is hard to find these days.

I’m searching too.
Where are the bikers
Who let it roll down
The highway?
Or the jailbait looking for
A miracle?
Gas, grass, or ass, baby!

Or the poets making
Sloppy love in a motel,
In bed with the ladies
Who rolled their eyes?

And in the city, under the
White sky, where Kerouac
Fell off the same chair
He sat in while Ginsberg
Sucked his cock,
They now supplicate:
Give us steel! Glass and steel!

Nature remains,
Renewed by fire.
The poet’s tower still stands
Between hawks and sprawl.

The barely legal hitchikers,
If they didn’t get killed,
Retired from their
Library jobs years ago.
And the rock singers they used
To hitch rides to see
At the Fillmore are long gone.

It is the monster of time expired
That I wish strangled or beheaded.
If not, I’d like to sue Heaven.
Thank God the wilderness is left.

I remember in my own time,
Once in Big Sur the company I kept
Took too much LSD and couldn’t
Set up a tent.

I left them and went to a roadhouse to
Drink beer and slept in my car.
I was searching for a woman,
There was time enough for love
Back then but all I found
Were crashing waves and yet
This I remember: the freedom
And folly of youth.
I can revisit it in mental vision
Or drive six hours north but you can’t
Put your arm around a memory.
And I couldn’t put my arms around her.

In the mountains the killer waits
For the next victim.
A camping party perhaps,
Hitchhikers are few these days.
When caught he’ll say he
Didn’t do it out of malice,
It was just something
He was compelled to.

The same with time.

At least the beauty of Big Sur
Compels us in turn
To remember that
While the poets lie dead on the shelves
And those who were once girls
Hitching to the concert now await their graves
The crags near the ocean
Will still be there.
And the ocean will still be blue.

PARTIR C’EST MOURIR UN PEU

We met in the morning for a “farewell breakfast.” I hated to think of it as a farewell, but it was to me a separation serious enough to feel semi-tragic, filled with trepidation. I had remembered similar breakfast dates with past girlfriends. The details were hazy but the lump-in-the-throat feeling was still embedded somewhere in my mind.

In LA, not long before leaving for NY, I heard a story on the radio about hyper-sensitive people; the ones who can be driven to tears by ephemeral bursts of sadness from something as trivial as watching Bambi or Dumbo, or hearing a familiar melody that very vaguely reminds them of something, and I realized I fit squarely into that category. As we sat in the diner before Betty was to go to Atlantic City, I felt a horrible tinge of despair that this was farewell forever, that this was the last time I would see her. While this was potentially and hopefully untrue, since she did promise to return in a few days, staring into my greasy omelet I was reminded that this too will come to an end, like all things good and bad. Summer would end, and I would have to return to my life in California. I had barely thought about my wife and child during this journey. What was going to happen between now and the time I had to return? What will happen when I return?

I had always hated diners. Something about that very New York institution revolted me. I don’t know whether it is the smell, the geriatric clientele, the meeting place for mobsters or the lighting and crystal chandeliers, or that Burt and Linda Pugach, the crazy love couple who got married after he left her blind in an acid attack loved them, or that they were often part of peoples routine as they sank into more routine and life passed them by... Or perhaps it is the extensive menu, which is absurd and overwhelming even when you know that everything will taste the same. Anyway, it was her idea, so we sat in Park View Diner which was nowhere near a park and did not offer much of a view. I was melancholic, she was distracted and distant. I observed the bulbous, gelatinous hides draped over shrinking skeletons devouring their club sandwiches and patty melts and felt immediately nauseous.

Much of the breakfast was spent in silence, and the day felt like a bleak and boring Sunday, though it was Friday and Betty was leaving in a few hours. Usually our silences were comfortable, the way one can easily be silent together with a spouse or parent or very close friend, but that day the silence was intrusive, as if some “quiet angel”—in Slavic folklore, when people stop talking unexpectedly they say a quiet angel flew past—kept interrupting. For the first time with Betty I felt tongue-tied. It was as if that particular morning, or starting from the night before to be precise, she started to seem different to me, as if she was someone else. Several times I asked her whether she was okay, until she finally snapped and stared at me and said in a hostile voice, “Yes, I’m okay! Why do you keep on asking me that?”

“Bye. I’ll see you in a few days,” she said as we left the horrific diner. I squinted through the brightness, the sidewalk stained with pigeon and seagull shit. “I can go home by myself.” She turned her wheelchair and started to push herself away. “Bye.” I said nothing and walked to the subway, not knowing what I should think.

When I came home an odd thing happened. I felt a modicum of freedom and decided to put at least part of her out of my mind and try to write.

On the morning of this farewell breakfast, I awoke without a hangover for a change and now felt that despite the sadness of her departure I could concentrate on the book. The sky was turning grey; a storm was coming in from the ocean and the fog and mist of the marine layer chilled and refreshed. I turned on the computer, looked at the blank page I had been staring at for weeks, and miraculously started to write. It started to come automatically as if on autopilot, from some divine or demonic inspiration. And though I cursed myself for writing in verse again, I could not stop, and so I went on.

“It doesn’t matter,” I kept telling myself when I wanted to slam on the breaks. “Sure, no one reads poetry anymore, but maybe some people still do, and you can be certain that no one reads screenplays, so just keep going. At least you will have completed something, even if it’s not what you wanted when you first conceived the idea.”

Sometimes I would be interrupted by a flash of a thought about Atlantic City, that utterly wretched and blighted excuse for a town. I would wonder what Betty was doing but tried to shoo away that thought. When I did, brief memories popped up of when my mom dropped me off at Atlantic City for the summer, and what a boring and pathetic summer that was for a twelve year old kid to spend in such a hovel. But I’d kick those ugly memories aside and they would scurry away for a while as I returned to the story at hand: the saga of Stacy Fox.

Why Stacy? Why did I devote my life to telling and obsessing about the miserable and tragicomic story of this fictional character? Others have done the same, I suppose: Cervantes with his peabrained knight errant, Petrarch with his Laura... Stacy was my filthy bit of a creation, a Galatea with STDs, and I was a talentless Pygmalion or Geppetto. And in time she became my Laura and my Christ.

I admit it: the reason I didn’t want to start typing was because I didn’t want it to end. But I had to, I felt like time was running out, desperately. Forget my health, forget my madness, forget it all, I knew that now was the time for me to finish this book. I was determined not to fall into that vague but inextinguishable sadness that would overcome me as a child. That New York feeling, never more pronounced than when I would return; the tears would well up in my eyes the minute I saw the George Washington Bridge and knew I was coming back to a dubious home.

I set out to write, and write I did. Occasionally, over those few days, I would get a phone call from an old friend or acquaintance, once even from someone in high school, but I had no desire to see anyone, much less indulge in gormless juvenilia, reminiscing about the supposed “good times”—I was too busy creating my own past as I revisited it. I didn’t need any of Frieda’s handkerchiefs, reminding me of how utterly stupid the real past was. How did they manage to track me down? I didn’t pursue the question and so I kept going. I wrote like a man possessed, and I suppose I was to some extent, or if not wholly possessed then certainly pursued by some manner of furies. Stacy was the America I could never understand and never hold.

