Jacob Rubin: The Poser

Littered over it was a landscape of crumbs and dishware and almost every forum for the printed word: The Evening Post, The City Times , splayed hardcovers, yellow notebook paper, not to mention a pale thigh outlined by a garter belt, though the rest of the image — the woman’s midriff, bra, and ruby lips, presumably — was obscured by a basket of rotten bananas. An excitable hand decorated every page on the table, circling words, adding phallic exclamation marks, the notes swarming like ants in the margin: “Exactly!” “Memorize.” “Money?”

“Some orange juice, young squire,” Max said, standing over me. Sweat ticked out of my armpits.

“Thank you.” I took the still-filthy glass and rested it on a relatively flat pile of magazines. I then scratched my nose so as to make returning my hand to its initial position less conspicuous.

“Awfully glad you could make it,” Max said, walking to the refrigerator. He swung open its door and grabbed — violently — a beer. “Glad as hell.” He tilted the bottle at a decisive angle and then decapitated it against the kitchen counter. After batting away whatever occupied his chair, he collapsed into a reclining position, wiping his brow. “This goddamn heat. There are things going on in my body no man should know.”

I shook my head though I meant to nod. This could happen. Sometimes at the station, when tired, I said “Please” instead of “Thank you,” winked when intending only to smile. Max hadn’t noticed, though. He leaned back in that poor bursting chair. “You’re not a talker.”

“Oh, sometimes.” I smiled my ticket-seller smile.

“Fine with me. Talkers, nontalkers. I don’t distinguish. Hell, I don’t distinguish at all. People are people. That’s what entertainment’s about.” He swigged his beer. “The best performers — the ones who can perform anywhere and get a self-respecting girl to drop her panties and grin while she does it —they don’t make distinctions. They say, ‘Distinctions—’” He blew his thumb, making a flatulent noise, raised his middle finger, and planted his beer on the table. “Look at Shakespeare. His genius? You want a madman? Okay, I’ll show you a madman. You want a king? All right. You want a pauper, pixie? Fuck you.

“But as soon as someone’s got that talent — I’m talking about someone who can relate to anyone , make us all ”—he drew a wide rink with his finger—“relate to him. When you got someone like that, what do they do?” He shrugged so much his palms were at his shoulders. “They put him on a pedestal. They say, ‘I wonder how he does it. How does he do it?’” He shook his head. “Have you ever heard the expression ‘People worship the lucky’? It’s fucking — it’s true, boy.” Either the hypocrisy itself, or his facility in exposing it, revolted him. He sighed and raised his arm as if to salute, then slapped his hand hard against his thigh. “I talk,” he said. “I talk.

“Well, you know what I mean.” He stood and began pacing, fanning the bottom of his sweat-stained shirt. “I was in a café in Sea View when I heard of you. Two men talking like they’d seen a ghost. Real shit-them-ole-panties fear.” He clasped his hands in front of his chest, wheeling his thumbs over each other. “Their fear — you need that first. Have you considered it? Performing?”

I made a face that said as much as making no face at all, like nodding while breathing out your nose (to express amused agreement), raising your eyebrows while suppressing a smile (mild scandal), or shaking your head while breathing in through the mouth (sympathy) — all those safe expressions I’d perfected at the station.

“What’s celebrity?” he asked. “Being different from everyone. Different, so they want to be like you. Usually, it’s beauty. Oldest hustle in the world. People never get bored of a beautiful face. Never bored of fucking beauty. I, for one, am bored of it . Me, I like a woman whose beauty is tilted ninety degrees.” He mimicked twisting the top off a bottle to express the ninety degrees to which beauty ought to be twisted. “Heavy potential. Because of that added layer. You’re not up there saying, ‘Like me ’cause I dance, like me ’cause I sing.’ You’re saying, ‘Like me ’cause I’m you.’ Quite brilliant. Quite a bit of everything, really.”

He muttered this last part, and having completed that sprint of breath, collapsed back into the chair. It groaned. “Hmph.” Energies blew in and out of the man. He massaged the meat of his neck, pinched the baggy skin around his throat. “Hmph, hmph, hmph.” He was staring out the window, or rather, looking at the air outside the window as if it, too, were a window to be looked through. A quality that attracts dogs and babies to a person belonged to him: a certain largesse, a willingness to share oneself with strangers.

Because of this quality, I found myself asking a question, a thing I hated doing. Questions were holes in my demeanor, windows through which rocks could fly. By then, I used the leavened voice of Richard Nelson, the father of radio-fiction (and previous go-to) Jimmy Nelson. Puberty, years before, demanded the shift. An improvement, really. On the diminishingly popular The Hoaglands , Richard stood as the true paradigm of the sensible and wry, qualities, if anything, his son (my first model) had aped. “What are these for?” I asked. “All these newspapers, magazines?”

“Research.” He planted his elbow on the arm of the chair, rested his two chins on his palm, and sighed. “Been putting my finger to the wind. That finger. You gotta get it wet.

“Month ago I was down in the City. Wore my ass off attending the latest horseshit day and night. Music, comedy, burlesque. Some were B-plus, I’ll give them that, but the majority, boy — it was like watching a child make a brown little surprise in his pants, then walk around the aisles, asking everyone to clap for him. Wouldn’t know it by the critics, though. Open up the paper, and the critics love Brown Surprise. They want more Brown Surprise. After all, what’s a critic gonna say? ‘These are bullshit times. Take a nap.’ No, they say, ‘Tour de force. Art’s as good as ever!’ Nonsense. The time is ripe for something new , and when they see it — oh, when they see it…” He shot up again, pawing through the newspapers on the table. Whether he was searching for something in particular or the frenzied shuffling was a point in its own right, I couldn’t tell. “Well, they’ll be making cider in their undies. White cider.” He looked at me. “What I mean is, they’ll sperm themselves.”

I raised my eyebrows while suppressing a smile.

“Well, that’s the thinking, anyway.” He dug his chin into his palm. “It’s not that I doubt it. Doubt and I — no, I don’t doubt things. I just want other people to give us the chance. It’s the chance that needs to — ah, God, what can you do?” He squeezed circles into his temples and then covered his face entirely with his hand. Out the window a hammer clinked, a common noise in Dun Harbor. Men in hardhats were always streaming in and out of the train station, the reports of their hammers and drills punctuating the afternoon. The place lived in a constant state of construction without anything, as far as I could see, ever being built.

“What is it you’re proposing, Max?” I was surprised to hear myself ask.

His eye studied me from between the knuckles of his middle and index fingers. Then his hand slid down his nose and mouth, unveiling a carnival grin. “How much time do you need?”

“I’m sorry?”

“To go on — I mean, you imitated me in — what — a few seconds. Is that all the time you need?”