Will Not Attend: Lively Stories of Detachment and Isolation Page 13

  I reached up and gently freed it from the nail. Somewhere I heard a sigh. It was Gina, standing behind me.

  “That’s what you wanted? A fucking clock? God, that’s ugly.”

  I hushed her and somberly placed it on the kitchen table to begin the autopsy. I turned it over to inspect the B side of the clock. Back in its halcyon days, when it was still a record, I would have seen the title “Blue Yodel No. 12” (aka “Barefoot Blues”), but it was all gone, painted over for some inexplicable reason with mustard-colored paint. The center hole had been clumsily enlarged to make room for the quartz mechanism that was affixed with black electrical tape and contained two C batteries. I flipped it back over and gazed at the face of Jimmie Rodgers, old pal of my heart, smiling at me through the cracked laminate.

  Then, I noticed the time.

  We exited fast, Gina with a bag of liquor and her grandmother’s wedding ring, and me with the clock—which I intended to bury. The apartment door slammed shut just as the corner of my eye caught sight of my mother. The remainder of the eye found the cop, the coot, and my brother Jack’s shit-eating grin.

  I sat alone in the backseat of the Cutlass, no longer captain of my vessel. The clock and the box of records from Gina’s mom had been confiscated. I would never see them again. Through the windshield I watched as the officer spoke to my mother, occasionally using a dramatic hand gesture. She was comforted by my brother, who had his arm around her, shaking his head in mock disbelief. What a fuckwad. Gina, meanwhile, sat defiantly in the back of the police cruiser. When the cop had asked her where her mother could be reached, she replied, “Up my ass.”

  My mom stewed silently for the first thirty seconds of the ride home and then erupted.

  “Do you know what that cop told me? He said that girl’s run away from home three times! The last time with a thirty-two-year-old man!”

  Jack chimed in from the passenger seat. “What normal person would be involved with a girl like that? She’s not even pretty.”

  “She comes from a bad home,” my mom continued. “She’s been in trouble with drugs and everything else.”

  “I just hope she doesn’t rob us now,” Jack added with concern.

  “I don’t want you anywhere near her again! And you can forget about using my car—ever! I don’t care if you’re sixteen or sixty!”

  “Actually, I don’t know if he’ll even be able to get a license now,” Jack pointed out. “They’ll probably make him wait until he’s twenty-one.”

  “Good!”

  “My friend’s dad is a Lower Paxton cop. I’ll ask him.”

  “Shut the fuck up, Jack!” I snapped.

  My mother started to tear up.

  “First Buddy Rich, and now this.”

  Well, it’s all shit from here, I thought. And Merv’s not even home yet.

  The hellhounds had not lost my scent. Nor would they ever. I knew they would shadow me all the way to the grave. (The irony is, I like dogs.) The road ahead looked long and dreary. I was only fifteen.

  Yet just moments before, as my mother drove out of Camelot Village, we passed the patrol car in the parking lot. Gina was in the backseat. She looked bored. We caught sight of each other and she waved to me, bouncing up and down with an excited grin that seemed to say “We did it!” What we did exactly was unclear to me, but it was certainly something. She was a special one, Gina Erdmann. Had Jimmie Rodgers met her, he might’ve written a song about her. And then hopped a train to the next town.

  The Strand Bag

  Although friends, family, and casual acquaintances might violently disagree, I consider myself a simple man with simple needs. Like the gentle field cow that requires little more than to be grazed and watered, I’m the very definition of “easy keeper.”

  Per my modest routine each morning, I carry a legal pad, a blue retractable pen, and a piece of fruit twelve blocks to the small studio apartment I rent as an office. Throughout the years I’ve transported these items in a variety of plastic shopping bags: Fairway, Gap, CVS, Saigon Grill—they’ve all had their turn and they’ve all come up short. For a brief period there was even a very nice Tumi messenger tote that my wife bought me one Christmas—unfortunately, I was daunted by all the zippers and compartments and disliked the sensation of a strap on my shoulder, which, quite honestly, made me feel like a drag queen. But somewhere along the line, in this blur of bags, I became monogamous with “the one.” We’ve all been there, right?

