Chapter 11, Bad Novel

It was a barren hill that I chose to climb. All life had been wrenched out of it; an angry God had scraped his talon across the landscape. He had left ravines, crevices, boulders that threatened at any moment to unleash themselves. I would be there, watching, as the juggernaut of death took me in its aim.

The boulder would be laughing—rolling with glee, salivating at the thought of gut and sinew and muscle that would be all that remained of me. The sun would not bother to set, then, and the clouds would be still in the air.

Nothing would remain, everything would change.

The others knew better. They had chosen the sea, some of them, and who knew where they were, at any moment? Of they had found a meadow kissed by a sheltering hill: no winds would rake their house, no snows would bury it. But I had my hill, that I had chosen or that had come with me.

Which was it?

The hill—if I turned my back, it grew larger by far. Better, then, to face it—to look at the ugly scars that adorned it, the kissed ravages of the angry God. Yes, I could see it better when I turned from it. But better made the hill worse: the ravines sharper, the boulders larger and more precariously imposed on the hill.

Each day, I looked at the hill. I tried to study it; I tried to master the ravines, I imagined the tango I might dance with the boulders flying toward me. The hill glowered at me, dared me, threatened to unleash itself at any moment. The boulders screamed to be free of the hill—free to hurtle downwards, as I was steeling myself to go upwards.

For the hill, everything was downwards—there was no ‘up’ there. For me, there was no downwards. Any retreat was death, as was the hill itself. The question was how. Would it be the boulders? Starvation? Thirst?

I knew what I wanted. I wanted, at last one day, to begin the quest: to plant my first foot on the hill.

“Ah, but you have!”

“And you are?”

“The person who is writing. The person you don’t know. And perhaps, the person who chose your hill.”

“Perhaps?”

“You don’t enjoy ambiguity?”

“You always ask question?”

“Don’t you? Come, let us not fence. Would you like to get up that hill?”

Would I?

Yes.

Why?

I think I’d like to embrace the hill. I’d like to put my arms around it, squeeze it, feel its breathing and rest in its arms. This angry hill of an angry God—this is what I have.

“Willing, now?”

“Yes. And scared.”

“Of course.”

“Your hand?”

“Don’t you feel it?”

“Yes. I wondered if you did.”

“And your feet?”

“Yes, I know they’re moving.”

“There was never any question. And they have always been moving.”

“Then why have I been always in the same place?”

“You don’t know?”

I want to tell him—I have looked at the goddamn hill for well over fifty fucking years. And the hill, the hill, the hill has gotten no bigger, no smaller, no prettier. No rain has fallen on it for all of time; the bones and skull and smashed torso of those who have gone before me will lash at my feet. The crows will caw out my death; the vultures will circle. And yes, I am on the hill.

“We could go faster,” he tells me.

“No.”

“Ah…”

“Thank you for not telling me,” I tell him.

“You wouldn’t have believed me, anyway….”

We start. I pause to take off my boots. I will feel every cut of this hill. I will stumble upon every rock, I will take every grain of sand into the creases of my feet. I will know the hill. What good, if not, would death be?

“I didn’t know it could sing,” I tell him.

“It didn’t know you could listen,” he tells me.

The song is lilting and sad, a lament for the absence of the angry God, for even in his anger there was grace. The grace is gone, now, and the anger, though still scorching the land, has abated. The hill remembers the annealing anger—how it scorched the pines, sucked dry the rivers, hardened the stones and lashed open the ravines. Yes, the hill remembers.

“Is it hard to be a hill?” I ask.

“As hard as it is to climb it.”

Hard then.

I gaze at the top of the hill. Now, a little lower.

Or has the sky lifted?

     

Well, why not tattoo the cat?

“I think it’s time to tattoo the cat,” I told Lady, “since as we all know, the cat is as much a part of the family as anyone else. So that’s decided; now then, what would you suggest? Tribal? A delicate rose? The sacred heart of Jesus? Or maybe just the traditional heart with ‘MOM’ written under it…..”

“You can’t tattoo the cat,” said Lady. “Or at least, if you can, I don’t think you should. Anyway, it would be annoying to have to keep shaving the cat, just so that you could see the tattoo….”

“The cat, of course, will be responsible for grooming itself,” I told her. “That’s all it does, anyway, when it’s not sleeping, which is about 20 hours a day. So I will provide the razors and shaving cream, but it’s up to the cat to shave itself!”

