Directions for the Living

“Hey Backpack!” he called out to the girl with the backpack taller than she was who was walking through the streets of the city.

“Hey You!” she said back when she saw who had called her.

The thing is, neither one knew or had ever seen the other. Do you realize the odds against this? For a boy to call out to a person he does not know? To have the girl reciprocate such pathological behavior? And for them to engage in a conversation that is neither disingenuous nor unnecessary?

But theirs was no feigned familiarity. Only the greeting reeked of fat, but in this case was necessary to arrest attention and establish the parameters of the first conversation.

“I now believe,” he said, sitting down on a bench he hadn’t noticed until he felt the desire to sit, “there is no way to convince anyone of anything unless you are willing to kill yourself for it.”

“You’ve mentioned this to me before.”

“Have I? How could I? I’ve only just thought of it.”

“That’s bullshit, and you know it.”

“It seems like it would be, and yet I can’t honestly remember ever thinking this thought before right now.”

“It’s just wording. Remember the first time you fell in love? That was the same thing.”

All the other people on the street were vanishing and took their time doing so. By that I mean they continued to be there without the desire to be there and therefore the boy and the girl were virtually alone.

“You’re right. But that felt so melodramatic in retrospect.”

“And this isn’t?”

“Yes. You’re right. But that doesn’t make it untrue.”

“Same goes for the love.”

They sat in silence for thirty hours after that. The girl with backpack kept the backpack on her back and did not shiver in the night. He did and she noticed, but she did not offer anything from her backpack to keep him warm because then she would have had to disturb her own meditation. Also, she knew she had nothing which would take away the shivering anyway.

When the thirty hours were up, he turned to her and said, “Do you have a sweater?” After that, she didn’t mind disturbing herself.

They decided to live together. They found a house with five bedrooms. He took two of the bedrooms to put his things: clothes, shoes, American novels, ski equipment, old birthday cards, four wristwatches, a hammer, pictures of people, three blank notebooks, grade school illustrations, a clock radio and a power strip. She took two of the bedrooms to put her things: a calendar, an ashtray, six boxes of grey envelopes, a computer, a box of chocolate, a porcelain pony, clothes, shoes, a scented candle (rain). In the remaining bedroom they put the bed and a lamp. The rest of the room was bare. In the kitchen was some Tupperware that had been left by the previous owners and three forks they found on the street.

Then they went on and lived lives that were mostly fulfilling. Today, the bedroom they share has many more things as do the other bedrooms and the kitchen. They see movies. They like eating dinner in the dark. They tell stories to each other about the things they do when they are not in the house. They don’t greet each other anymore because they have already said hello once and are in the process of saying goodbye, so it wouldn’t make sense. The girl still walks around with her backpack no matter where she goes. The boy still calls out on the street to other people from time to time, but so far nobody has answered back.

Sometimes there is silence for days.

Piss and Love

Here, in the midst of all our failure, there is time enough to make a point.

What is the point?

            “The point is this,” he says, across the table, the only one with a drink still in front of him. It has been several hours at the table and everyone has eaten and drank his fill and is done with it. Now they just want to wrap things up, and, sooner rather than later, slink away to their homes, nighttime cars through Saturday town, another meal over with, go home, unknot tie, unzip dress, maybe another drink, maybe television, maybe, but not likely, sex, considering the couples are all in the terminal stages of their marriage lust, which is to say each one has memorized his or her partner’s body and would release a more satisfying shot of dopamine by conjuring the naked nooks and crannies of the other bodies at the table, men of the men and women, women of the women and men, chaotic, layaway cravings of the working class,  because the bird in each of their hands can never damage dangerously enough to defeat the neatly-trimmed (or wildly unorthodox) secrets of the unknown bush.

            “The point is this,” he repeats, knocking over his glass, brown soupy creeping over the tablecloth, the pathetic fingers of sad women, then getting up from his seat while all the others look on, six of them, seven if you count himself, (the couples group was recently busted of its snug-fitting octet when Gregory, one half of the one couple of color in the group, decided it was best to separate – not divorce, not yet, this was a trial – from Lucy. Gregory said it was a trial when he showed up at last month’s gathering without her, and now, this month, it is still termed that way, but two months feels like a long time to still not know the answer. (It’s probably known, you just have to bend down deep to hear it.) And how will they absorb the loss, this group of eight, this monthly gathering of friends who used to have other friends, but these are the eight given the go-ahead, chosen for Christmas presents and children’s wedding invitations and permission to call late at night for something deemed an emergency (though the couples’ varying definitions of that word occasionally cause minor rifts among the group, whose sleeping habits are sacrosanct). It turns out to meet this way, once a month, all eight (now seven) at the same time, is the best way, even if it’s really only consolidated nostalgia, a book club meeting, a monthly checkup: another goddamn appointment.