Exhausted, I collapsed and slept fitfully, the book and real life forming a very murky mélange. I had no idea how long I slept for but when I looked at my phone I saw that it was Wednesday. Betty had left on Friday. There were no calls from her, no messages. I started to panic. The satisfaction of finishing the manuscript evaporated.

At first, the New World Symphony seemed to be about three different women, all three of whom suffer the same predicament. They were also all, though unmistakably rotten, possessed of not just a tragic quality but a need for some type of redemption— even, if need be, through death. I considered having them as the saga of a single character or archetype, a theme-and-variation on the Fallen Woman. Finally I decided that the New World Symphony should be a continuation of The Girl from Below (Garbage Dump) and that it should follow the pitifully sordid saga of the protagonist Stacy Fox.

At the same time, I wondered what was the worst thing a woman could do to merit what I put my character through. I was not thinking of Irma Grese, Elizabeth Báthory, Darya Saltykova or Ilse Koch—those were true monsters who should have been shot in the cradle. I was thinking about sleaze, something sexually depraved. But what is depraved these days? Even De Sade is, after all, rather pedestrian; fetishes have been around forever.

One story that came to mind was Jean Lorrain’s “The Unknown Woman,” about an upper-class female who seduced petty criminals, slept with them and then turned them into the police solely for the ultimate purpose of masturbating and reaching orgasm as they were either sentenced to prison or even guillotined. Or there’s the story of Casanova, who fucked a whore in the ass while looking out of the window at the regicide and achieved the most powerful climax as the wretch was dismembered. From Wikipedia I learned:

Fetched from his prison cell on the morning of 28 March 1757, Damiens allegedly said “La journée sera rude” (“The day will be hard”). He was tortured first with red hot pincers; the hand with which he had held the knife during the attempted assassination was burned using sulphur; molten wax, molten lead, and boiling oil were poured into his wounds. He was then remanded to the royal executioner, Charles Henri Sanson, who harnessed horses to his arms and legs to be dismembered. But Damiens’ limbs did not separate easily: the officiants ordered Sanson to cut Damiens’ joints with an axe. Once Damiens was dismembered, to the applause of the crowd, his reportedly still living torso was burnt at the stake.

But those instances are rare, and there are many more pedestrian ways a woman can create fear and horror in a man. The old ghastly whore who narrates De Sade can be dismissed as apocryphal, a titillating fantasy, but much lesser sins—when they are real—can fill the heart with fear of the unknown, and send the mind reeling. For it is the things we cannot see, or do not know, that are most frightening. And thus I always suspected there were deep and ugly secrets hidden within each person, and particularly within each woman. I have never been able to let go of this fear, this fascination.

The first few days were a blur. I would be overcome by a wave of exhaustion and once as I lay down a bunch of murky lines of verse went floating through my head. I was a poor student in high school and college other than in English literature, or any kind of literature, and in English I had a fine memory for recitation. I lay down on my gaudy “European Furniture” bed and fell asleep mumbling to myself the section of Chaucer’s Manciple’s Tale that I was still able to remember with clarity:

Taak any bryd, and put it in a cage,
And do al thyn entente and thy corage
To fostre it tendrely with mete and drynke
Of alle deyntees that thou kanst bithynke,
And keep it al so clenly as thou may,
Although his cage of gold be never so gay,
Yet hath this brid, by twenty thousand foold,
Levere in a forest that is rude and coold
Goon ete wormes and swich wrecchednesse.
For evere this brid wol doon his bisynesse
To escape out of his cage, yif he may.
His libertee this brid desireth ay.

To escape out of her cage, if she may, is what I was dealing with.

END OF BOOK II.

THE SECOND COMING

When God walked on the earth,
Two thousand years ago,
What did he see, what did He feel?
They tell us He tried to appeal and
Said to live your lives in different ways.

That’s what they say.

When through atrocities He stumbled,
What went on in His brain?
And what would go through it again
Today, that is, if He came down?

Let Him come down then, let it all come down!

For nothing’s changed since He was here!
Except we now have lesser fear of He who
Had supposedly walked with us as a man.

We’re proud of man-made sun but yet
When lights are out we huddle in the dark.

What would we say to Him?
There would be quite a difference
Of opinions and some would cry
Forgive my sins and my transgressions.
Some others would instead raise fists and shout.
I don’t know what I’d do, I have my doubts.

If He came back I’d like to think
He’d say the one thing that He could to
Soothe so many fevered brains,
And put collective crimes to rest.

Not only doubts but I’ve got anger too,
Resentment towards indifference, and clinically
The shrink would toss it off and say:
Abandonment issues.

Well step up to the plate then, head clinician!
What I would hope is that He’d answer
Me in truth if I could show Him all our handiwork
And all that’s passed since He walked on the earth.

To finally see the long suffering
Jew bow down His head to me when
Put to task, and say to me just as I used to
Say to Him: “Forgive me, that is all I ask.”

Start from Chapter 1

RETURN TO THE HEIGHTS

The train ride to Upper Manhattan seemed never ending. Back when I was first starting to compose Stacy’s story, the view across the Manhattan Bridge and the descent down into Chinatown always filled me with emotion. The light, the morning light where she finally decides to come home and leave her misadventures in New York behind, the yellow blinding light illuminating the stacks of garbage, the decaying buildings, the prison barges that were once moored in the East River. But today, travelling from one end of the city to the other, I felt strangely numb. As the D train went over the bridge, everything looked different. I felt no pangs or flutters. All of it was gone in real life, it only remained in my vision and in my unproduced film.

When I exited the 175th Street station, things were a little better— it was mostly the same old slum—but the tears which I expected never came. I walked past the park, green as I remembered it but still filled with the same winos and dealers. I approached my mother’s building and vaguely expected to hear some faint laughter coming from within. Somewhere in my mind a song started to play—a very vague melody of something I must have heard one summer when I was young, but probably never had. A lilting melody, one which I probably only imagined. In some ways I was glad this forgotten part of Manhattan had remained its ugly self. There were fewer Dominicans and Cubans sitting on milk cartons playing dominoes and sipping Heinekens, but they were still there, still present, as were the darting eyes and on my end, the perennial feeling of alienation I felt there from day one. Even then, I did not belong.

The blue haze of New York summer blanketed the filthy streets. Across the river, the mild green of the Palisades Parkway beckoned, over the George Washington Bridge, the bridge that I always hoped would take me somewhere. The green leaves whispered something to me in the afternoon breeze but I could not understand their language.

I crossed back from the waterfront and made my way down to Broadway. I needed a drink but there are no bars in that part of town so I entered a bodega, of which there are plenty, in search of an ice-cold beer.

“Buscando algo?” the man behind the counter asked and grinned. I said nothing, paid for my Heineken and carried on my way. Si, estaba buscando algo... Yes, I was looking for something. But what?

I exited onto the broken street. My dream was ruined. I had not noticed until now that I was covered in sweat.