“And do you really think you can get a tattoo on a cat?”

“Absolutely—one just has to be firm with it. No nonsense! Brook no dissent! And trust me, the cat will thank me for it, after a bit….”

“Well, several people have tattooed my poem ‘Little by Little’ on themselves,” said Lady. “But you’d either have to shave off most of the cat, or just choose the last stanza. Though perhaps you could write it in really small print, and then hang a magnifying glass around the cat’s neck.”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” I told her. “Whoever heard of tying a magnifying glass around a cat’s neck? I refuse to talk to you, if you can’t be serious!”

“Well, I am serious! Just a serious as you, with all that insane idea of tattooing the cat! Really, Marc—you’re as bad as all my poets!”

“What have they done now?”

She tells me—one person left the poetry slam because of another person, who left because of a third person, who left because of a dog. So last night, which should have been a great night, had been somewhat frayed by fits of inflated personalities.

“I’m thinking of writing a short story about the seven deadly sins, and assigning each one to a different poet,” she says.

“An excellent idea,” I tell her. “Though it might be a great way to diminish attendance, as well as to trim your friendships. Anyway, it still begs the question of what to tattoo on the cat.”

“Oh, bother the cat,” said Lady. “Whoever heard of such a thing? Maybe you should forget the tattoo, and get a piercing instead? You know, a nose ring on the cat might look wonderful.”

“True,” I said. “And then we could tie the cat up, if necessary. Which it usually is, since Loquito is the worst cat, bar none, in the house.”

“What,” cried Lady, “you have a sick and twisted mind! First you propose to tattoo the cat, and now you’re doing bondage on it!”

“With it,” I told her, “though I had imagined nothing of the sort. You, on the other hand…”

“Marc, what’s up with you?”

“It’s a ‘meh’ day,” I tell her. “There’s nothing to write about, and the news is absolutely horrible, and my back hurts. And I haven’t been able to write anything. Plus, the news is just terrible. Oh, and did I tell you that I can’t make my phone play my music? Before, it was no problem. But now, I get this error message, which starts with this annoying, ‘Fiddlesticks!’ I kid you not. So I try to do what it tells me to do, and I can’t. It’s completely stupid, and completely annoying, and I either have to buy an iPod for 300$ or go without music until August, when I finally can get a new phone.”

“I hate your phone,” she said. “I want to take a sledge hammer to it!”

“So do I,” I told her. “Actually, we should probably have a ritual purging for all the people who hate my phone, which would be everybody. Do you know, I still can’t figure out how to establish my voice mail? So now it turns out that my voice mail is full—though how it can be full when I can’t access it, I don’t know!”

“Well, it’s full because you can’t access it,” she told me. “That’s obvious. Now then, how about we tattoo…”

“Don’t tell me,” I said. “I am not paying seriously good money to tattoo that phone!”

“The problem” I continue, “is that technology is moving so fast that the professional world hasn’t caught up. Because we should seriously have telephone therapists. You know, the first session could be just being in the room with it. I’d be on the couch, the phone would be on the coffee table, and the therapist and I could be doing visualization exercises. ‘Imagine,’ she would say, ‘imagine that you are holding that phone in your hand. Now let’s process how you feel!’”

“That,” said Lady, “is even more ridiculous than tattooing the cat. How many words has this silly post been? Can I go now? I can’t be spending all morning discussing cat-tattooing and telephone-therapying, if that’s a word. Don’t you have a novel to write? And what about Julian, revalationing away, and what are you doing about it?”

“I’m a news junkie and a depressive,” I told her, “which is not, at this sunny moment in Puerto Rico’s trajectory, a great combo. Actually, it’s sort of like barbiturates and booze. Which is starting to look more and more attractive.”

“Nonsense,” she tells me, “anyway, I’m going off to France, and you’d better still be here, when I get back.”

“I will be,” I said, though….

…I’m definitely gonna tattoo the cat.  

  

Chapter 10, Bad Novel

I’d never seen anything like it. Sure, for the natives, the whole thing was a bore, but for me?

I had grown up in a “nice” neighborhood, which meant that each house had a large lawn, one or more flower gardens, a stay-at-home mom who baked her own bread and experimented with new recipes. There was the wildly thrilling new casserole that would appear, for example, with water chestnuts!