            He stands before them, not acknowledging the spilled liquid and intends to speak. He thinks about pulling out his penis. “I could pull out my penis.” That is the most recurring thought of his mind. There are others, too. He thinks he might have cancer. He ordered a catalogue for a facility. He thinks about this constantly and only his job is disconnected enough from the constant, solipsistic prattling of his mind to distract him from his fears. He thinks that there might be a cobbler in deep-country Canada who is the only man who can fix his favorite pair of shoes. They have been steadily ripping for months and now his socked toes stick through the front when he wears them; he wears black socks so it’s hard to tell. He thinks that the young women he doesn’t know, the ones bobbing around right now, in an old oak village, smoking, leering, making money in honest ways, the ones who have been there since he first conjured them and their scenery when he was 24, are starting to get too old for his slurpy nipple sucks. He needs to get there soon or he will not be permitted to bite their asses; it will be viewed as creepy. He sits down. He mumbles “The point is this …” and trails off, letting them think he is drunk, wishing he were more so, feeling a little drunk, knowing they think he is more than he really is so they can believe he never had anything to say in the first place. So they can ridicule him on the ride home and not worry about what he might have said, the magician suddenly without his cape, feeble-looking and slumped against the white tablecloth smeared with dinner, everyone’s seen his tricks before, they used to be dazzled, but lately he’s been threatening to reveal the machinery and they’re petrified of even the first glimpse. He shuts himself up. But instead of being grateful to dodge a bullet, they allow themselves to think that he is the crazy one, he is the one who drank too much after all, maybe he has a problem, maybe we have a friend who is an al-ca-hal-ic—that’s the way Jenny says it when she talks about her neighbor who drinks Remy on Monday afternoons while watching NFL Network replays of angry football games—someone with a problem serious enough that we can safely dismiss his message but not serious enough to intervene. Perfect for us, really dear, because as much as I love Danny and Sara, I don’t really think we need to get involved in all that. There are the children to consider and we’ve got a busy few months now, what with the holidays and then you’re going on that business trip, and oh, don’t forget we have that thing next weekend, so we really can’t afford to get mixed up in that. It’s not our business. The dinner was lovely though. We should go back there sometime. Do you want to stop at the store and pick up a few things before we get home? Did you remember to bring home the leftovers? Did you think I looked pretty in at dinner? The lighting in that room was very bad. 

            After the car ride home, Danny goes straight to the living room. He kisses Sara amiably. There is nothing amiss despite his little scene. After all he held back, all he did was spill a little liquor, he didn’t actually say anything, just threatened to. She is grateful it was not worse. Certainly there were nights when it was worse, nights when he got more than a little angry. Frequently he couldn’t name his anger, though lately he was muttering something about the Coolidge Effect. She doesn’t know what that is—she knows she could know immediately if she wants to, it is the Internet Age after all, the Age of Knowing. (She dimly—and grimly—hopes the next Age will be about the dearth of information, though that seems an unlikely twist in the human story, if only so that people will be forced to go to sleep at night without assuming they’ve settled all their scores.) But she decides to let him have his private things, be privately furious. It would’ve been a betrayal to look up the Coolidge Effect. Information was allowed to elude her. And anyway, she doesn’t need to know everything about her husband.

            She doesn’t know much of his nightly routine either; she always goes to bed before he does, usually by two or three hours. That is the amount of time he knows she needs to get into a deep, unguarded sleep, after which he can go into their room sloppily and fall beside her without mashed tippy toes in the carpet, turn on the light and only see her shift rather than snap to fearful attention. He made that mistake a few times early on, would go in too soon after she went upstairs, she was hardly asleep at all and she’d shoot up like a rake stepped on by the boob in a cartoon, he didn’t know why but that’s the image he saw, her eyes too wide and disproportionately fearful, she’d spring up and her language reflex always resulted in the same “Whasthamatta,” the lack of diction the only indication she’d been in the dusky, sad-city neighborhood of sleep only a moment before.

He waits until a few minutes after she goes upstairs to start doing what he wants to do.  It’s not very specific. The room is brown all around, brown carpeting, brown light from the one little lamp on the wood end table next to the chocolate brown couch. There are no children in this home, though they’d bought as if there would be. He decided there would not be several years ago, and she implicitly went along with it while still, at occasional moments, usually lopsided by liquor, alluding to the offspring of a fantasy future. On most evenings he poured a brown drink from a glass decanter, plopped onto the couch and started noodling around the ping-pong galaxy of remote-controlled television, hardly watching, thinking about the bedrooms that sat like mouths on the floor above him, he’d look to the ceiling and imagine each of the three rooms, all in a row, the one that was “hers”(technically “theirs”), the one that was “his” (though his ownership was tenuous at best and always usurped by occasional overnight company), and the other one they never go in but which always has an open door, and at night it is like looking into a perfect glacier of unspeckled soot, a black fist waiting, ceiling blending into wallpaper blending into carpet, a black hole to the unadjusted eye, he hardly ever goes inside, but when he does, it is like walking through space, airless, he finds himself holding his breath, and the silence of the room, which is unlike the silence anywhere else in the house and feels like the end, not a waiting, makes his eardrums throb. He spins around, closes his eyes, preparing for a long fall, interrupted finally by the trick shade that snaps up whenever he (or someone else, presumably) steps onto a certain part of the brown carpet at a spot almost directly at the center of the room, but just far enough to the non-window side to be suspicious.