Next, I took a train up to Kingsbridge Heights in order to walk those old, familiar streets. The only thing worse than the seemingly endless trip from one end of New York to the other was the prospect of the same journey coming back. I got off at the 231st street station and saw that very little had changed. In some ways it was a relief, preferable to the “Disneyfication” of much of Manhattan and Brooklyn. That sinister feeling that dwells just below the surface was still there. All cities have ghosts, but New York to me, always seemed to possess the most sinister ones. Behind every snowfall there is a rapist poised to attack. Behind every gorgeous view of the Hudson from the West Side Highway, there is a dead child stuffed into a plastic cooler.

As for Van Cortland Park, that’s where my grandmother spent her last years looking through her window when she wasn’t looking at the green fluorescent corridors of a nursing home, waiting for her daughter to visit her, wondering why she doesn’t come anymore. If I moved to Kingsbridge with Betty, I would be returning to childhood the way my grandmother acquired her second childhood of dementia. No, I had to return to Brooklyn and try to write. I was able to sneak in a few mini bottles of whiskey onto the now cop-infested subway to make the ride tolerable. This was it, I thought. I must somehow finish a draft of the book and return to California as soon as possible. I already felt the pre-autumnal chill that is the harbinger of winter, bringing on the season of death. And yet autumn in New York is inviting, and that brief hint of an Indian Summer was tempting me to stay just a bit longer.

But what really tempted me to stay was Betty. And there she was, popping up like a dream or image each time I thought about returning. So, when I arrived back in Brooklyn, with the sweat stuck to my back from the ridiculously cold subway air conditioning, just as I was warming up in the humid night, I broke into shivers of a different kind. Betty was outside the front door to my building, her face wet with tears.

“What is it? What’s the matter?”

She motioned with her hand as if to shoo me away, gesturing like a deaf mute between sobs.

“Come. You need a drink,” I said.

There was a bar a few blocks around the corner that I had spotted once but had never gone into. It looked seedy, but I needed her to calm down and there was no time now to cab it to Europa or Primorski.

The bar was a relic, an anachronism. With the green awning, the green lights and the geezers sipping their little beers with a shot on the side, it was a throwback to times we only remember from movies. The smell of stale beer was particularly redolent. We sat down and ordered whiskeys on the rocks. They came quick and she bolted down the booze and the tears dried. She started to speak.

“Oh, Lucky. There are so many things to say.”

“Everyone has a story, and your stories, they don’t compare to mine. Your stories make me feel tiny...But I have a story too...”

I squeezed her hand.

“Betty,” I told her, “everyone has a story. And those aren’t my stories, they’re my parents’. And they’re not happy stories. I haven’t got much of a story myself, that’s why I’m struggling with this book. But, of course, you have a story. Why don’t you tell me yours? I still know so little about you.”

“There are certain things people should never, ever talk about, Lucky. There are certain things that should never be written about, either. But I will talk about it. I will talk about it briefly, and then you can make up your mind about me and who I am.”

“You can tell me anything,” I told her, biting my own brain and heart out of fear for something terrifying, but I needed to know.

“Very well, I will tell you a few things. But not everything, and not right now. No, I can’t tell you right now. Let’s just drink this one and then I want to go home. Anyway, what’s up with you? Don’t ask about me. What did you do today?”

I told her a bit about my day, my exploration of places haunted by memory. I told her how I felt that although everything changes and the locomotive of time speeds on, the fact that some things like buildings remain made me feel like the past still existed, that time wasn’t yet destroyed by Kali. When she asked me about Kali, the black mother goddess, I explained that I hated myself often and that I considered myself an unsuccessful drunk a lot of the time but that at one point I had studied Hindu philosophies. I told her that she, as a jiva, is caught in samsara like all living beings and is waiting to be liberated. This intrigued her but also frightened her though I could sense an oddly hopeful fear in her eyes. I walked her to the train station—she insisted on taking the subway home by herself—and went back to my apartment, exhausted but pleasantly tipsy after my voyage to childhood. I also felt something was fomenting. I was not at all sure what it was. Perhaps I was about to break out of my writer’s block, I thought, or perhaps something was going to happen with either Betty or Charlotte.

The night after taking Betty to that peculiar old bar, I had the most wonderful “virtual sex.” In one especially sweet dream a girl in a red wig came up to me and said, “Come, let’s go home and get naked,” and gave me the key to her flat. Perhaps keys, apart from their obvious Freudian symbolism, held a special significance for me—perhaps they represented my wish to see where Betty lived, to be invited into her house, whether real or metaphorical.

Back to the redhead: I wait for her in her flat. She lives in a messy apartment on the top floor of a brownstone, in an unnamed town. I know I shouldn’t be doing this. I know I shouldn’t even be there. And then she comes in, begins to undress slowly, saying, “I haven’t had sex in so long...” I reach over when she’s down to her bra and panties and kiss her stomach, then I wake up.

But I am still dreaming. I wake up within my dream and run into Betty on the street. I try to tell her what happened in my “dream” without being too explicit, try to apologize and she laughs. Then I woke up for real. I lay there sweating, thinking, “Something has to change. I can’t go on. This can’t go on.”

A few days went by without seeing Betty. There were excuses, doctor’s appointments (I never asked for what) and I brushed aside because to paraphrase Swinburne I was hoping that absence would make the tart grow fonder.

I took another excursion. The one place I knew I needed to visit was The Met, but that too, I found, had changed, and not for the better. Like everywhere else in the city, it was too chaotic, too crowded. Even the little things were missing, like the iconic metal admission buttons, or the info desk (now two separate counters). Artworks littered the gallery like city trash, piled up hodgepodge in every available space, a triumph of congestion and wealth over subtlety.

I wandered aimlessly through the galleries, trying to remember what, if anything, would elicit the “saudade” I felt for New York in LA, but which seemed to be missing now that I had arrived. The Egyptology collection remained as stunning and creepy as I remembered it: strange, ancient dreams preserved in stone. It was when I segued into the American Wing, searching for something to help me find me a connection to this America, that I found myself staring at Sargent’s Portrait of Madame X. I had read something about the subject, that she was a “professional beauty,” and I wondered if that was simply a glamorous term for a high society slut. There was also something about her that vaguely looked like my poor Betty, but standing tall and not confined to sitting. What did this glamorous Madame X do in the bedroom?

And then I also remembered Mlle X: “French Neurologist Dr. Jules Cotard was surprised and confused by the female patient (known only as Mademoiselle X) brought to his office at the Pitié-Salpêtrière University Hospital in Paris one afternoon in 1882. The 43-year-old described a peculiar set of symptoms: she claimed she had “no brain, no nerves, no chest, no stomach, no bowels — that there was nothing left of her but the skin and bones. Also, she claimed she had no soul, that there was no God and no devil, and that overall she was nothing but “a disorganized body.” With no internal organs, she claimed to not need to eat anymore. Further, she expressed her belief in her immortality, noting that she could not die a natural death, but “will live forever unless she is burnt, fire being her only possible end.”

Just as I pondered these awful thoughts, there was a silent rotation of the security guards and, mouth agape and laughing quietly, I was approached by one of the guards who it took me a full minute to recognize. It was my friend Felix, whom I had not seen or talked to since moving to Los Angeles a decade ago. It was his lunch break and he invited me to eat with him at the staff cafeteria, to which I gladly obliged.

