Arthur Nersesian - The Fuck-Up

“If you’re waiting for someone do it over there.” She pointed away from the door.

“I’m here to see your boss.”

“One second.” She picked up a phone and mumbled something into it. In a moment a short stocky guy in his thirties with curly hair and wire-framed glasses appeared.

He opened a big glass door allowing me into the lobby. “I’m Nick Miedland, the manager. Can I help you?”

“Yeah, do you know Tanya?” I said in a low voice.

“Yes,” he looked nervously at the box office girl, “what about her?”

“She sent me.”

“Tanya?” He said looking behind me.

“Right,” I murmured as I moved farther down the lobby away from the bitchy ticket girl.

“Tanya said you had a managerial opening for me.”

“She said that? Well, I’m sorry but there are no openings.” I gave him an insider’s smile.

“Come on, Nick.” I took the liberty of using his first name. “Tanya said just yesterday that there was an opening.”

“One second please,” he said and then looked behind me. He addressed the girl in the ticket booth, “What’s all this about a manager’s opening?”

“What?” she replied.

“This gentleman claims that you’ve been telling him about some kind of manager’s opening?”

“No, not her,” I corrected, “Tanya told me about it.”

“This is the only Tanya I know.”

“I must have the wrong place,” I muttered.

Without a further word, he turned and went back to his office. Two Tanyas in two days, what a fluke. I smiled apologetically at the present Tanya as I left, but she only gave me a nasty expression. At least she had a job. As I walked away, I felt increasingly foolish. Half way up the block, I turned and yelled back, “Fuck you, Tanya!!”

I didn’t know of any other theaters on Twelfth Street and wondered if I’d gotten a bum steer. So I wandered down Twelfth and stopped into the Strand Bookstore. There, I took the elevator up to the seventh floor to drop in on Kevin. Helmsley had introduced me to him a couple years earlier, when he was working part-time in the basement and had just entered some Columbia master’s program. Over the years, Kevin had slaved his way up to the rare book room. Whenever I wanted to buy a book, I brought it up to Kevin and he would purchase it for me with his employee discount. We talked a bit about books and finds. Eventually he had to get back to cataloguing books, so I went downstairs and browsed a while. Fortunately nothing caught my interest. I wouldn’t have been able to afford anything anyway. I wandered with increasing worry along Twelfth, eastward. At least, if all else failed, I had enough to get a slice of cheese babka at Christine’s Coffee Shop on First Avenue.

At Third Avenue, on both Twelfth and Eleventh Streets, NYU dorms were erected around 1986; students rinse the area. But back in the early eighties parking lots filled the sites. The emptiness was a marketplace for prostitutes. They would hook their tushies on car fenders waiting for a trick. I remembered their tight bright clothes were making promises that their wasted bodies couldn’t keep, and for a while I watched the middle-aged, fat-assed men decelerate their long American cars with Jersey plates and consider the day’s slim pickings.

The morning had started with hope for a good job, but that belief was slowly sinking with the sun. Each of the blocks went by without a theater. In despair, it seemed somehow appropriate that these lost souls were stationed here. Each of them must’ve had a day like this when their hopes started strong and erect, but slowly, one by one, all possibilities dwindled until they wound up on a street like this one, watching other girls hanging their sides on fenders like meat on a hook, waiting for a buyer. Seeing this they must’ve figured, “I’ve got nothing else going,” and then joined the others.

Looking northward up Third Avenue, I noticed a guy walking with a pretty blond boy in a sailor’s outfit. Together the pair walked, arm in arm, heading toward the sleazy porn theater half a block up. The entrance of the place was circular and covered with dirty brown shag carpet, a giant orifice. Above it proudly flapped a flag: “The Zeus Theater.”

Quick as a fart came the revelation. This was a theater near Twelfth Street! Even though AIDS was widely known, this was about a year or so before the Post ran headlines like “Grandma Dies of AIDS.” The hysteria was still a ways off. Between the NYU dorms and the pandemic pandemonium, the Zeus Theater had little chance of survival. It was closed down in the late eighties. Instead of taking the view that I’d be exposing myself in a pathogenic porn theater, it looked like just another offbeat job.

So I pondered for a moment with a renewed hope. Could this be the place? And if I did go in and was offered a job, would I take it?

My affections were never inclined beyond females. But this was a job and I was broke. I had dropped out of college just before my graduation. I had no marketable skills, no connections, and no real ambition. After a succession of degrading minimum-wage jobs, I finally might luck into something with a salary, in which I’d most likely be unsupervised.

Checking both ways, just to be sure that no past pillars of my old Midwestern community were lumbering by, I followed the middle-aged man and his Ganymede inside. They paid and together they romantically squeezed through a single angle of the turnstile. I looked through the dirty bulletproof Plexiglas and saw an elderly olive-skinned lady sitting on a stool.

“Excuse me,” I yelled through four small vertical slits.

“Please turn it,” she interrupted, pointing to the turnstile. “They only turn it once.”

I turned it and yelled back in, “Is Miguel in?”

“A segundo.” She replied in an accent, and then yelled into a cheap intercom.

“You wait here.”

I stepped to one side, turned away from the door and waited. After the turnstile spun a couple of times, I turned to the entrance and watched those coming through. They were mainly businessmen types, family men who didn’t fit my naive idea of what gays looked like. A door finally opened and a very young man with only dark peach fuzz for a moustache introduced himself as Miguel and asked if he could be of any assistance.

“Yes,” I replied, shaking his hand, and in a conspiratorially low voice I explained, “Tanya sent me.”

“Oh, I’ve been waiting for you. Come this way.” He led me around the turnstile and down a narrow hallway in the theater. “So how’s Tanya faring?”

“Fine, fine.” The whole place was darkly lit. Occasionally I would brush shoulders with some passing patron. Finally stopping at the end of the corridor, he opened the door and flipped on a light. His room was a modified closet, the fluorescent bars of light revealed a macramé Yin Yang calendar, a small refrigerator, and a tiny television set.

“One second,” he said, flipping his desk lamp on and turning off the fluorescent flood. He offered me a group of film canisters as a seat. When I sat, he leaned back in his swivel chair and began, “So talk to me.”

I told him my name and gave him Helmsley’s address and then explained that I had theater experience at the Saint Mark’s. About to elaborate on my theater know-how, he interrupted.

“I don’t want a resume.”

“Pardon?”

“I want to know what you’re thinking.”

“About what?” I asked.

“Just about.” And he leaned back further in his swivel chair and set his thin arms on the rest of the chair and threw his head back.

“Well,” I said, leaning forward on the dented canister, “I’ll level with you. I’m in dire straits for a job, and I’m probably not qualified, but I am willing to put a lot of energy into learning, and I guess that’s really what I’m thinking about.”