It begins to snow outside the patio door of the living room, quiet as ice out there now, in fact it strikes him that a snowstorm isn’t really a storm at all, it behaves so quietly, there is nothing of the thrashing aspect of the hurricane or the hail, even when there is wind the snow counteracts the violence and deadens the earth, a soft killer with gentle hands, and after that it lays on the ground, blanket is the perfect metaphor, Danny thinks, no use trying to think up another one just to be original, it was just like when he’d lie in bed at night and would want to get away from his life, and a blanket was all he needed to make that feel possible, she could’ve been right there, body and soul beside him, and a dark blanket with no holes could cover everything up, make him believe when he took it off he’d be somewhere else, it is total and enveloping, like the First Fuck, that’s how it must feel to the rocks and dirt and the tramplings the snow lays over, when it is lifted they might be anywhere, and the disappointment of the eventual acknowledgement—the melting, the morning—isn’t enough to make the hours, days, months of fantasy and anticipation any less rewarding.

He turns on the television and instead of plopping tonight on the couch, sinking into it as he normally does, he fills his glass to the brim, hollowed-out little barrels of ice cubes from a bag tottering above the rim as he makes his way to the patio door, parts the blinds, the motion detector activated from the hurtling woosh of the wind, he swears he can see it, nothing else to see besides slanted and swirling white in the orange pool of security lights, everything beyond it is undetectable, as if it has been crushed into night’s pocket. He’s glad he can see at least this as he staggers backward, lets the blinds re-assume their former, unruffled position, clattering, whispers, then settling down, a schoolgirl gaggle as the crush approaches, then walks by, even the little aftermath tittering as the blinds sway barely, taking their sweet time to resume absolute silence. As he totters, little spits of liquor here and there splash down on a carpet that harbors and forgives all vagrants, you’d never know any of those spills are there if not for the wetness right after the fact. After that, never.

“Maybe the drink IS the thing,” he thinks, back to the couch now, television muted or really really low, he can’t tell which, he thinks there might be a low buzz in the room, he feels it on his skin more than he hears it with his ears. “Maybe I just like drinking. Maybe I’m not dealing with anything. There’s nothing to understaaand, man. Maybe there is no more ice and I’ll have to drink the whiskey warm from this day forward. What would that be like?” He flicks around looking for something static, something that won’t move, there is too much movement on television, quick shot, snap shot, smash shot, montage, those were terms he saw in scripts when he was a reader in Manhattan in the 1990s, that was the Golden Era, to be an actor in New York City in the nineties, Golden Times. He went on auditions, took a few classes, practiced his lines on the JMZ. He got a job reading for a casting agency, reading the other parts for the actors who were auditioning. He thought it would lead to auditions; it led to more reading jobs at other casting agencies. He became known for it in a small circle and made enough money to go to bars. Golden times, definitely, at least within his own context. He slept with actresses and they treated every fuck like a performance, especially the unemployed ones. They were always hanging out late, high heels ca-lopping from bar to bar, they’d pretend the night was a showcase for their as-of-yet undiscovered talents. Lean in, naughty dialogue with an unwavering confidence that exists only in the movies, make out noisily in a booth, pithy whispers of unbridled sexual desperation. They didn’t care who noticed. Complete bullshit, but it didn’t matter to him. He liked making a scene. 

