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Steve Fried |
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Afterburn for Vito Ricci I do this because I'm terrible at sex. Sometimes for a while I'm not, but it's still my life. I lived with The Burn for three years: the first wasn't so terrible; we both got terrible for the next-and-a-quarter; then we spent the remainder of that final year building in our loft. It was a hundred by twenty feet, seventeen feet high, with twelve-foot windows on three sides. We filled it with partitions, split levels, platforms and a two-story walk-in closet. We built walls out of sheetrock and 2x4s, laid hardwood floors, decorated, painted, strung electrical conduit and almost used up enough energy to keep from fighting all the time, enough so we stopped having even terrible sex. Halfway through the last year some guy with a whiny voice called collect from London. She wasn't there, I wouldn't accept the charges and we had a worse fight about that than usual. He called back when she was home. She accepted the charges and found out Eric was coming back to New York after four years bouncing around Buddha-country. "He's very spiritual," she told me. When he got to town he called her to come to some ashram by Stony Point. She was gone three days. I bought flowers once and threw them out, then bought more. When she came back, she was happy. "Do we still have a monogamous relationship?" I asked her. "Of course," she said. "He's very spiritual." I wanted to believe. We fought off and on for two more weeks. Then in an apparently ordinary set-to, she said, "I'm going to the Catskills with Eric. I want you OUT of here when I get back!" "Is he moving in?" I asked. "Yes, we're in love. We fell in love four years ago, but he had to go on his Search. Now he's back and we want to be together." "Did you fuck him when you went to the ashram?" "Of course! We were together for THREE DAYS!" "I thought you said we had a monogamous relationship." "We did, once I was back. I haven't seen him since then. Now we don't have one again; I mean, I have one, but with him. You have one with yourself." Lofts were everywhere then. I had a deposit on a 4th floor basement in the flower district within sixteen hours. Then I went back to pack. The flowers had dried in the vase. I got everything together except I couldn't find my hammer. I looked everywhere. I pictured the spaces between the studs in the walls,, the floor, the three years she'd been waiting for him to come back. I was reading Poe. I thought of closed-in spaces: "The Tell-Tale Heart," "The Cask of Amontillado," "The Black Cat, my hammer. I got my prybar, my father's, a yard of hexagonal mild steel 3/4" thick, the ends hooked and tapered into chisel-points I could jam into a small slit with tremendous leverage to rip it large. I pried off some sheetrock. No hammer. I tore up a section of floor. Nothing. When I got to the closet, I piled her clothes on the bed. They made a triple stack taller than I was. There was stuff there I'd given her: a cable-knit fisherman's sweater of oiled Danish wool my ex-wife had made. I left it. I made four mounds in the middle of the floor: electrical conduit, sheetrock, 2x4s and wood flooring. When I was done, wherever I stood in the loft, I could see all three walls of windows. But no hammer. My new loft was 20' by 20' and had one window. The ceiling looked like it was descending. There were freight trucks and screaming arguments outside all day; refuse trucks strained their hydraulics all night. I taught writing at a left-wing community center seven blocks away to meet women. Everything'd go well until we went to bed, which happened pretty fast then. I'd turn away into the fetal position and think criticisms of myself, direct quotes from The Burn. The women mostly blame themselves, often out loud. I knew better but didn't correct them. Even after I did that once with Pammy she tried again. She called me, said "I'm ready to defend my thesis on Doris Lessing so I want to come over and talk about William Burroughs." "Huh?" I said. "I'm coming over," she said. Upright, I could hold a conversation. We talked about writing in a way that would've been fun if it were what was really going on, literary sex-gossip. Then, "Can I sleep over?" she asked me. I didn't answer. We got in bed, she reached for me and I snapped into my prenatal knot. We lay awake; Pammy berated herself aloud and I myself silently until 3AM when the phone rang. It was a relief to have something else to do. "If it's for me," she said, "I'm not here." It was my father. "Your mother," he said, "died in my arms an hour ago. I don't think she even woke up." "I'll get a plane," I said. He hung up. Pammy was looking at me. "My mother died," I told her. "I have to go." She didn't change expression. I wasn't sure she'd heard me. I dragged a chair to the other side of the refrigerator, out of her line of sight, and cried for a minute. Then I got up and packed two changes of clothes and some pot. I walked Pammy to Sixth Avenue, put her in a cab and closed her fist around a $20. She said, "This is all my fault." "Okay," I told her. "See you later," and flew * * * Stedman's Chapels opens to visitors at ten but I get there from the airport at nine-thirty, so I'm able to walk around the block