The height of adventure!

So I stepped out the door of the Ritz, and bam! How even to get into the pedestrian flow? I knew, for example, that I wanted to get down to Times Square, and that required a left turn out the door on 60^th Street? But how to turn left, when the constant stream of passerby were trotting in the other direction?

‘Go with the flow,’ I thought, and so I went right, turned right, and turned another right, until I was on 59^th street. And so I walked on, trying not to appear like too much of a hick. But the city! The cabs—everywhere! The people, so well dressed, so sophisticated! I watched as one beautifully dressed woman came out of a brownstone, stepped to the street, and hailed a cab. A bore to her—one more cab to hail down. But for me, a marvel! Would I ever learn to do that? Or did you have to be born here, grow up here, get the rhythm and pulse of the city into your blood, or maybe jeans? Whatever, I couldn’t imagine it.

The buildings were like nothing back home. The brownstones that still remained were a novelty—I peered in windows when I could, and imagined the lives that were lived there. He was a doctor, I decided, and she was a social worker—they came home each night into that elegant living room, with the grand piano that had been played by his grandmother, a concert pianist in Czechoslovakia. They had a leisurely martini by the fire, and then popped out of their door. The husband, his wife on his shoulder, hailed the cab, and then they were off to the theater, to be followed by a late supper…

“Get off the rag, bitch, ‘ cause you is not the only Niggah on the block. And if I catch you messin’ with mah shit one more time, girl, I’m gonna be wiping the floor with that Niggah face of yours!”

Right—my reverie had been interrupted. The people in front of me were tall and willowy—they both wore extravagant high heels, the tightest of miniskirts, and makeup my mother would never have dreamed off. The eyelashes were nearly whisk broom length and lushness. The eye shadow was magenta on one girl, a violent crimson on the other. The lipstick was a wild, though complimentary shade, and both wore the darkest of lip shadows. Have you seen the Rocky Horror Picture Show? Well, these girls made Dr. Frankenstein looked like a school librarian.

I followed behind them, fascinated. Where were their mothers? Who could have let them out, looking like that? True, they were older than me, but I would never have dared…. I knew it was rude, but I couldn’t help staring at them. All of a sudden, they erupted in laughter, and in song:

“’There’s a new kid in town!”

“I don’t wanna hear it.”

“There’s a new kid in town!”

Right, I’d been spotted. Should have known—I was wearing Madison, Wisconsin all over my West High School face.

“OK—you got me,” I told them. “Do you know the way to Times Square?”

“Girlfriend, do we know the way to Times Square! Why little miss thang, we virtually IS Times Square. We is know up and down Times Square for our vast beauty, wit, and repartee! Yes’m, the mayor herself got into a hissy fit, when the entire city council chose to up and sit at out table at 21. Why, those boys couldn’t stop ordering us drinks! Fortunately, they was a squad of limousines, ready to haul our Niggah asses back to our humble abodes. Which would be your average penthouse, overlooking the river!”

“Mine’s overlooking the park!”

“Don’t you listen to little miss Thing, dear, ‘cause she got less than the cockroaches scampering over the kitchen floor of the Hell’s Angel tenement that she crashes!”

“Bitch! One more word, and I is sending your fat Niggah ass straight into that traffic!”

“Yeah? Well you can eat out my black Niggah cunt, bitch!”

“Oh don’t you wish!”

“Look, I’ sorry if I upset anybody, or anything…”

The most flamboyant grabbed my arm, and addressed me in a stage whisper.

“You must excuse the outrageous behavior of my sometime companion, the former Manuela de la Puta Madre, as her whorish mother called her, when she was born into the humblest of circumstances, down there in San Juan, Puerto Rico. Yes, that was the spawning ground of señorita Manuela, and my, did she live up to that name! Though it could have been Lingüela, or Bichuela or even, two or three days a month, Culoela! Because not everyone is as refined as you and I dear….”

She patted my hand as she said this, and looked archly at her companion.

“No, we is ladies of refinement, is we not? Not like some, who slept their way from the bottom to the top and then down to the bottom again of San Juan society. That is, after she got done doing all the jibaritos up there in the mountains. So she accepts my gracious invitation to accompany me on my very numerous forays into the very highest circles of New York society….”