Over a lunch of tasteless salmon and ratatouille we did our best to catch up in the little time that we had. I knew Felix when he was a guard and I still worked at the info desk. He had always had talent and initiative, but now, twenty years later, he was sorely lacking in the latter. Felix and I were never terribly close, but he knew Dick and Mike, and would appear at parties of mutual friends and join in for the occasional after work drinks. Never particularly exciting nor a great conversationalist, he was often the “voice of reason” during feuds and a good listener when it came to talking over the girl problems we others all had.

As he talked it became clear that, for reasons he never explained or even hinted at, he had completely given up on any ambition, not only his art career but even to rise up in the ranks of the security department. And while letting him talk in his signature monotone I silently composed a jeremiad of my own failures and about all the things that I too had given up on. Yet Felix, nearly bald now and resigned to mere survival, was a picture of defeat. The only lively thing about him were his cold Putin eyes that shone despite the despair. He was content, or so he told me, but I understood that he envied me despite my own failings, and so he broke out the old trope about writing being the noblest profession. He too had flirted with the idea of writing a novel once, until he became too content with his health insurance and dental plan from the union.

“Write, man! Just do it,” he said, unaware that the imperative to “just do it” was the thing that grated me more than possibly anything else. “I can’t figure out how to do it anymore, but I still try sometimes. You know that writing is primeval? It’s the only thing that gave our ancient relatives the ability to transmit something to the following generation. I mean, look at this place—the pharaohs, the hieroglyphs...”

“For what purpose, though?” I asked. “To keep the human race alive?”

“Yup.” Felix smiled and dipped into his slop with a smirk.

“Evolution and all that. I dunno. What do you want from me? I’m just a security guard.”

“And I’m nothing,” I said and started drifting off while Felix mumbled recycled philosophy and told me about his life. His words faded in and out. He mentioned something about how we live on through our children, which was surprising since he had none. Soon enough his break was over and it was time for him to return to guarding treasures of art.

I gleaned little from that episode. I garnered that he was single, lived alone. Another New York soul lost in the anthill. Before we parted, he went to the vending machine and bought a “Hostess Fruit Pie,” proudly joking that these disgusting desserts had “never been touched by human hands.” As he headed back to his shift at the American Wing he looked to me like the Black Dahlia, Elizabeth Short, disappearing into the lobby of the Biltmore Hotel never to be seen alive again. The only difference was that Felix would go back to his own Biltmore via the Met until his death. And I emerged from the Met with a taste of death on my tongue, not to mention the man-made salmon. Death is the ultimate certainty. When it will come and in what form is the ultimate uncertainty.

All things must come to an end, and we are supposed to accept that. But I could not. The randomness of whether it will be a happy ending, a tragic ending, a false ending... it drove me crazy. There are platitudes that seek to explain this misery, that without death we would not appreciate life and other such nonsense, but they have never worked for me. A day before my meeting with Felix I dreamt of my father. He was old, as old as he was when he died, but was still making plans for a new choreography. I had just bought him a new iPhone to better stay in touch and was showing him how to use it. In the middle of explaining how to take photos I was struck by the terrible realization that he would be dead soon, and that with his death his work would simply vanish. There was no way I would be able to continue his work, nor did he pass his knowledge onto anyone who would be able to do so in turn. Conquering death by death only works when you’re the Son of God. I resolved, on waking, to finish my book. But when I got home that evening after meeting Felix, all I could think about was Betty. And the pages were still blank.

There was no way to know or tell where Betty would be the next day. I supposed I could walk back to the Boardwalk and wait for her at Café Europa. Eventually sleep won and my eyes closed. I did not shut the blinds before I collapsed and sleep lasted for only an hour or two, at the break of dawn. In my delirium and in my search for a woman, I took the subway to the end of the line and walked to the Café Europa in the vain hope of seeing her.

“Gingerly” is not an adverb one would usually use to describe a person eating a plate of fried eggs, but there she was—gently and, yes, gingerly cutting through the runny sun of the yolk and scooping it up with her toast.

The only thing she said was, “Sit.” No hellos, no I missed yous, no where have you beens. I sat down as she gingerly finished her eggs and toast.

“I have to go out of town tonight,” she said as I rubbed my eyes in disbelief. “But I’ll see you again soon, okay, honey?”

I grinned politely and swallowed bile.

“Can you help me? I’m done.”

She threw a banknote on the table and I wheeled her down the street. We didn’t talk. I had nothing to say. The taxi was already waiting.

“He can do it. I’ll see you soon, honey,” she said and motioned me over. We kissed on the cheek.

When her car pulled away I hailed another cab, went home, and slept for eighteen hours.

Where had she gone? Why didn’t I ask her? Who exactly was she?

The latter question seemed to me less important than the former. Where did she keep on disappearing to all the time?

I too wished to disappear—but with a woman, perhaps even with Betty, despite her immobility. I wanted to sit on a beach in Miami, Palma de Mallorca, Cascais... with a woman. With a woman’s waist in easy reach. But Betty’s midsection was out of my reach, it was entrenched in her chariot. Perhaps I needed someone else. One of Mike’s litany of bimbos. But then I would imagine myself married to one of those strangers, my arm around her waist, mumbling, praying, “Oh my Betty, oh my Betty... it is you that I want, no matter how crooked and crippled you may be, it is you, my Betty...”

I awoke in my sweaty white and marble tomb and believed for a moment that she was there. I saw that I was only hugging wet pillows and loneliness broke through me and shattered my heart.

How would you like to be remembered? Oftentimes, one mistake and you’ll be remembered only for that one episode, at least on earth.

Another fixture at our house was a poet and scholar by the name of Vyacheslav Zavalishin who came from the “Second Wave” (post WW2) of Russian immigration. Many of the Second Wave emigres came from Displaced Persons camps. Some - like Zavalishin - served Nazi Germany as a propagandist, whether of volition or under the barrel of a Luger. He was slovenly but genteel, charming and annoying, constantly drunk but never slurring or stumbling - but eventually, to me he simply became annoying as he would invite himself over constantly, uninvited.

His fascinating history meant nothing to me for years, decades, except the toilet incident which I remember until today. And until I got to know his fascinating background deeper - his escapes from the Germans until his collaboration with them - this was how I recalled him.

THE FAT MAN AND THE TOILET SEAT

A fat man sat on our old busted toilet
And broke it completely.
The weight of his elephantine haunches
Cracked the seat.
If that wasn’t bad enough, our dog
Knocked down the door as he
Was exposed, both barking at each other.

He was a poet, with white Beethoven mane of hair,
And probably some hemorrhoids to spare
From the toil of literature and sitting.

I must have been around the age of ten
And all I did was laugh at his disgrace.
He didn’t care, his dignity was history.
Neither did I.
For I was sore that he ate all the Finnish herring
That my mom set out in one gulp,
And hated him for not offering me even just one bite,
How with impunity and such bravado
He placed the glass jar right onto his plate
And dove right in.
And so I snickered quite maliciously
About his toilet fate.

He’s dead now, but I still recall him well,
His boozy smell, his mane and basic poet’s charms,
Accoutrements like Gordon’s vodka in a plastic bottle,
And sordid and heroic stories that he’d tell.