and smoke a couple of joints before I I was brought up Catholic and Jewish. My mom was Irish Catholic and my father a Russian Jew, and each of my parents secretly raised me in their religion. So every Saturday, my father's "I'm taking the kid to the movies." "Oh, fine. Have a good time!" and we're off to shul and then Sunday my mother's "Stevie and I are going to the park," "Right. Just be careful." and there I am at Mass. It never got that far though. My father could never figure out a way to get me secretly bar mitzvahed and my mother, though she did sneak me out and baptize me, couldn't manage a covert first communion either. The whole thing should have made me schizo, but it made symmetrical sense. The Jews were all "The fuckin' Catholics want to kill us!" and the Catholics were "The fuckin Jews killed Christ, and we're next!" There wasn't much getting together on holidays, the lunar and solar calendars usually diverging, but occasionally some fancy running around. The one Christian lunar holiday, Easter, made for the worst conflicts with Passover, the normal simmering hatred brought to a furious boil by the shared nature of the observances, festivals of persecution by the unbeliever. Funerals were awkward. Besides each side's attitude toward the dead and how to behave around them -- compare a wake to sitting shive -- the tendency on both sides was to haul out old grievances, anything even remotely connected to the dead, and air them before the court of family opinion. There were even allowances made by the unnbereaved side for those who'd actually lost kin. Of course if I'd died, everything would've gone to hell, because though I had no idea what I really was, each side was dead sure I belonged to them, and though none of them liked me much, my membership had a symbolic one-up value. This time, though, there's a complication: my father, being the real victim here, the one who's lost the most, is slated for loads of sympathy from his cronies, so this Irish funeral is filling up mostly with Jewish professionals and businessmen. In fact, before much of either family gets here, the place is crowded with his pals, a few with their families, most alone, a couple with either adult daughters or mistresses. Everybody who's talking's talking business. These are lawyers, dentists, proprietors of their own going concerns. The Irish who've now started to drift in, besides being outnumbered, are at best construction engineers and mechanics, all with bosses. Some of them actually work for the men who've come to see my father. So my mother's cousins and nephews skulk into corners where they drink and make uncomplimentary observations on the players center stage. When my father comes in, he's waving to everyone, shooting little bits of banter and news back and forth as usual. I've never found find a public place in Pittsburgh where he doesn't know somebody; every block of sidewalk seems to have a few of his acquaintances on it. When he gets to me he's got a painful handshake, a crack about my hair, a polite, pointed question about my job, which I ignore. Then he's off with these guys, his real family. He's charming their wives or whatever and making contacts with and between their children, the next generation of Pittsburgh's commercial makers, enjoying himself the same way he did when Mom was alive. After about an hour of circulating, he drops by me again and says, "There's some people coming later I want you to meet. You should get a lot out of this." I'm coming down off the pot, crashing with nothing to eat and no opportunity to slip off for a snack or another joint so I go to have a look at my mother. The early line of praying Catholics at the coffin rail has died off so I have her to myself. The dead seem like wood to me. There's nobody there I could mistake for her, even if the mortician hadn't mounted a hideous makeup attack. Looking at what's left, I feel glad we finished our business well. After my mother's first heart attack six months before she died, I did what she always wanted me to do: started lying to her about my life. All through adolescence I saw it as my mission to expose her to reality, to be the antidote to the polyanna illusion she tried to live in. This reached a peak around Vietnam, when I became volubly expert on the worst sort of news, not just due to my own morbid take on things -- itself a reaction to her attitudes' impact on -- but also so I could constantly exhibit reality to her. This took other forms, too: about my life as well, I always told her the worst, in the worst way. Later, long after her death when I've pieced together what a pit of familial abuse and madness she rose above into the armor of her brittle optimism, I see my error and am ashamed, less so, though, than I'd be had I not lied to her at that last opportunity, when I told her that I had a full-time teaching job with guaranteed tenure, that I was coming to be truly happy due to my having begun to see the correctness of Catholic doctrine, and that The Burn and I were engaged to be married and planning to start a family right away. She died happier for it. The general family consensus, a rare one shared by both sides, is I treated her like shit, so I'm not getting any sympathetic attention. My presence at the coffin has created a bubble of isolation around