David Gates - The Wonders of the Invisible World

“Right, they’re animals. They smell. I could smell it the other day when they broke in and they were sitting going through the glove compartment. That smell. You know, you start out telling yourself that this is what you would be inside of a week if you couldn’t bathe, you didn’t have anyplace to shit — but the brute fucking fact is that you’re not that, man, you’re just not. I can’t even believe I’m saying this, but you know? I mean, I think back when I first went to work for Bernie, and he even told me, he said, ‘We’re not going to work miracles here,’ but I — okay, now check this out.”

He tosses his head at the car going by: a glossy little Jeep thing with music thudding out of it and two black guys with baseball hats, the rear license plate framed in glowing purple.

“Couple of brain surgeons, probably,” he says. “Mustn’t jump to conclusions, right? You have any idea what a rig like that costs? I mean, beaten down, who’s beaten down in this situation, man? You know, you can completely see how it happened.”

“How what happened?” I say.

“The thing, ” he says. “No, World War Two. You know, the cops just had enough of it. At that minute. And something fuckin’ broke, you know? I mean it could’ve been me. Easily. Easily.” He snorts. “Hey, confront your racism, right?”

Upstairs at last, he lies back on the futon, breathing through his mouth, eyes rolling. I untie his work boots and tug them off, getting not a lot of cooperation though not a lot of resistance either.

“And another evening bites the dust,” he says. “At least we got away from that shit for a couple of hours.”

“Which shit is that?” I say.

“ That. ” He points to the window giving onto the air shaft. “You don’t hear that?” Only now am I aware that the music, so-called, from the next building has started up. Boom-badoom, boom-badoom. The air shaft is only about that far across, and they keep it up eighteen hours a day. “I live here,” he says. “ Why do I live here? Even fucking Bernie Adler couldn’t hack it — Mr. New York. In his fucking co-op in Riverdale.”

“Wasn’t part of it that they were sending Winnie to Horace Mann?” I say. That “I” of his is echoing.

“Fucking Riverdale. I mean, isn’t that what the place was in Nancy Drew? Riverdale?”

“River something,” I say. “I wasn’t all that big into Nancy Drew.”

“The blue roadster,” he says. “Sometimes I just want to fucking scream.”

“I think we’re both sort of burned out,” I say.

“Oh, so sorry, have we been neglecting your problems? Nap time and its discontents?”

Fuck you.

He sits up and starts his thing of running fingers through his hair, hard. “I am disgusting,” he says. “I’m so fat now I’m out of breath coming up the stairs.”

I glance over. He’s got just the teensiest little roll, about that big, above his belt, the way anybody gets if they’re sitting. “You’re the same as you were,” I say.

“I smell like a pig, too. Come home and I take a bath and it’s like I can’t get clean.”

“What is this about?” I say.

He says, “I can understand why you would lose interest.”

“What?” I say. “Correct me if I’m wrong, but — oh, God, look, it’s late, I’m exhausted—”

“I need to talk to Bernie,” he says.

“Okay, fine,” I say. “Talk. You can pick up a phone.”

He gets the phone and starts jabbing numbers. “I know Bernie, he’ll still be there.” He listens for a long time.

“It’s after nine,” I say.

“He should be there. Jesus, if even Bernie is in on this thing.”

“What thing?” I say.

“Dinah. What have we been talking about the last three hours? Jesus. I feel like I’m going out of my mind here. I mean, maybe I should be insulted that I’m not important enough for them to even try to get to. What do you think? Should I try to call like Mike McAlary?”

Mr. I-Don’t-Read-the-Tabs. “I don’t know what to say about it,” I say.

He shakes his head. “This is some serious shit going down in this city.”

He’s in bed, asleep, by the time the news comes on. No follow-up about the march: it might as well have happened a year ago.

I zap the thing off when they say sports is next. I get up and go into the kitchen and open the Norhay (I mean, it is funny, kind of) and have a good long slug of Tropicana HomeStyle, right from the carton. Then I mosey back out and over to the bookshelves, hands clasped behind my back like Prince Charles or something inspecting the royal guards. Queen of all she surveys. You wouldn’t believe what’s here. I mean, Journey to the End of the Night? Chaucer, Chesterton, Dickens, the complete everything of T. S. Eliot, Faulkner Fitzgerald Freud, what looks like all the Hemingway in the world (which would figure), Langland Lawrence Lorca, Melville, Nabokov, O’Connor O’Neill Orwell, Peacock Plato Pinter Poe Pound. If they bombed all of New York but miraculously not us, you could start Western civilization all over again. Though lately Tobias’s intellectual life is mostly turning on the TV and complaining about how stupid it is. Which I guess is better than Rodney King over and over, or when Bernie gave him that tape of Koyaanisqatsi and we had that for the next month. But what really pisses me off as somebody who’s Jewish is all this Ezra Pound: the big fat Cantos of, Literary Essays of, I mean it goes on. Who but Tobias would have Jefferson and/or Mussolini? Plus not one, not two, but three biographies, plus two books just on the treason thing that he got locked up for and rightly so. Sometimes when Tobias isn’t here I’ll read around in these books just to give myself a good hit of how totally unbelievable this man was. I mean, every other word out of his mouth is kike, and this is the great poet supposedly, and what Tobias thinks is a good idea to have in what after all is my home, too. I fantasize sometimes about making a big stink and demanding that he at least put Ezra Pound away where I won’t have to see it every day of my life. I’d be like Hey hey, ho ho, Ezra Pound has got to go. But I can’t really imagine having the energy to get into a big hoo-ha with Tobias over Ezra Pound, or anything else, like having no sex life. What I think is that he should know not to have books where every other word is kike without my having to say anything. So I don’t say anything.

Actually, I don’t know why I’m even bothering to look at the books, because I already know what I’m going to do: I’m going to go rent Beauty and the Beast again. When Tobias is out he’s out, and RKO Video doesn’t close until eleven. This is truly a stupid obsession, but harmless, I guess. I mean, by comparison. I get my purse and duck my head into the bedroom: Tobias’s shoulder is rising and falling. I’m out the door.

Same as every Friday and Saturday night, crowds of hooting white kids wander this neighborhood because of the bars. I say kids; in their twenties, really. In packs and couples. Barelegged girls, noisily drunk — you can tell they’re going to be sick and sorry — held up by what look like frat boys who probably all work on Wall Street and could buy and sell you by snapping their fingers. And in front of every bar and deli, some homeless man shaking a paper cup. I go into a Koreans’ for my usual thing of M&Ms, pay with a dollar bill and, back on the sidewalk, drop the change into a dirty hand.

RKO Video is bright and empty; except for the clerks I’m the only one here. They’ve got The Shining on the overhead TVs, right at the part where Shelley Duvall is looking at the huge stack of pages Jack Nicholson has typed. I go straight to Children’s: sure enough, three copies of Beauty and the Beast. You never have a problem renting Beauty and the Beast, which I thought was weird until I realized everybody with kids already has it and who else would want it. Strange feeling, bringing it up to the counter. It seems sicker than something from Adult X.