The fat old man would speak quite proudly
Of how in his youth, a girl who loved him
Jumped into the drink and drowned in Die Donau.
Or maybe in the Dniester, or was it Die Moldau?

And how he had escaped over and over again.

But far from mourning he would slurp
The pickled fish into his mouth, his grey hair
Flowing from the breeze
Of New York City garbage nights.

This fat old man wrote maritime poems,
The boundless expanse of the sea.
And many romantics do get wildly caught
With pants way down, despite the girls who drowned.

Apart from talk of sunken brides
He’d sit and drink and chime about
The poet’s lot and when completely hammered
He’d trundle to the toilet:
even a poet has an ass, and that night
I laughed when our dog jumped on the door
to interrupt him as he passed some new material.

How do we wish to be remembered?
With deeds, with thoughts,
With memories we can all applaud?
And for a poet, how much more
Dreadful would your station be to
be remembered for one squalid bit:
About how you were not allowed to shit in peace.

Now looking back, in fairness I often find him sweet,
Despite how he ate my herring and when
I saw him fallen off the toilet seat.

Zavalishin’s poetry is not well known - it consists mostly of romantic maritime themes. He was, however, considered an important lay scholar for publishing an encyclopedic biographical compendium titled Early Soviet Writers which was used in universities for quite some time. Later, he published a well received translation of Nostradamus which unfortunately for him did not mention toilet seats or dogs in his future.

MAGIC AFTERNOON

One day, when Betty wasn’t around (she told me she had a doctor’s appointment), I dreamt of a magic afternoon.

Read from Chapter 1

The girl’s name was Rachel (why Rachel I have no idea, but for some reason I remembered upon waking that that was her name) and she had bright reddish hair, almost dyed but it seemed to be natural since the carpet matched the drapes as I found out later in the dream. I was cleaning out my mom’s house in Washington Heights, waiting for the last of the movers to arrive when I saw her through the window, sitting on a fire escape, smoking a cigarette, dangling her legs. She must have been seventeen years old. She looked like what one would call a meretricious “girl from the neighborhood” who was just embarking on a journey of boys and sex. Was she a pass-around girl? I didn’t know and didn’t care. I knew she was too young and that this was dangerous territory but it was literally “love at first sight.” I wooed her, tried to seduce her gently at first and then finally I confessed that I was madly in love with her, to which she admitted that she felt the same way. We kissed. I lifted up her skirt and licked between her thighs. She giggled. How bright, how fiery and wonderful that summer afternoon felt, as if youth in a tidal wave of emotion just dowsed me in fictional memories of the sweetest kind. What a glorious manifestation of summer. My maiden, the princess of summer, rode in on a sorrel horse, guided by the pleasantly scorching sun, kicking away the garbage and debris of aging thoughts and burdens, all manner of discarded faiths and longings, reigniting long dormant passions with a golden torch. Compared to the grey, cold planet where we “haste upon decay,” who wouldn’t prefer to spend one’s entire life dreaming?

Somehow, I knew or understood, later when I woke up, that Rachel was Betty. They did not look alike but nonetheless I knew it—because my love, the feeling of love that I wore like a hair shirt in my dream was real and comforting, and that feeling stayed with me for a long time until the dream went “whoosh” and disappeared like steam under a door.

Later it dawned on me that the girl in my dream looked a lot like a porno hooker I had seen a few times. First softcore and glamour shoots, she looked like she could have been walking down the catwalk in Milan and then, progressively her “work” became raunchier, ending with an orgy in which dozens of horrible looking men circle jerked and ejaculated into her mouth. That last video was the perfect combination of arousal, disgust and terror. Would I, if the dream were real, be able to “date” her and have a romantic relationship with such a cheap slut? I shuddered and let the dream float away completely. There were always other dreams to be had. My youth was gone but at least I found comfort in the endless variety of dream dates who would continue as long as I could dream, as long as I was alive and perhaps even in the next world.

I used some broom of self-control to sweep away these gnawing images, which were pleasant and frustrating in equal measure. I had lost track of time, the way I did during that seemingly chthonic week in childhood that I spent under black stars. Betty and I often stayed up late into the night. I would walk her home, kiss her goodnight, go back to my apartment to drink and spend much of the day with the curtains closed, gently chopping away at my hangover with rosé or vodka tonics until it was twilight and time to see Betty again. In the process, I had neglected not only my writing but also my daily swims.

One evening Betty told me she could not see me the following day—she had a checkup scheduled with a doctor. I don’t know how many days or weeks had passed at that point since we first met and it was only then that I realized that we were seeing each other every single day. I decided that some time apart, even for one day, was positive and resolved to go swimming in the morning the way I used to when I first arrived.

I rose early as I had kept the drinking to a minimum the previous night, and after a bracing shot of vodka after my coffee I took the train down to the beach, ready to rinse my mind in the muddy surf. But my mind did not need rinsing. My head was in the proverbial clouds and I myself was a cloud in trousers. I was ignoring my work, and whatever ideas I tried to sketch were utterly inchoate. But I wasn’t worried. I exited onto the filthy platform, dodging dog and human waste, used condoms and broken beer bottles, and as I made my way down and toward the boardwalk and the sand, where salt air pushed away the garbage smells, I once again reflected on how I missed the East Coast beaches and summers. How wonderful it would be, I thought, if I could somehow drop anchor here, acquire a pied-à-terre perhaps, so that at least every summer I could come back and live this other life with Betty, my mistress, my summer girl...

What would poor Betty do without me during the blue and purple winters under the cold yellow moon? Would she shiver alone out on the boardwalk, looking at the horizon and waiting for a ship with scarlet sails to enter the harbor and bring her happiness at last? Would she be an exile without me, and would the cold ocean look like the Sea of Okhotsk and the city like Magadan? Who would push her chair along the boardwalk? Who would wrap her in warm clothes, put a shawl around her shoulders and keep her warm when November comes and strips the trees? Who would carry her to bed in her dark little flat where she would lie alone and look at the beam of the lighthouse in agony of longing? Who would snuff out her candle and give her a warm blanket as she gazed, shivering, at the purple sky? My reveries turned into pathetic, maudlin sniffles, again straight out of Hans Christian Andersen.

The heat roused me from my icy fantasy. The sun was blinding and the humidity was becoming uncomfortable. I stripped to my swim shorts and walked into the water. I submerged and dove under a wave, and for a second I thought I saw Betty swimming alongside me. “Could she swim in her condition?” I wondered. What evil force had bound her so? Perhaps she could swim, and grow scales and a fish tail? Had some wicked enchantress created her human bondage but allowed her life as a mermaid or perhaps a Rusalka? An unquiet spirit? In Slavic folklore the Rusalka is a water nymph, the spirit of a young woman who drowned herself in order to escape an unhappy marriage. In some versions she is pushed into the water and drowns against her will. Was I the one who would eventually break the spell and return her to her previous human form?

