Steve Katz - Kissssss - A Miscellany

In size, my office is not so impressive, a modest room on the forty-third floor in suite 4343. Several small businesses have taken rooms in this suite, and we pool our resources to pay Hilda, the receptionist, who sits at the desk in the entry to take messages and greet clients. She hardly looks up from her book, Jude the Obscure , which she has been reading for more than a year; not even when I tell her that I am expecting the president. Of course, I am also anticipating a trip to D.C., or to Dallas, if it turns out to be necessary. Maybe in those cities this war makes sense.

Even in this suite of offices, I am not a big player, not like Duncan & Weist in rooms twelve to sixteen, who are hanging on now in commodities and junk bonds. My small office has its desk, a couple of chairs, a leather couch. It has framed prints from the museum shop at street level across the way. I am a member of that museum, a member for life. Many of its other members are dead. Death is a member of that museum. When I was an artist, I expected my own works to be on display there one day. I can't say I ever got to do anything I can call my own work. At least the money I have, what's left of it, is my own. I was happy to discover the nature of money. It's not currency. Art is currency, and some of the artists use it to pay the bills. Money, on the other hand, is a virus, variable in its effects, that spreads through the cables, telephone, optical, and now, sometimes, wireless.

I trap the virus on my flat-screens, watch it march across the plasma that covers one wall of the office. I have parameters set up to catch the potential of the movement, or to let it flow according to my interests. Calls come in on seventeen telephones, and some of them I answer. In my baskets the cell phones ring incessantly. Various configurations and graphs display — pie charts, flow charts, bar charts, elliptical projections, the calculus of need, the topology of the apparent, fisting into the irrational. I've got open pockets for the virus. That's moolah, Do-Re-Mi; that's bucks. Wisdom is not to grab too much. Too much can be fatal. Just enough is a state of equilibrium. I set a goal — twice the mortgage and maintenance payment on my loft each day. Elegant is when I arrive at that amount at my first yawn, at the moment I am about to pack it in. Sometimes I don't quite get there, or am ready to leave when the day is in the red. That's expected. For the last ten years, at least, the monthly balance has always been in my favor. Even when the dot-com bubble burst, the virus and myself remained compatible. Goodbye art, hello money hello death.

As often happens, on certain days when everything seems to slide right into place, I reach my quota early, and am ready to leave long before the work day ends. I'm just putting my pencils back into their trays, so to speak, and about to straighten my lapels one last time, when Hilda buzzes my phone, tells me the president has arrived. Some of his Secret Service brutes are cute, she tells me. I had almost forgotten about this meeting, and am relieved that I don't have to plan a trip to Texas or D.C.

“Make them comfortable in the conference room,” I tell her, “and I'll be there in just a moment.”

It's flattering that in this time of war, economic turmoil, protests on the street, the president can spare a few moments for our meeting. I watch him through the glass wall of the conference room, drinking Cherry Coke from a can. He is a cute president. He circumambulates the table. One of his people empties the Cherry Coke into a paper cup, and he carries that with him. We must love him for his John Wayne swaggerette, as he strains to make us think he's a real Texas cowboy and not the mediocre Yale punk we know him for. It's hard to make out just where the evil resides. He has help, of course, from the vice one, Cheney, smirking over his various oil fortunes, busy making more; and the Goebbels of the bunch, Rumsfeld, small and self-important; and John Ashcroft, the poor, bloated fundamentalist.

Hilda winks at me as I go by. She sits on the lap of one of the Secret Service men, reading to him some good passages from Jude The Obscure . I submit to the frisking before I enter the room. One of the brutes calls another over to feel the fabric of my double-breasted jacket. Weighted silk. They slap me on the butt, and I enter the room with the president. He actually stands up again to shake my hand, and before our meeting begins, asks if I want a Cherry Coke. He tells me how much he favors Cherry Coke, now that he no longer takes a drink. Nothing cherry, I say, and we both laugh before getting down to serious business.

I step off the elevator, into what is usually the comfort and solace of my own space, but this evening I feel something different. For one thing, Ilyana's coat is still on the rack. She almost always leaves on Monday mornings, to spend a few days at her own apartment, often ’til the next weekend. I call her name, get no response. Andrew is not on his perch, hasn't even nibbled on the loquats I placed in his cage, isn't playing hide-and-seek with me in one of his usual hideaways. I hear some rustling in the bedroom, which is an enclosed platform, cantilevered off one bearing wall, reached by a curved stairway. I listen at the foot of those stairs to the bedclothes whipping around up there.

I remove my suede Vans, and tiptoe up the stairs, pausing on each step to listen for what I fear is going on in the darkened bedroom. Carefully, carefully I move. I pick up a jar of Dilly Beans someone opened and carried halfway up to the bedroom. There comes an ecstatic grunt, then an unmistakable cry of pleasure. This is not good. At last I stand in the doorway of my bedroom, and when my eyes adjust to the darkness I find my worst fears are realized. That vile parrot is in bed with Ilyana. A jar of pickled okra sits open on the nightstand. I put down the Dilly Beans.

Andrew is of the African Grey species, his accursed breed famous for its infinite capacity for mimicry.

The wretched bird peeks out from under the covers, and rips at the comforter with his beak. Goosedown erupts into the air that had been so corrupted this morning by crackers. Ilyana opens her eyes, sees me, and sits up suddenly, pulling my sheets over her breasts.

“It's not what you think,” she says.

“I never thought I could do it, Andrew, but when there's a challenge I face up to it. That's my M.O. I was perched, you know, because as a parrot I do perch, and I was saying to myself, Andrew, you good for nothing parrot guy, what the hell are you doing with your life. Maybe it's the time to lay something on the line. Maybe it's time to do your own thing . So I went for it, just like that. And you know what? I can do it. Yeah. I'm up to it. I'm a goddamned helicopter of free love, Andrew.”

The fucking parrot says he's a fucking helicopter.

Ilyana cowers, as if she would have me believe she is afraid of what I might do. Each time she moves, more goosedown squirts into the air. What can I do? Kofi Annan mildly, diplomatically scolds us for our war. Putin pontificates. Little bitty Rumsfeld claims the Iraqis aren't fighting fair. Mike Tyson tattoos his face. Everything we do turns Saddam the Beast into Saddam the Martyr. Ry Cooder has been prohibited from returning to Cuba to get the music. China strengthens out of bounds. Which way Albania? Do we fight to make Iraq safe for bin Laden? My mind is excited but my heart is tired. Do I love her any less for finding her in bed with my bird?

“It's still not what you think,” she repeats.

“Not what you think, grawk .”

“Then what is it?”

“A dance piece I'm working on, to go with those poems.”

“What dance piece? What is it about?” I recoil from the sarcasm in my own voice. “How to avoid AIDS by sleeping with anything from the order of Psittaciformes?”