“Bitch couldn’t pay her half of the rent on that basement dive she calls an apartment….”

“The Rockefellers, the Carnegies, you know. Lovely people of distinction and refinement…”

“So she start whoring to pay the man, and then she gets the idea—call her childhood friend. So I fly up here, and what do I find? Girl’s laying tricks left and right, with every dick’s got twenty bucks in his pocket. On the ten most wanted list of the Venereal Disease Board. Known to every precinct captain in the borough!”

“Pay no mind to Miss Manuela,” whispered the other, though people across the street could easily have heard it. “She is suffering from various mental conditions, which I am laboring daily and nightly to combat. Oh, not a day goes by that I suffer for my generosity! How I am repaid for my kindness!”

She had assumed the voice and mannerisms of a southern belle—one of Scarlett O’Hara’s dear friends….

“Anyway, it is providential that we should meet, because who knows what unspeakable things dear Miss Manuela might do, down there in Times Square! I force myself, dear, to go with her me, for I fear for her safety, I most assuredly do! “Cause don’t you know, Miss Manuela gets near anything in pants, and she completely LOSES control. All but knocks them over and into the curb, hits ‘em so fast they don’t never feel the clothes being rips off their backs, and then, girlfriend, is she on ‘em! Nearly tears the balls of ‘em, so desperate she is!”

“You cunt! You stop that jive-ass Niggah mouth of yours, or I’ll rip the balls off’n you!”

“What does she mean?”

“Delusions, dear. Part of her sickness. She is uncertain and insecure of her feminineness, and so questions…”

“Huh—that why you wearin’ that thong? You know what you got taped up there up to the brown eye!”

“Please excuse her…”

Oddly, it didn’t seem to matter, this fight between them; it had the familiarity of dirty dishes in the sink. And so it continued all the way down Broadway. And just as curiously, no one paid the least attention to us. In Madison, Wisconsin, there would have been a fleet of police cars tailing us….

“And now, dear—prepare yourself, as we is about to enter the rarified world of salon society. Those writer and thinks and captains very especially of industry! Scions of the very very-ist of societies! Gentlemen by the scores await our highly critical eyes, all very much desirous of making our elite company. This dear, is Times Square!”

It was a visual riot, an assault on the senses. There were billboards flashing everywhere, neon lights in ever window, people ducking into and out of shops, others thrust pamphlets into our hand, rats scurrying in the gutter. And every blinking, flashing, pulsating sign?

“XXX”

“Busty Babes Live for You!”

“Male Only Bookstore!”

“The Ram”

“Girls Delite!”

“What is this!” I asked.

“Here you is, girl friend! You have arrived, sweet miss thing, into the very creamiest of cream of New York society! “Cause the very same gentlemen who denizen this here square will be taking their wives to the Metropolitan Opera Ball two hours from now. But now, they seek relief! They seek distraction! They seek the discerning judgment and cultivated good taste of young ladies like moi, and the former miss Manuela de la Puta Madre, late of San Juan, Puerto Rico. Yes, we is here! The gentlemen await!”

And here, she grabbed my arm, and led me into the Triple XXX Arcade.

      

Chapter 9, Bad Novel

The one thing you should never do is lead my mother to the bar.

But that’s what the doorman did; then, he put the quiet word into the bartender’s ear. And so we had our “drink” on the house; diet Coke for me, a brandy Alexander for my mother. And perhaps it was true that the first drink was on the house; the remaining five or six were not. But there were credit cards, so who cared?

In short, my mother was getting sloshed, and she did what drunks do. Her speech slurred, her thoughts muddled, and she began to get a bit weepy with the bartender.

“Who knows what I might have become, if I had stayed in the city,” she told the bartender.

“Mom—do you have to? This guy probably doesn’t care…”

“Well, of course he cares! Bartenders love talking to people—that’s why they do what they do.”

Right—I thought. This guy woke up one day and wanted to spend a lifetime seeing middle-aged women from the Midwest get sloshed in a high-class bar. So he hoofed it down to the Ritz, and here he is, twenty happy years later!

“Oh, I was young and fancy-free, and living in the Village. That was back when you could—rent was low, all the boys were off fighting in the war, and all of us girls were having the times of our lives. Everywhere you went, there were signs telling us to support the war effort, buy bonds, plant victory gardens. But mostly what I remember was how free we all were! I remember coming home and walking through the Village at three in the morning, and never thinking the least of it. Oh, there was the occasional burglary, or pickpocket, but never anything serious. And then, well…then I met my future husband, and everything changed. Are you married, dear?”