it. I'm alone with the dead, with a lot of schmoozing and boozing in two discrete concentric rings around us, a social schematic of the planet Saturn, the god who eats his children. Suddenly, though, my father's next to me with a hand on my shoulder, which in our untouching family's unlikely enough that I immediately guess it's meant for Keep an eye on this guy on the left," he says to me sotto voce: "he's got the entire Reinhold Ice Cream franchise for western Pennsylvania. You Could learn a lot from him. And he could do a lot for you." This puts me in mind of my father's last job offer to me, just before I met The Burn, when some crony of his caught a patronage slot in the new state administration, netting me a job offer as a Pennsylvania state trooper. I take this new offer less seriously, than I did that, since the idea of a gun appeals to me more than does the prospect of -- what? An ice-cream truck? Anyway, there's no question of my paying attention to the franchise-holder, since the woman next to him has, at a moment's glance, two more authoritative qualities: she's staggering drunk and falling out of her dress, of which there isn't much to start with. I don't get much more than that impression before she wraps her arms around me, presses the length of her body along mine and howls into my ear: "Oh, your poor, poor mother!" I hug her back lightly, a forgotten reflex, feel warm skin move under my fingertips. She hits just the right note of grief and hysteria to shift the ambient sociogram: my father's acquaintances pull back from the unseemly display; simultaneously, the Irish relatives now work their way toward the coffin, hoping for a show. The rings of mourners interpenetrate briefly, then reorganize, relative positions reversed. As we hold our tableau for our mixed audience, an upheaval in my partner shakes both our bodies. I weigh convulsive passion against the prodrome of projectile vomiting, for she's writhing jerkily in a way that might be either. I lean toward the latter when she thrusts me away, arching backward in a kind of tango-step, and spins out of my arms to stagger to the coffin. She steps up onto the upholstered knee-rail, claws at the satin liner as she grips the edge for support, and leans over my mother's body, heaving. Away from the nexus of action, I take in the crowd nearby. Dead in front of me, Eamon Smallhover passes a chrome-plated pint to Mike Wilkie, who returns him a stage-whisper that a wink in my direction means for me as well: "And for sweet Jesus' sake y'think the Godforsaken Jews'll be startin' throwin' up right in the coffins, now?" Eamon breaks up laughing in a fine spray of whiskey but I'm stunned into recollection of things I've seen done with the dead at Irish funerals: spouses diving into the coffins, refusing to come out, demanding live burial; friends pulling out the corpse and dancing with it; drunker friends tipping over the box and its contents onto the floor; one memorable wife trying to rip the pants off the embalmed cadaver, shrieking: "Vouchsafe me one more drop of your sweet semen and I swear I'll give you the lovin' son you never had!" But for all I've seen of inebriates throwing up on the floor, into the flower-baskets, down the fronts of men's jackets and women's dresses -- for all that I've never yet seen anyone vomit into a coffin. Is this then where some line is drawn? If so, someone here bids fair to cross that line. But instead, the wife of the Reinhold franchise holder turns still full and heaving from the casket and cleaves to me again. "Oh, your poor, poor mother!" she says, softly this time, her breath wet and hot in my ear. She strokes the nape of my neck with one hand and swings the other low. Looking down, I see her breast come full out of the dress as the shoulder strap slides down her long white arm toward the hand that gently cups my crotch. The fingers move individually and then together, quickly and then slowly and I immediately respond, not just with an erection, but with a feeling, then a certainty that I might be less than terrible at sex again. I turn to her husband who's moving toward us, neither of us certain what to do. I give him what I hope in my pleasant physical confusion is a look of grim commiseration, gently disengage her hands from my neck and groin, and pass them to his waiting grasp. He uses them with accustomed skill like reins to steer her away. Neither of them looks back. "What the hell was that?" my father says from close behind me. I turn to him and say "It's me not having a job selling ice cream. But then I don't need one." And then, as if he's just asked his pointed question of two hours ago, I tell him a lie about my work that he really likes, and then another, filling in details, and start to finish my business with him too. Later I add more lies, finding each one easier. We carry the coffin well down a rain-slicked grassy hill, five pallbearers drunk and one stoned, but not much else happens till I get back to New York. Pammy's been telling people I was an unfeeling monster when my mother died. She's spreading it around that all I want is to emotionally abuse and degrade women, probably due to deep-seated, unresolved conflicts in my family past. Thanks to her, I start to get a lot of dates, which is how I meet the great love of my life. |