Rafael Yglesias - Fearless

Max had stood on the window ledge of that room twenty-one years before, high on LSD. He remembered the red face of a student who had the thankless job of being the “control” (namely the sober one) for that day of tripping. The control was flushed from the effort of holding onto Max’s legs while Max shouted back at him, “Let me go! I know that if I jump I’ll die! I’m not going to jump!”

Max laughed.

He hadn’t remembered that moment in years. That Max had died without a funeral.

He had to pee. He hadn’t since takeoff, hours ago, and although this was the first request from his bladder, the need was pressing. He went up to the door of his old quarters and pushed the white button. The sound it made was different from the old harsh buzzer. Chimes played softly in the distance. The urgency of having to urinate was delicious and brought tears to his eyes.

The young mother asked, “Who is it?” warily. She opened the door guardedly, only a crack, peering out at him.

“Excuse me. I really have to use a bathroom.” He didn’t mean to be comic, but he swayed from one foot to another, unable to stand still without releasing his bladder.

“I’m sorry,” she said and shut the door.

He peed on her steps. He didn’t blame her for keeping him out, but he had no patience, and so he unzipped and splattered the granite. She saw him do it from the window and rushed away, probably to phone the police. A man across the street stopped to watch him. In the summer heat it would smell when her young husband came home. Max had been full. Minutes seem to pass and yet it poured out of him. Max thought there was plenty of time for the cops to arrive. He imagined her report:

“There’s a man peeing on our renovated brownstone.”

The whitish gray of the granite darkened from his pee. “I’m aging you. I’m giving you a more European look,” Max said as his stream became arched, then sporadic and finally a trickle.

“That’s disgusting!” the man who had been watching from across the street yelled at him.

The young mother looked out the window again. Max stared at her as he zipped up. She jerked back at his intensity. Her brown hair fell across her face like a curtain.

“Sorry,” he said to her, mouthing the words and gesturing helplessly. He moved toward his car.

Seeing Max come in his direction, the man across the street trotted away fearfully.

A world of suspicion and cowardice, Max thought. A world without enough public bathrooms. Unvandalized bathrooms, he corrected himself. He had designed a pair for a city renovation of a small park in Brooklyn. “No nooks and crannies for muggers,” the Parks Department official advised. “And keep ledges to a minimum. Avoid anything that would encourage people to sleep or camp out.”

Max had worked to make the structure bright and airy — an outhouse with plumbing. He drew a skylight, aware that its protective cage would cast a medieval shadow; and he planned a row of windows just below the roofline that would also be marred by bars; but the extra light would keep the space open anyway. The stalls were generous, thanks to the new regulations for the benefit of the handicapped. Max also insisted that the urinals have barriers between them for privacy. Max hated public bathrooms that forced unnecessary intimacy. He remembered the shame of modest and insecure adolescence when obliged to go in public.

The city liked his design and built them. Unfortunately, both were kept locked to bar drug dealers and the homeless. If you wanted to use them you had to hunt down a ranger. Max had visited the park twice and not seen one. He wondered if anyone besides the work crews had ever used the facilities. By his second visit, the exteriors of his bathrooms were covered by a spider’s web of graffiti written in black paint. One window had been smashed somehow, despite its inaccessible height and bars.

“Frank Lloyd Wright it ain’t,” Jeff had said about the finished product. He was bitter because the city didn’t contract for more. “They think your bathrooms are too elaborate. I said: ‘What? You don’t care for the bidets?’ ”

Max didn’t laugh at the memory of Jeff’s joke. He saw Jeff’s severed head instead and felt pity for him. Jeff whined and itched and complained about everything in his life, but he had loved the world, and believed that every day held the promise of his redemption. Even if he did see redemption in the form of a long-term contract from Nutty Nick stores.

Could I say that at his funeral? Max wondered. He was lost in Pittsburgh, driving through an unfamiliar suburb past the campus. There was a youthful air to the neighborhood. He stopped at an intersection next to a pair of college-age kids. They came up to his car right away, before he had begun to lower his window, as if they knew he needed directions.

“Hey, what’s up?” asked the one who was blond and thick. His muscles had the shape of a bodybuilder’s. His friend was small and skinny and dark. The blond’s tone was hostile and challenging.

“It’s rented,” the skinny one said, nodding at Max’s car.

Max asked how to get back to the city proper. He wanted to find the International House of Pancakes where he used to have marijuana-inspired orgies of pancake consumption in the pre-dawn hours, at the end of his day, the beginning of it for the resentful workers.

“You want directions?” the blond said and laughed with contempt.

Max confessed his real goal to the pair.

“You looking for pancakes!” the skinny one cracked up. He seemed to have an accent, Caribbean maybe.

Who were they? They were like a punch line he hadn’t understood. “You guys cops, or something?” Max asked. They had the police’s arrogant curiosity.

“Shit,” the blond said and smiled.

“Don’t joke around, man,” the skinny one said, not smiling. He turned away. “Come on,” he called and walked off.

The blond put his elbows on the door of Max’s car and leaned in. He looked at the backseat as if searching for something. Maybe he’s a thief, Max thought, excited. He watched the blond carefully, ready to hit the gas and spin him off. “Just take this right and go. You’ll hit the city in a mile. I don’t know about your pancakes…”

“Thanks. I can find it.”

“You want smoke, man? That what you really want?”

So that was the punch line. Max smiled at the blond. The skinny one was across the street now. Another car pulled up beside him. Skinny leaned on its window. The driver handed him an envelope and he produced something from his own pocket. Max had come to the local pusher.

“Only thing I feel like taking is acid,” Max said in a friendly tone to this monster of modern America, the villain of almost every drama on television, the Nazi for today’s screenwriters.

“I got lysergic diethylamide.” The blond said the scientific words rapidly, proud of his familiarity with them. “Hey, I’m a fucking Sears. Cost you fifty.”

“Fifty!” Max would never become accustomed to the shock of inflation.

“You want one?” The blond looked over toward Skinny and made a gesture.

“Forget it,” Max mumbled. He had been kidding.

The blond hadn’t heard. He was distracted, answering a hand signal from Skinny with his own cryptic gesture. He talked to Max sideways, casually: “I’ll sell you one for thirtyfive. Okay? A sample. A fucking loss-leader.”

Max handed over the money and was given a tiny white pill, certainly too small to be potent, maybe too small to have any effect. He assumed he had been taken, but he drove off without a complaint in the direction the blond had suggested.

That advice proved to be correct, anyway. He found the International House of Pancakes where it used to be. It had been redone, although probably only in lieu of a repainting, since the design had the same dull reds and browns and standard shapes. He liked that, however. Max believed serviceable places should look serviceable.