The bartender had been looking for an escape, but it was still early in the afternoon; the lunch crowd was gone, the serious drinkers had not arrived. So he was stuck with us.

“No, Ma’am.”

“Well, don’t be in too much of a hurry. Though men have a better time of it than women; men have their careers, they have their lives. But we women, well—we just tag along, somehow, and then we wake up one day and we’re forty or fifty, and things are sagging, but the men are still good looking. Better than ever, in fact, since that grey-haired temple is even sexier than it was before. So there we are, and our husbands have their careers, but we’ve never had much of anything—we’ve been teachers or nurses, if anything. So then the husbands are flying out to give their keynote speeches in conventions in Dallas or Denver, and of course you don’t go, because you can’t get off work, or because who will look after the kids? And that’s when…”

‘I will kill her,’ I thought, ‘if she actually goes there. Because you’ve been throwing this into father’s face for the last three years, now. Yes, I’ve heard you. I hear the fights, the recriminations, the glasses thrown, the doors slam. Listen, Mom, the best thing that ever happened to you was that stupid affair. Now you get to be the perfect bitch all the time—lording it over Dad, blackmailing him, making him feel guilty. Oh, and you probably haven’t given it to him forever, since he came back!’

She was fumbling for a tissue—the bartender handed her one.

“I’m sorry,” she said, “you just seem like a very nice fellow. Kind, understanding….”

‘BORED’

“I hope you find someone nice to love you, dear,” she said. “And when you do, well, promise me, promise me…”

‘NO!’

“Well, you won’t let anyone or anything come between….”

“No, Ma’am,” said the bartender, who did not want to get where this was going.

“There’s no pain like it,” said my mother. “The hurt! The betrayal! You can never fully trust again! Every day when he comes home, you look at his shirt collar. He has an emergency at the hospital, and do you believe that? Or do you think about getting in the car, and driving past all the likely places where a man takes a woman? The bars, first. The restaurants where you can’t even see the menus. Then there’s the motels. Well, by that time, he really will be home—and what will you say if you come home and he’s there? So you go and buy a bag of groceries that you don’t need, and then, then….”

She was slurring her speech badly, now, and beginning to wobble in her chair—‘God,’ I thought, ‘don’t, please don’t let her fall off that bar stool!’

“So there you are, coming in the door, and what do you have in that grocery bag of yours? Because there he is, hungry and irritable, and well on his way into the third or fourth drink…”

‘Thank you SO much, mother!’

“…and all you have to give him is cookies and chocolate chip ice cream, ‘cause you’re so miserable that all you want is something sweet, and then he looks at all that shit—excuse my French—you bought, and he looks down at your waist. And he just keeps staring, and he can still wear his army uniform, but now you’re just an old, fat, ugly, good-for-nothing woman and then you remember that he had an affair, oh, he had an affair! Oh, how could he! Three years it’s been, and the pain is like it was yesterday! Whatever happened to us! Tell me, dear man, where did my husband go? Where did I go? Because I’m spinning, spinning…I don’t know where I’ll fall…the pain of it all…”

“Ma’am?”

“Oh, I’m sorry for being a silly old cow…”

“No, Ma’am,” he said, and looked at me. I nodded.

“It’s just that I think you should let your daughter…”

I already had her arm—I was hoping that she’d go without a fight. Fortunately, she was just sober enough to realize what an ass she was being.

“Perhaps I should rest before dinner,” she said. “You’ll put the tab on the room bill, won’t you, honey?”

The bartender probably would have paid the damn drinks, just to get her out of the bar.

So it was a weepy ride up to the 12^th floor, and a struggle to get her down to the room, and then it was the hell of getting the key out of the bottom of her purse and opening the door. So I propped her up against the wall, leaned into her to keep her from falling, and opened the door. We both nearly fell into the room.

“Now, where is….”

“Here, Mom,” and I led her into the bedroom. She was asleep almost before she hit the bed. Still, I figured I’d wait until the first snore….

Five minutes later, I was sailing out the door of the Ritz-Carlton, about to taste the city for the first time!