I dried off, sat around on the beach observing the New World Odessite lumps of sagging flesh and soon decided that I had had enough. I was bored. A vague unsatisfied feeling began to break through the summer idyll. Superficially, at least, there was nothing to be worried about. I was on a holiday of sorts, and I was in love, although I feared this love... Everything was nearly perfect, especially if I ignored the little problem with my book, not to mention my wife and child, which I had come close to successfully ignoring. If I believed that this was it, this was totality then the ennui would have resulted in the boredom that comes with achieving all of one’s goals—non plus ultra. Castles in Spain were built and half the world had been conquered, and yet life had become a dream. The kings and queens reposed in the gloaming, the ladies danced to the Chaconne or promenaded through the gardens of El Escorial, and ages and memories passed alongside them. Everything was occurring all at once, and in the New World, the sea captains were bathing their boots in the same waters I had just emerged from.

I began to feel hungry and walked over to Primorski. I had a strong desire for grilled meat and vodka. I thought that eating and drinking would help to fill the physical and figurative emptiness, but it had the opposite effect. Sitting alone in the place that I now so closely associated with Betty was dreadful. There was something missing from the picture, something dreadfully missing in the picture and it was her... I felt as if she were gone forever, and all I had were memories of a summer long past, memories conjured by the taste of charred lamb and the burn of vodka. After the second shot, I began to feel completely, utterly alone and tears came to my eyes. The wait staff ignored me, which was natural in a Russian establishment. What did they think? Why was a grown man crying over his lamb and grilled tomatoes with rice? Did he get laid off? They weren’t the tears of financial distress. Did he lose a love? Was there an accident? Did someone die? I finished the vodka but not the lamb, paid hurriedly and caught the train home. Tears had turned to sweat. The minute I walked through the door the phone rang.

It was her.

“Meet me at Café Europa.”

Soon there we were there again, at our little safe haven where we looked out upon the sunset, pensioneered and smiled. Europa served alcohol, and Betty liked to drink, even if she always did so with grace and control. What is alcohol, anyway? A diviner. We all die. Let us drink while we can, let us swing low. At the Café Europa we sat and smiled, gazing lovingly into each other’s eyes. I put my hand on her leg which couldn’t feel a thing and yet she kind of knew it was there. I peered deep into her eyes. I had to hold onto myself so as not to fall in. But I was falling nonetheless... falling... Ich bin von Kopf bis Fuss... I was not thinking about my wife and daughter, I was under the sea. When would I finally rip her out of that ungainly trap and throw her on the bed and make love to her?

It was an awkward date. I was expecting something, anything. Anything to break the cycle of waiting for some type of resolution to this. To all this. And yet, to my disappointment, there was only idle chit chat. Perhaps we were spending too much time together, always a risk at the beginning of a new relationship. Relationship. Is that what we had? I remembered that years ago I was stalked by that girl Andrea “Andie” Easton who I met outside a movie theater. Though we had a few platonic dates, and talked on the phone a few times—we had a mutual interest in film and I thought she may be of use—we didn’t really see each other that much, and I wasn’t terribly interested in getting her in the sack. And yet one day she called me out of the blue, yelling: “We really need to talk about our relationship!” “What relationship?” I said and hung up. In order to avoid turning into Andie myself I remained taciturn and we ended the evening rather early.

I decided to spend a bit of time away from Betty, even just a day, but the next day she called me in an excited tone and suggested we go to a free symphony concert in Central Park.

“Come on, we never go anywhere, we just stay here in Brooklyn and do nothing,” she said slightly flirtatiously. My heart skipped a beat when she used the plural. We never go anywhere—so there it was in one grammatical nuance, we were a “we,” a couple. So now it was she who was being Andie, but an Andie that I actually wanted. Elated, we took the train that early evening into Manhattan. I held her hand in the subway car. She knew how to maintain her chair and I tried my best not to be too doting, letting her dignity and independence ride alongside my insecurities and fears and when the train hit a bump I only reached out to balance her when I saw in her eyes that she needed some help, and when I straightened her out she smiled and looked at me with something that I felt was love.

The train ride took forever. Even without the added problem of us looking for elevators and other handicapped access ramps and tunnels, the process of exiting the underworld added another half hour to our journey until we finally exited from the depths, stepped over a Styx of piss and finally saw the green of Central Park and the windows of the buildings to the north and southeast burning in the evening reflections, jolting me back into the underworld of my own which cannot be seen by the living, only the memories seen by the dead or nearly dead. The twilight over the park was magical. Though many of the buildings past Central Park South were new and obstructed the sky, at least the perspective remained the same as in my youth.

I crossed the Acheron when we passed the stone entrance gates and headed in the direction of the orchestra tuning up, that slightly nauseating cacophony of instruments trying to find their place among each other. Before we made it to the stage, the first violin came out to applause as de rigeur, then the conductor. “Come!” she yelled, “Hurry!” as she wheeled herself furiously and pointlessly— there was no way, at this point, that we could get good seats unless the entire crowd was touched by her incapacitation. We rushed closer to the stage nonetheless and the music came rushing toward us, and within the first few minutes I realized what they were playing. In my excitement over this date I didn’t even have a chance to ask Betty what the program was for the evening and in the roar and racket of the subway journey we hardly spoke. But now I heard it: it was Dvořák’s Ninth Symphony, “From the New World,” the New World Symphony. How did she know—if indeed she knew— that this was my favorite orchestral piece? We made our way to the stage, as close as possible. Again, a burst of timidity struck me when I didn’t know what to do with the blanket and the picnic bag we brought with us, I didn’t know how to move, how to act, how to make her comfortable. I was reminded for a second about how I had started to act around my wife, that because I had become an economic parasite I had to keep reminding myself that my pitiful life dangled by a thread, that I was a mere economic equation (and a negative one to boot), that at any moment a misstep could cost me my life, that my life would not be missed in the least. But I snapped back. Betty had found a spot. Kindly, or fearfully, people had moved aside and managed to make some space for us. I asked Betty if she was okay and she nodded. And so I sat next to her chair—there was no space for our blanket or for me to lift her out and carry her close to me so I held her hand and sat on the grass and fell into the music. She dug her fingernails into my forearm at the beginning of the first movement. The piece must have been familiar, perhaps all too familiar, to warrant that reaction of pain or delight. Oh, what heights the symphony reached; not the Iowa prairies but the skyscrapers of Manhattan, a journey across the continent like the one Stacy takes, a patchwork of colors, a quilt of misadventures large and small, of loves and tragedies, and then finally release, an apotheosis. During the robust parts, of which there were many, I started to get hard. This was not unusual for me. I had on many occasions experienced a very strong sexual reaction to music, live orchestral music in particular.

Just then my eyes began to fill, and as I surreptitiously wiped away tears Betty banged on the arm rails of her chair, motioning for me to hold her hand. I squeezed her palm and saw that her face was stained with tears and she was shaking. It was the end of the symphony, the Allegro in E Minor; we had already survived the Scherzo. I closed my eyes and pictured us levitating, leaving the world, her drifting up like an angel kicking her miserable chair aside, embracing me and carrying me into the blue atmosphere like a guardian angel ripping me out of hell. The music ended and I opened my eyes. She was smiling, tear-faced but beaming, as if she too had imagined both of us soaring up into the firmament. The concert goers immediately started to disperse at the first sound of applause, so we too pushed ourselves away and onto the path and then out of the park. I pushed her in the direction of Columbus Avenue. We found a café that wasn’t too crowded and went in.