  The Strand Book Store on lower Broadway is one of New York City’s great marvels, boasting 18 MILES OF BOOKS. Never mind that you’ll want to blow your brains out after ten minutes because there are too many fucking books, simply jostle and elbow your way through the three congested sales floors and, in time, you’ll exit with some reasonably priced treasure like Vintage Cracker Jack Toys and Premiums, 1912–1940 (seconds of pleasure) or an insightfully balanced volume probing the mind-set of ordinary Germans during World War II (yeah, right, they were brainwashed—please). In my several yearly visits to the Strand, I have, books aside, always been assured to walk out with something I’ve considered very special: a superbly designed shopping bag that feels so good in my hand that it elevates my dopamine levels and helps bring my skeletal frame into proper alignment.

  Allow me to continue.

  While I wouldn’t characterize my fondness for the bag as obsessive, a few particulars are worth noting. Made of luxurious two-ply, wrinkle-resistant plastic, the cheerful red-and-yellow Strand bag measures thirteen inches wide by seventeen inches tall. Comfortable oval-shaped handle openings are perfectly positioned approximately an inch and a half below the top lip. These openings are reinforced and made even more pleasing by a bordering strip of clear plastic on the inner side. The base of the bag has been blessed with a tight inward pleat that prevents slackness and eliminates the dreaded “puffing out” effect so common with its lesser colleagues. Contents remain snug, upright, and balanced. (For all you Freudists enjoying a cheap titter, grow up.)

  To carry this little wonder around is one of life’s simple joys—a rare example of perfection in a woefully imperfect world.

  The trouble began when I happened upon an old photograph of myself tentatively feeding a mentally ill water frog. The frog, purchased from a mail-order company in Loxley, Alabama, was prone to psychotic episodes that sent it zipping full-speed through the algae before it smashed its face into the side of the tank and vomited. I think it was also blind. In the picture, the Strand bag can be seen resting on a chair in the background, safely set away from the splash of amphibian puke-water.

  As I studied the image, I crunched the numbers: The frog was purchased for my daughter’s seventh birthday and only lived twenty-six days (which I’m sure it considered twenty-six days too long). If the bag went back as far as the frog, that meant I’d been carrying it or one of its identical siblings around for almost a decade. A question arose inside me faster than a country songwriter jots down “gravel road” on a lyric sheet: Am I out of my mind?

  The easy answer, of course, was “yes.” But was I that kind of crazy? When I left the apartment in the morning, did the regulars along West End Avenue think of me as the “Strand Bag Guy”? I was particularly concerned about a group of teenagers I often passed as they waited for the school bus. Was my memory playing tricks on me, or had I sometimes heard laughter as I walked by? And why was I suddenly recalling phrases like “Nice bag, Porky”?

  I made a few inquiries to a short list of people whose opinions I trusted, starting with my wife. “Hey, you know how I carry that Strand bag around every day? Is that a little . . . funny?” Her I dunno shrug was as big and phony as Jethro’s twin sister Jethrine in The Beverly Hillbillies (Google it at your own risk), and her follow-up was even more telling: “What happened to that nice Tumi messenger tote I bought you for Christmas?” My friend Julie responded with a similar non-answer answer: “You should check out J.Crew. They have some really nice backpacks.” (Then shot me an email with a link to amplify he
r point.) And Jill, a close colleague with a certain obnoxious candor, merely stated, “You look insane.”

  I was a little annoyed that people close to me had a negative view of the bag yet had said nothing all the years I’d been carrying it around. Was Lorrie biting her lip as I left the apartment each morning, only to burst out laughing when the door closed? Did she watch me from the tenth-floor window as I walked down the street, thinking, No wonder I’m banging the guy I met at the dog run?

  I decided to seek out a more reliable opinion. As luck would have it, I knew a mental health practitioner who I habitually bumped into twice a week for forty-five minutes. Certainly he’d seen the bag in my possession and never commented.

