Bob Fingerman - Pariah

She still had it .

And there were hoops for Alan to jump through before they all collapsed into nothingness.

“Here,” Alan said, handing Eddie a dashed off, slightly altered pastel copy of the painting. In it Ellen was more robust, her buttocks rounder, her spine less protruding.

“ Pfff, ” Eddie sniffed, his disdain slap-in-the-face obvious.

“What’s wrong with it?” Alan sighed.

“It’s too nice.”

“Nice?”

“What’s the word? Tasteful. How’s The Comet supposed to get his jerk on with something like this? I want you to draw me humping the shit out of her.”

“No. Nuh-uh. No can do.”

“Why not?”

“Because it’s totally disgusting. Listen, this is too high school for me, okay? I used to con my way out of schoolyard beatings by drawing naked girlies for jackasses like you, but forget it. What’re you gonna do, take my lunch money?”

“I’ll beat the shit…”

Alan arched an eyebrow.

“I’ll spread the word that that whore is spreading for you like Velveeta. You think she wants to hear that shit, the widow lady in her hour of grief?”

As Eddie smirked in triumph, Alan’s indignance slackened to indifference.

“You know what?” Alan said. “Whatever. Do whatever you want. I did you a nice piece of work and you didn’t like it. I used to get paid good money for art like that. The one aspect of the apocalypse I kind of dig is assuming all those unappreciative art directors are dead. I’d hand in a beautiful piece of art and they’d either grunt approval or pick it apart. I don’t need bad reviews from a scrawny ape. You know what else? You can tell whoever you want that Ellen guzzles my cock morning, noon, and night. Tell them whatever you want. Make up any kind of deranged shit your feeble mind can come up with. Who cares? Be a gossipy little bitch. Everyone knows your ‘secret,’ so why should I protect Ellen’s? She’s a big girl. It’s the end of the world , Eddie. No one cares who’s diddling who. No one even cares that you fuck Dave, or vice versa, or whatever.”

“That’s a fuckin’ lie!” Eddie growled. “The Comet don’t play that!”

Laughing, Alan snatched the drawing from Eddie’s table and walked out the door.

“The Comet. What a retard.”

“ Oy , my sciatica,” Abe muttered, rubbing his thighs at the top of the stairs to the roof. He unlatched and pushed open the door and stepped onto the puckered surface. The bubbles in the tar paper reminded him of pizza, with its enticing puffed-up, reddish orange surface, peaks and valleys of sauce and cheese. Up the block from his office in the Shtemlo Building was a hole-in-the-wall pizzeria that made the best sauce-not too sweet, not too bitter. Perfect. The Punchinellos who worked there were torn straight from the pages of an Italian joke book, stereotypes all-bushy eyebrows and mustaches, arms hairy as apes’, speaking in Dese’a , dems’a , and dose’a spumoni-Inglese. For twenty-two years Abe had gotten pizza there and never knew their names. That was New York for you. Intimate anonymity. You could see the same people day in and day out and never know a damned thing about them.

“You know the latch was closed.”

“Yeah,” Dabney said. “I forget who was up here last, but sometimes I get locked out. S’alright. Not like I come down anyway. Knees bugging you, Abe?”

“Knees, back, everything. Bursitis, arthritis, a little bronchitis, you name it. I’m an old Jew. Everything hurts. What doesn’t hurt doesn’t work.”

Dabney laughed. “Don’t have to be Jewish for that shit.”

“Oh yeah? So what hurts you, Mr. Non-Jew?”

“No, I don’t want to have that conversation. I’d rather keep this on the upbeat tip, if it’s all the same. Whyn’tchoo come on over and park your narrow behind?”

“Suits me.” Abe, clutching Alan’s Phil Dick paperback, stepped over to the shady spot where Dabney sat, his back against a low wall. With some difficulty Abe took a seat on that wall, the top of which was capped with curved tile. “I can’t sit on the floor like that. I’d never get up again.” He propped open the book and slipped on his smudgy reading glasses. Dabney took the cue and fished out his own book and was about to read when Abe slapped the paperback closed and said, “How can it never rain and be so goddamned humid? It’s getting maybe a little gray on the horizon, do you think? Or am I crazy?”

“No, there’s some gray. Could just be haze.”

“Haze. Yes. Yes. No cars and we still got smog.” He trailed off. “What are you reading?”

Dabney held up a copy of Time Out of Joint , by Philip K. Dick. Abe showed Dabney his borrowed copy of The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch . They both smiled.

“Courtesy of that Zotz kid, am I right?” asked Abe.

“You are correct.”

“I think maybe that’s all that kid has is Dick.”

“No, that would be those meatheads in 4B and C. They got all the dick they can handle.”

The two men laughed.

“I don’t know who those schmucks think they’re fooling keeping separate apartments. You can hear their mishegoss whenever they get up to it. When I was in the service we had some fellas like them: straight laced and hard as nails on the outside. Guys with the pictures of femmes fatale of the big screen and so on. But they didn’t fool anyone. Once they were safely away from home, they were off to the races. You know that’s why New York and San Francisco are, um, were knee deep in faygelehs , right? All these fellas come home and they’ve got a choice: go home to Podunk and step back in the closet, or stay in the port town and make a new life. They chose wisely, I think.”

“So you think it’s okay to be homosexual?”

“I don’t care one way or the other. Never did, so long as their attentions weren’t on me. I had a few make goo-goo eyes at me; that I didn’t care for. But live and let live, I say. And now, what difference does any of it make? People are going to expend energy on carnality come what may, and use the available outlets-or inlets. Whichever. I’ll tell you, the best thing about getting old was that my libido, which controlled me all my post-adolescent life, finally died. Too bad it came right along with all this mess. I never got to enjoy my belated Age of Reason. And the hell with Viagra. Viagra’s only good if you’ve got a young honey waiting in your bed. No pill in the world could make me want to shtup the pill I’m married to.” Dabney snickered. “Yeah, easy for you to laugh. That woman is no picnic.” After a reflective pause, Abe looked up and, rubbing his knees, said, “I need to take my constitutional. Want to join me?”

Dabney helped Abe up off the wall and the two men strolled the roof. After two circuits of their building, Abe suggested they walk to the end of the row, assuring his companion he could make it over the walls. Dabney was in no mood to carry Abe back home. He liked the old geezer but would just as soon spare himself the piggyback routine. When they reached the north end of the line, Abe needed to sit down again. There was a rusty folding chair near the two oxidized bicycles permanently bonded to a metal guardrail. With their tires rotted away and everything glazed in a multihued orange patina, they looked more like modern art than defunct transportation. Abe was huffing and puffing like he’d run the marathon. Twice.

Dabney looked at Abe, who sat there panting, hands gripping his quaking knees. Though the geezer’s face looked all right-partly because it was enshrouded in beard-his hands were cadaverous, the skin like yellowed tracing paper speckled with liver spots. His fingertips came to disturbing points, the skin so close to the bone it barely masked it. A drop hit Dabney’s nose and he wiped it away with annoyance.