The night turned chilly and the café was cold and did not serve alcohol. After a few frustrated minutes I nodded and we left in search of warmth and booze. Down the street, towards the 1 train, there were several pubs that I recognized, including a few Irish pubs with green awnings. In one of these, I seemed to recall, Roseann “Easy to meet, nice to know” Quinn met her Mister Goodbar. We went in. This place was equally cold but they had whiskey to warm us.

After a flight through the country during the concert, I felt odd being snapped back to reality. I tried to recapture the feeling I felt a half hour ago but could not reach that plane again. The bar was unfamiliar yet oddly reminiscent of something. A vague memory of drinking in the afternoon with my dad in that same neighborhood when he worked at Lincoln Center. Memories of youth. The scotch warmed our veins and loosened our lips.

“It was the first time I’d heard that music,” she said, “but it felt like the millionth.”

We took the train back to Brooklyn in silence, at least at first. I nodded off for a minute, falling into reverie and mumbled: “Well, that went by quickly.”

“What?” she asked
“My life,” I said, then added, “Never mind.”
“You’d like to live forever?” she asked.
“Of course, who wouldn’t?”
“What about dying, then coming back and reliving the same

life again? Would you like that?”
“I don’t know.”
“Think about it. Beginning to end, infinitely.”
I knew the old trope about how lives, like books and films, need a beginning, middle and end, otherwise one would be bored stiff, or like the jaded undead doomed to walk the earth for infinity, but it offered little consolation. I had never thought about what it would be like to relive my life again and again, to accept all the beauty of childhood, the angst of adolescence, the torture of searching for steadfast love. I had no answer, but I was reminded of a children’s song from the USSR and I rocked with the train and the melody in my mind, Betty’s hand in my own as I tried vaguely to translate the words into English without falling asleep...

One by one the minutes slowly slip away, Don’t expect to meet them, live or dead.
And although we’re sad that our past can’t stay, Better times, of course, still lie ahead.

As a long runner roll
The long path spreads away,
In the end it juts against the sky.
And everyone still believes
In the coming of the day...
As our blue railcar
Sets off to roll and roam.

Maybe we offended someone, hurt for naught,
Calendar will cover this day’s sheet.
Paths to new adventures with our friends we plot...
Engine driver, gather some more speed!

Our blue railcar runs forward as it sways,
The express train’s speeding up ahead...
Why is this day coming to an end? I’m dazed,
I wish that it would last one year instead...

We always thought that happiness was just ahead of us, but as the song says—and I wonder if others even got the nuance—the horizon is unreachable. And what was there to say as Betty and I sat in our own blue wagon in the darkness, returning to our platonic affair somewhere at the end of Brooklyn, at the end of the continent?

When we returned to the outer borough, we went our separate ways. I took her home, of course, accompanied her back to the door (she never let me inside, though I was always curious about what mystery lay hidden behind those walls), and after a peck on the cheek I took a black cab back to my own flat, filled as I was with anxiety tremors, a longing I could neither shake nor explain, an itch that could not be scratched. She was always almost there— always just a hairsbreadth out of reach, almost like a webcam girl. I tried writing a letter, though I knew that I would throw it in the rubbish in the morning, not out of spite but out of fear of possibility. If I did (I don’t remember if I did or not) it would have sounded something like this:

“I don’t know why I am writing to you. I see you every day and yet we are not together the way I wish we were, but I don’t know what that wish actually is. I see you, I hold your hand and I watch you cry and wipe away your tears and I feel as if we are lovers but on a different level of reality. Perhaps we are lovers in a parallel universe. Maybe I am imagining you, but imagining is better than not having anything at all. Oh Betty, my love. Perhaps you are my false true love. How can I own a bit more of you? How can I get you to give yourself to me just a tiny bit more? I am writing a book, I told you. But I have no one to talk with about it, and I have no one to hold either. I clutch the sweaty sheets in the balmy morning and I wish you were here with me, sweating with me, rolling over gently under the cover, turning to me upon waking and opening your sleepy eyes and mumbling, ‘Good morning.’ And I hold you tight, so tight, tighter than I have ever held anyone ever in my life and we drift off somewhere together... but that morning never comes. Save me, Betty, and I will do all I can to save you and to hell with everyone else, to hell with rhetoric, to hell the naysayers, to hell with spinal discs and wheelchairs, to hell with past flings, but not to hell with love. Be my lover, Betty, not just my love. “

As I had predicted I knew I would do, in the morning I crumpled up my love letter and threw it in the trash. I was sure I would see Betty again that evening. Our meetings had become almost like clockwork. But that day I felt a particular sense of desperation, perhaps something had happened at the concert, or on the train ride home—her tears, her silence. Something had changed, perhaps something very small but something nonetheless. Perhaps my desire, my longing, had gotten out of control.

Everything I wrote to her then was true. It was the desire, the desire to own her somehow, to own a piece of her that would not let go. I felt like one of the prisoners in the Chinese Torture Garden sticking my neck out to try to grab a bite of a piece of rotting bat flesh that a Russian princess or a German countess stuck onto the pointed tip of her parasol and giggled each time she pulled away just as I strained to take a rancid bite.

The phone rang. It was Charlotte.

“How’s the book coming along?” she asked mockingly. I knew it was mockery by the tone. The question was disingenuous and rhetorical.

“It’s coming,” I lied. I was tongue tied and didn’t feel like talking and was terrified of making a slip and saying something about Betty. We stuck to idle banter. “The little one has been learning to swim.” “Don’t drink too much.” “Hurry up and finish your book so you can come home.” At least the palaver was performed calmly.

Within a couple hours I was on my way to see my lover, my mistress. I decided to go on foot to the Boardwalk. The early evening was the perfect temperature, and the brisk walk would only take me a bit more than half an hour. It was cold by the time I reached Café Europa and I was chilled.

Some folks like to say “change is good.” They say it when someone loses a job, and sometime importunely they say it when someone breaks up with a lover. They even say a variation on theme when they say turning forty, or fifty is “just a number.” But I didn’t want change—or maybe I did and I didn’t, but I knew that something was about to change and that evening at Europa confirmed it. Something in Betty had changed after the concert. I felt like she wasn’t quite the same anymore, as if something happened that I wasn’t aware of or was unable to decipher. Nothing terrible happened that evening; we ate cake and drank coffee and brandy. But I had never seen her so distracted. I looked into her eyes, trying hard not to stare, trying my best to figure her out, but her expression gave no clue to an answer. After I had walked her home and left her in the lobby, where she waited for the elevator, I felt a shard of ice pierce my heart, my guts, my cock. I kissed her goodnight as the rickety elevator arrived and went home.

On my way back I was even more dreadfully chilled. I was sure I was developing a fever. I thought that vodka or whiskey was the logical way to nip it in the bud, but I resisted the temptation to submerge myself further in alcohol and when I entered my flat, I undressed, pulled the covers over my Italian Guido bed all decked out in white and gold and immediately went to sleep to sweat out all my concerns.