  I sat down with him and laid it out: I don’t suffer from OCD, I’m not making an environmental statement about reusing stuff, nor am I trying to cultivate the image of a cool, eccentric writer who, à la Tom Wolfe and his white suit, is never seen without a plastic shopping bag. Can’t a man just ferry his possessions from place to place in the repository of his choice? Must we be judged by even our most benign habits and routines?

  The doctor sat in thoughtful silence, struggling to stay awake. Finally, he replied, “Whatever happened to that nice messenger bag your wife bought you for Christmas?”

  Another wiseass.

  Then came the capper—he challenged me to throw the bag away in his presence. “Just, as, well, sort of an experiment.” “But what about all my stuff?” I protested. “How am I gonna lug around a pen, a notepad, and a Ziploc full of blueberries? Am I supposed to shove ’em up my ass?” The “genius” had no comeback.

  I stormed out of his office with the bag and its contents intact. Three blocks later I concluded he was 100 percent right and I belonged in an institution. Without further delay, I removed the pad, pen, and blueberries and tossed the bag into a garbage can. Fuck it.

  I continued down the sidewalk, making it a full ten steps before my belongings got the best of me. I dropped the pen and almost blew my back out saving the blueberries. The legal pad ended up in a puddle, where drowned cigarette butts clung to it like leeches. I huffed back to the trash can, furious that I’d been manipulated into making such a rash decision, arriving just in time to see a guy using my bag to pick up some dog shit. (The irony of shit inside the very bag that normally contained my writing somehow escaped me at the time; the shrink made a point of hammering it home a few sessions later.)

  I refused to make a big deal over the fact that I was on the No. 3 train within minutes, headed downtown to the Strand. Or that my mouth felt abnormally dry and I was unconsciously scratching my neck, leaving long red scrape marks. I simply needed a new bag, and this was no time to read into things. As it was, I was dropping blueberries all over the train and not a single passenger offered to help gather them.

  The store was typically packed when I arrived. The Strand is often less about shopping and more about finding an air pocket. Thankfully, I just needed to grab a quick book so I could get what I really came for. But for the first time in fifteen years and hundreds of visits, I could find nothing of interest. I must have combed through at least five of the 18 Miles of Books, checking all my usual haunts. There was nothing new or fun on the Nazi table, the photography section was clogged with oversize volumes depicting civil unrest in the sixties, and no matter where I looked, I came upon towering stacks of A Tree Grows in Brooklyn. Ultimately, I settled on a slender, inexpensive Beat poet anthology, which had been misplaced on the Lesbian Erotica shelf. While never a huge fan of the Beats or their let-me-get-this-claptrap-down-before-my-heroin-dealer-gets-here prose, I thought it would make a fun gag gift for my father. (“They actually pay people to write this shit? I should be a fucking writer.”)

  At last, I could get my beloved bag and depart.

  As I stood in the long, sloppy line that congealed at the register bank, an astonishing idea entered my head: What if I asked the cashier for extra bags? You know, backups. A reserve supply. It didn’t mean I was committing to the bag for the rest of my life; I was just preparing for an extended period of internal debate.

  Suddenly, I was startled by the ear-piercing command “Next on line!” and a not-so-gentle shove from the old fart behind me.

  My heart sank as I approached the far register. It was manned by an icy-looking NYU grad student type whose hair was pulled back so severely she resembled some sort of predator fish. The young lady viciously swiped my credit card, flung it back at me, and bagged the book, all in one boorish flurry—as if I’d been the one who’d steered her toward a master’s in social work when her true love had always been graphic design. With my window of opportunity closing, I seized the moment: “Um . . . would it be possible for me to get a few extra bags? I reuse them. To carry stuff.”

  She glowered at me with a mix of disdain and confusion, the same look she likely reserved for her older sister—the oncologist in Pound Ridge who’s happily married and has always had her shit together. “I mean, I’ll pay for them,” I quickly added before she could say something curt, but of course saying something curt was her whole raison d’être. “We don’t sell the bags,” she snipped. “And we don’t give out extras.” For a moment it seemed we were destined to tangle assholes, but a kindly woman with a manager’s badge suddenly appeared and uttered seven of the sweetest words I’d ever heard in my life: “Oh, just give him the bags, Rachel.” The next thing I knew, I was walking out of the store with five Strand bags—six if you count the one holding the Beat anthology. I was flying high.