He keeps a little jar of Vaseline underneath the couch and grabs for it now. He remembers a girl called Josephine, black but light, sinewy, angular; she worked out. He remembers thinking she didn’t seem black to him. She talked with a smile and wore subtle jewelry. She was the last appointment of the night, 7:35, and her audition hadn’t gone well. He pounced. They were out until two and when he got her drunk enough to go home with him, she made him piss on her tits. Right in his living room. He had a good, ground floor apartment, subletted it from a guy who knew a guy who knew a girl, so he lived alone and could do whatever he wanted. She was kneading his dick through his pants as he reached inside and groped at her crotch and she kept saying “Piss on me, piss on me, piss on my tits” but each time with different inflections, like she was practicing for tomorrow’s audition, or just working on her sex scene chops. After he ignored her three or four times, she said, “Piss on my tits goddamnit!” and she started punching his dick instead of rubbing it. He pushed her down as she ripped off her shirt and bra, unzipped his fly, and pissed on her tits for a good hard fifteen seconds, the stream careening up into her face. He pushed it out of him with his young man’s prostrate as hard as he could as she said “More baby, more, more!” though it wasn’t believable. Then he turned his stream everywhere, all over the living room, spraying the carpet, the sofa, the tv screen, the ceiling, the walls, drenching everything, he couldn’t believe how good it felt to piss like that, he wouldn’t have ever thought it was something he would enjoy, but it felt like a new beginning, a primeval fireworks show busting out from the electrical socket of morethan sex, First Sex, this was the opposite of how he’d always experienced people and himself, this was the savage ripping through and raw wound that threatened the buildup to every single human orgasm, only to have it peter out into a clump of snot or children. He didn’t think about all the things he normally would have thought about, about how he’d feel afterward, about cleaning it up, about how this behavior fit with his politics, he just let it out and screamed, and when he was just about done he jammed it inside her and fucked her while beating his chest and growling in a voice that was louder than he’d thought it ought to go. And on his couch ten years later, he comes in seconds as he thinks back to that evening, that part of life, and Josephine’s terror as he didn’t even bother to come, he pulled out and smacked her face and said, minutes later as she scurried out the door with her finally unfabricated tears, how sorry he was, which was both true and false.

And so there was a point after all. Tonight, he is caught by his wife jerking off in his living room, ten years or so after he pissed on tits. Tonight he is just jerking off, he doesn’t hit anyone, he doesn’t piss on anyone, and it feels so much more wrong. She catches him just before so that as he is coming, he is looking into her eyes, the way he never does when they make occasional love, he always has to look away and he knows it’s not just the goddamn motherfucking Coolidge Effect. She watches him convulse into his hand, he doesn’t turn away from her during the surge. Then she turns around in her pink robe and bedhead and eyes of the hopeful morning and heads back upstairs. A wife’s feet brushing over brown carpet in the middle of the night, returning to an empty bed. That is the point.

A Gathering

We are gathered here today to Witness. Witness the joining of you, (name), and you, (name), and everyone else here on this Friday evening in New York City, city alive and thumping, ten o’clock and all of us together, one time only, it shall never be exactly the same as this again, forever and ever, Amen.

We are gathered here today in judgment, even if we believe otherwise, in a room that’s hot and cooked up on mismanagement and devastation, trumped up on smiles and congratulations and thank yous, and we are each and every one of us prepared to go the extra mile to think we’re not let down.

We are gathered here today, mini-Tom Waits and mini- Bill Gates alike, with things on our minds, things on our minds, gas in the car, money in the meter, how the children are doing, Derek Jeter. We’re listening to sounds of our scheming, dancing to the beat of a diluted dreaming.

We are gathered here today, an anguished pack of ephemera, refusing to acknowledge what looms, a half-night away from the best night of our lives but never bothering to board the train.

We are gathered here today in the presence of the no-God, desperate to un-know, handsome in our feel-good clothes, the drinks sliding like cancerous slugs down our checked-up throats, the burden of midnight’s perpetual return burrowed beneath our skin like invisible lice.

We are gathered here today with overcoats and umbrellas, you never know when it’s going to rain, and the galloping ghost of a former lover occasionally pin-pricks our skulls, usually in bed at night beside she who sleeps, he who wants things, she who won’t let you out until it’s certain we’ve memorized the bullet points.

We are gathered here today in misery, but there’s hope at last! A-ha! Champagne! A two o’clock sneezing fit! The psychic whisper of Dan Nani! Puddles and steam! Seasickness! Central Park! J. Seger! Duck Duck Goose! Casinos of the snow! NyQuil! Jumping up and down! Plastic castles! Morning! Soggy nights! Champions of the World! We are free.

We are gathered here today to stop taking care of ourselves, stop trying to mean what we said, stop being reverential, stop tethering ourselves and making amends, stop smothering the loneliness and circumcising our decisions.

We are gathered here today to start looking around, start chasing chills, start blending our voices, start writing an altogether different tale of howling and woe, to stare down the  chimera, to blame happiness for the garbage revolution, to attend a standing-room-only event in honor of the new expectation, one that doesn’t shirk or smirk or shrink, but gambles and weaves and denounces nothing until it’s been properly vetted.

We are gathered here today, friends, to smell our stink, to consecrate this holy ground and joust with our dragons. We must find out what makes them tick and where they reside, instead of sequestering them like some straining jury of our peers, trying to connect the dots. Adjust! Repent! Relent! screams the chorus of the adaptive heart, the one that’s been whittled down and made to fit. Fit no more, friends, let it fill and bust through our throttled chests, and let us continue to gather in the great and everlasting chase for thoroughness, forever and ever.

Amen.