Steve Katz: Kissssss: A Miscellany

The light was red. At the bottom of the hill an ’71 Fairlane pulled up next to a Honda Civic. Rick, the kid driving the Fairlane, and his friend, Nolly, riding shotgun, both looked to their right at the driver of the Civic. It was Eighth Street, so it was one-way. Rick pointed at the dude, who had long blonde hair slicked back, narrow wire-rimmed glasses, and a black baseball cap worn backwards. “Pink that one.”

“About time,” said Timarie, one of the girls in the back seat. “Something.” She pressed the Indiglo button on her watch. “If you hurry we can still make the movie.”

“I'm like raging so much in here,” said Willie, the other girl. “I want to see Sharon Stone do what's-his-name. Or maybe it was vice versa. Candy said it. I don't care.” She leaned over the front seat and looked at Rick, “I just need to see it… ”

“You mean Richard Gere?”

“No. I don't think so.”

“Alec Baldwin? Tom Hanks?”

“No. Not that… ”

“Michael Keaton? John Travolta.”

“Don't be stupid, and it's not even Woody Allen, either. And Denzel Washington, not.”

Everyone laughed.

Nolly rolled down the shotgun window and signaled the dude in the Honda, as if to ask directions. The dude rolled his window down.

“Hurry up, Snakefoot, the light's gonna change,” said Rick.

“So how do you get to Wall Street from here, mister man?” said Nolly as he lifted his Glock and squeezed off three into the dude's face.

“Don't call me Snakefoot again,” he said as they turned the corner and drove east. “My name is Nolly.”

“What kind of a name is Nolly?”

“Who would want to steal an ’71 Fairlane?” asked Harriet, as she looked at every car in the parking lot of the Roxxy Art Theater.

Gloria shrugged. “People don't even know what they're stealing any more. It's a different world.”

“I should call the police, I guess. I never had my car stolen before. I hate to go through all that. Police and questions and forms to fill out.”

“I don't mind talking to the police,” said Gloria. “I'll call them for you.” In fact, Gloria liked talking to the police. She watched a lot of television. Reruns of Hill Street Blues , especially, and NYPD Blue , and Law & Order , her faves. Talking to the police made her feel like she was practically on television. She almost wished it had been her own car stolen, except she didn't own a car.

Harriet leaned against the corner of the theater building with her pinky in her nose, and stared blankly into the parking lot. They had just seen Farewell My Concubine , an epic movie, like an old Cecil B. DeMille spectacular. China had swept her away in the movie, even though the brutal training of the young boys in the first part had made her very uncomfortable. She definitely wanted to go to China, maybe even learn a little conversational Chinese first. In the parking lot she could see a BMW, a new Mazda, a Lexus, an Infiniti, a Cadillac, Volvos. Why did they pick on her ancient Fairlane? It would make her sad to lose that car. It was the last of her connection with her ex-husband's family. He had signed the car over to her a year before the divorce. The divorce was bitter, and had blindsided her, because neither herself nor any of her friends would have expected Gil to dump her in that way, just not show up one night for dinner, and before she knew it, before she even took his peejays off his pillow, he's living with a young kid, a boy, downtown in a loft in Lodo. It was a month before he even left a message. She never even got his address ’til a year later. She never suspected he had these tendencies. He was so moralistic in general, so judgmental about other people's lives. Her AIDS test at least was negative, thank God. He said specifically that she could keep the car, even though it was already in her name. It was the car his grandmother had given him. Blow it up, was what she thought at first, shoot him down with his little fairy friend outside their apartment. But she didn't. It had only 57,000 miles on it, a real old lady's car. She felt at home in it.

“It's going to take them at least an hour to get here,” Gloria said when she came back. “It's so warm. Oodles of crime everywhere.”

Harriet suddenly was laughing, and Gloria put a hand on her shoulder to comfort her, taking the laughter for a case of nerves. In fact, Harriet was shaking a little from the stress of the theft and the memories. “Everything's gonna work out,” Gloria told her.

“I lost my virginity in that car was what I was thinking. Gil fucked me my first time in the passenger seat. I got him to do it; I mean, of course I wanted to lose that. I liked the idea of losing it in Grandma's brand new car. Of course Gil was really fussy. He didn't want to get it dirty. He put down his sweater, and his shirt under my butt, first; and there I went. So I always had the idea that my virginity was still in the car, and now it's been stolen, my virginity lost and then stolen. I think whoever stole it will have some bad luck.”

“I liked it and I didn't like it,” said Michael.

This was the first time he and Sarah had gone to a movie together. They had started dating three weeks before, when Reggie introduced them in the computer class. Reggie was the handsome nerd who taught the class. He couldn't have been more than twenty-two himself, recently graduated, still wearing his baseball cap backwards. Reggie was unnerved by the obvious attraction Sarah, who must have been in her thirties, was showing him, licking her lips when he leaned over her station to explain macros. You could taste the relief the young man felt when he introduced Sarah to Michael, and saw some interest boot up. He turned away to leave them to test their compatibility. So it was out of a sense of retreat, second best, that Sarah agreed to go out with Michael, an acknowledgement that she could no longer easily offer herself where she willed as a flower to be plucked.

Both of them had just come off difficult separations. Michael's last squeeze terminated when his former, Susan, took a Peace Corps contract to work as a nurse in Sri Lanka. He suspected she'd signed the contract in order to get away from him, not a difficult conclusion. Michael knew he had been an oppressive bastard with her, dominating her life while she went through nursing school. He had ten years on her when they first got together, she being only seventeen at the time. He was willing to be the father she never had, and at a certain point after she got out of nurse's training, even he realized, basta —she had had enough — but he didn't know how to back off. For that reason he had resolved with Sarah not to seem too opinionated or overbearing.

For her part, Sarah had dumped Otis on a bet with her girlfriend, Nicole, who dared her to do it. Codependent was the catchword, Nicole saying she was afraid to give up the comfort of his sponging off her. It was a relief finally to be done with it, and as a payoff Nicole had taken her to a Michael Bolton concert, who she thought was like Fabio with emotions and a voice. For both of them, Bolton was the ideal man: strong, emotional, though they didn't know that much about him, except that he had daughters, and that he really cared about them, lucky girls.

Neither Michael nor Sarah knew if they wanted to be in a relationship again, and that gave them what they felt was a certain amount of freedom to be loose with each other. He certainly didn't want a young woman again, delicious as youth could appear. Sarah, too, was being cautious. She surely didn't want another Otis in her life. She knew that attraction and pain were toggled on the same switch. That was why her response to Michael's comment about the movie was inadvertently hostile.