  It was about two blocks up Broadway that I realized something was wrong—my face started to feel numb and a disturbing buzz invaded my ear canals. The sidewalk began to slant and I had the vague sense that my skeletal frame was coming out of alignment. I braced myself against a building. A quick inspection of the new bag revealed the unthinkable: it had been redesigned. The handle opening was now slightly narrower and set about an inch lower from its former position. This completely threw off the balance and my gait suffered accordingly. Gone was the supportive ring of plastic on the interior, taking a good deal of comfort with it, and the bottom pleat was less pronounced, allowing the bag to bloat out grotesquely.

  Once again, my long-held belief that tragedy lurks around every corner was confirmed. Something near and dear to me had been mutilated. A voice inside my head offered advice: “Track down the bag manufacturer! Locate the warehouse! The older, better bags are still out there someplace! Be proactive! And, P.S., everybody hates you.”

  I couldn’t go on like this. The bag had robbed me of . . . well, I wasn’t sure exactly what it robbed me of, but let’s face it, it wasn’t doing me any favors. For the sake of my family and everyone I cared about, I was done with it. There would be no calls of inquiry to bag manufacturers.

  Suddenly I found myself engulfed in a wave of melancholy as the world around me began to darken and melt away. I could perceive nothing except for an odd, gesticulating mass of yellow on the southeast corner of Fourteenth Street—the same shade of yellow as the Strand bag. It was beckoning me.

  I walked toward it.

  The man in the chicken suit greeted me warmly, patting my shoulder with a shaky wing while thrusting a Popeyes menu in my hand. His black tights sagged hopelessly at his knees and a section of tattered beak revealed a runny nose. But it was those eyes—those cloudy milk-blue eyes peering out from the dented chicken head—that struck me. In them, I saw a stubborn pride.

  The chicken man and I regarded each other for a moment, as if we had once traveled together across oceans and distant landforms. The moment soon passed, however, and he turned away, forcing a menu into the hand of an irritable gentleman who balled it up and called him a “bitch-ass-goofy-looking motherfucker.” The bird did not flinch. Nor did he take off his chicken head and chuck it in the garbage. He simply moved on to the next pedestrian.

  In that instant, I no longer cared what others thought of me. I was my own person. And I would never doubt myself again. I was the chick
en man!

  Slowly, the world around me returned. My head cleared. Sure, the new Strand bag was a bit of a mongrel, but heck, its virtues still outweighed its shortcomings. With a little duct tape I could reinforce the handles and some careful stretching would correct the alignment and improve balance. And Lorrie would figure out a way to fix the pleat—that’s part of the reason I married her; she’s so darn clever! I felt an enormous sense of pride. I was almost forty and beginning to grow as a person, learning to adapt to life’s unexpected curveballs while maintaining my convictions. The bag was still mine. And I would carry it forever in his (the chicken guy’s) honor. Do you hear that, gawkers? Do you hear that, Tumi messenger tote? In the words of the late Ben-Hur: “From my cold, dead hands!”

  I continued my journey north as the rhythm of a slappy upright bass filled my head.

  I’m traveling, brother. On the move. Crawling on all fours with muddy feet and twisted feathers. Impacted rubble stretching my bowels like a carny’s tale of Aztec children. Creeps and sheep and lactating mothers pushing wheelbarrows full of passion nightmares who piss and shit and wail. The Empire State Building hunched against the wind like a dead man’s erection. The bag, man, the bag. We build it up to fuck it up. I’m back on the train, daddy. Heading for that yawning cunt called the Upper West Side. Next stop . . . More of the Same.

  Now scat.

  The Lion in Winter

  There was no need to check the caller ID. I knew it was him. I could tell by the ring—it grabbed you by the shoulders and spun you around. Even the phone seemed to panic, sprouting arms and legs and scurrying down the counter. “Pick it up! Pick it up!” it implored. “He hates to wait!”

  “Hello?”