To some extent it worked. I awoke feeling spritely and ready to resume the living dream of mine and Betty’s affair. I called her after I had my coffee and vodka and asked her the borderline unthinkable because I wasn’t truly thinking: “Do you want to go swimming?”

I bit my tongue the moment I uttered those words. But then Betty laughed and said, “We could have gone swimming every day, silly! I live next to a beach! What are you talking about?”

“Silly? You’re silly!” I laughed. “There’s a reason we never swam in that dirty Coney Island beach. It sucks! It’s disgusting. Come on, let’s go to Long Island, let’s go to Jones or Moses. I want to see you in the water.”

“I don’t have a swimsuit, and besides...” she started to mutter, slightly dejected, “you know it’s...”

“I know everything...” I began, but she stopped me immediately. “You don’t know everything. You know nothing.”

I was about to drop the phone. The way she spilt “nothing” was brutal. Hurt, I fell silent. But I could tell she was smiling. I could hear it. “Fine. We can go to Long Island,” she said. “But you have to buy me a bathing suit.”

Within a few minutes I had a rental car reserved and ready for pick up. All I needed then was a bathing suit for Betty.

Presently we were speeding down the Long Island Expressway. I had disassembled and assembled her chair before but now in nervous excitement I was fumbling until I remembered how to put my fingers on the buttons to release the wheels and finally managed to get the chair in the trunk. Betty was smiling. The moisture of the New York summer was at the perfect level and we careened down the empty expressway, smiling at each other for a good thirty minutes until a monstrous traffic jam interrupted our fine mood. We took it in stride. Betty was wearing her usual outfit: a short black skirt, stockings (why had she worn stockings to the beach?) and shoes that she would never walk in, but I said nothing—we were on a road trip and I had promised to buy her a bathing suit. We stopped at a surf shop and I said, “Come on, let’s pick out a bikini.” “Come on!” I kept forgetting that she would need my help not only to help her pick a swimsuit but to enter the tiny shop. “Oh, for fuck’s sake!” she yelled. “Just pick something out and get back in the car!”

I did. I found a black bikini for $50 that I thought would look just right on her. I paid in a hurry and went back in the car where Betty was sweating and waiting for me to return.

When we got to the beach I started to panic. How would I help her with the bikini? Did I make the right choice?

“Just fucking let me do it,” she barked when we pulled into the parking lot, and then soon enough, faster than I could have imagined, she had changed into the new bikini I had bought for her and lay there, in the hot back seat, smiling. “I’m ready. Come on!”

What was this “come on”? I helped her out, helped her into her chair. Her day clothes remained on the back seat. She saved me some trouble, I thought. But what if, at other times, she’d need my help? Would I have to dress her, change her? Did she wear adult diapers? I had a flashback of changing my daughter’s diapers when she was a baby. How did poor Betty go to the bathroom and clean herself ?

“Come on!” she repeated and smiled, this time genuinely, and we walked. I pushed her chair until we reached a concession stand where we rented a beach wheelchair, a ridiculous device that made me cringe. I helped her closer to the surf and saw a couple of other people using the same Flintstones’ car. Most of them were retards. I wanted to retch. “Come on, let’s go!” she yelled, disregarding the tragicomic situation, and so I pushed her further and quicker, and she laughed loudly, enjoying the day, the salt spray sprinkling and almost showering her as the drooling retards stayed cringing and twisting in the same devices I pushed her in, down to where the sand turned moist and stopped us in our tracks. I lifted her out of her chair and carried her into the waves. She laughed and laughed, and when I was up to my waist in the warm summer waters of the Atlantic I let her go just slightly to bathe her body in the ocean and she held on to my neck almost the way my daughter did when I was teaching her to swim, as a toddler, and she kissed me and said “Don’t let me go... don’t let me go yet!”

“But I’ll let you go for one minute, so you can swim just for a little bit, no?”

“No!” She held me as tight as my daughter used to hold me the first few times I took her to the beach, when the incoming tide scared her to death. “No! Don’t let go of me Lucky! Don’t ever let go of me! Not until I tell you!” she grabbed my neck and I held her tighter and tighter and whispered in her ear “I won’t, Betty. I will never let you go.” And suddenly, she looked at me in hatred and disgust.

In a few more moments it was over. “I want to get out,” she said. As much as I had hoped for her to become a mermaid, to break free of her earthly chains, she did not.

She wiggled her arms and her useless legs. I could tell that she felt nothing. “Come on, let’s go,” she said, “I’m cold.” And so I lifted her dripping body out of the sea and lowered her gently onto the dry sand. We lay there together on the beach for some time. She let me touch her skin, even kiss her. I gently licked the salt from her neck while she, languorous, no longer confined to her chair, lay with eyes closed, smiling gently. No sooner had I closed my own eyes, ready to fall into blissful slumber, than she woke me. “I want to go home. Maybe it’s time that you do let me go. I am getting tired of all this...” I straightened up and examined her face. She was resolute. She didn’t want to stay any longer and I didn’t wish to protest. I put her back into the ridiculous clown car for wading invalids and wheeled her toward the parking lot and put her in her normal chair.

We drove back to Brooklyn in silence. She kept fiddling with the radio, trying to find the right song, and nothing seemed to please her or hold her attention for more than a few seconds. It annoyed me to no end. I kept looking at her crotch, to see if there was any hair peeking out from her panties. There is something spectacularly sexy about just a bit of hair that makes the panties or a swimsuit appear as if the gift inside is only a string pull away. But I could not detect one. I used the distraction of pubic hair to stave away my gnawing fear and trepidation, I still knew almost nothing about her.

“Good night. I’ll see you soon,” she said after I helped her out of the car. She had already changed without my help, handing me her wet bikini nonchalantly. Something about her was different now. When had it happened? Was it after the park and the symphony? Was it today, at the beach? Did I do something wrong, and if I did, what was it? What could it be? I have learned from experience not to push these things, not to push my luck. I accepted the peck on the cheek, drove to the car rental place and took a cab back home.

That night, after the beach date, was among the most restless of the whole summer. Absurd dreams tortured me throughout. Dreams of mermaids and mermen, visions of quicksand, of tidal waves, of unnatural sized eels and worms; and then, in a denouement right before sunrise, the sleep gods threw me a bone and I was able to return to some pleasant thoughts of childhood, of autumn, of warmth; of some type of “full stomach,” of my hand around a waist, of a sweaty, freckled back of a girl I loved... For so long, I had forgotten that one time, sex was actually linked to romantic love, and Betty rekindled the original emotion of desire.

I awoke, and while I knew that Betty and I would see each other that day, I had a horrible, unsatisfied feeling, and feared that the meeting later that evening would also end unsatisfactorily. For the first time since I had settled into Brooklyn, and for the first time since I had met Betty, I thought of our quotidian evening trysts as hollow theatrics. But who was I to pick and choose? We met as usual, talked as usual, and the evening ended—with her going back to her mysterious flat—as usual. We did not talk much about the beach; we hardly talked at all. I prayed to god that something had not changed, but I felt as if some shift had taken place.

For sanity’s sake I decided to spend the following day alone. I took the train all the way to Washington Heights and revisited my childhood. It was a moderate mistake, for it did not come out the way it played out in my dreams.