Christopher Hacker - The Morels

Your business?

I’m looking for a girl. He describes Cynthia, but it’s clear she isn’t here — clear, too, that this place it not what she had supposed. There are no vagrants here, no Cynthias. Everyone here is, in spite of some costumes, normal, adult. It is a place of commerce — a messenger handing over a package, someone signing for it, a man in a suit and bow tie sorting through artwork on a large table. Business as usual, even though their fearless leader lies recuperating in a hospital from a bullet in the ass.

What’s so special about this place? Nothing, as far as he can tell. Cynthia will be disappointed when she finds it — if she hasn’t found it already — just to be turned away by a man in a pink beehive wig.

He leaves and spends the rest of the day searching the meadows of the city. This seems to be where all the young people congregate when the weather is nice. In Union Square Park, Madison Square Park, Tompkins Square Park. He spends an entire day getting lost along the cloistered footpaths of Central Park. He buys a hot dog from a vending cart, and then another, then an ice-cream sandwich. He sits down in an enormous grassy field, among a ring of young people. Several have musical instruments. He is welcomed in warmly and — after being encouraged several times — joins in the singing, even though he doesn’t know the words or the tune, and eventually finds himself beckoning with the others for passing strangers to join them, making room, expanding the circle.

This was the day Robert Kennedy was killed.

It grew dark, and the circle broke up. He left the park and found his way back to the room he was renting. It was time to move on. Cynthia was gone, subsumed into the great anonymous swirl.

He would occasionally wake, panic-stricken that Dolores had killed herself and still, half dreaming, imagine that Benji was calling to give him the news. He would grope for the phone in the dark and be woken by the sound of the dial tone droning in his ear. He’d hang up and go back to sleep, and by morning the dread would have passed. No news was good news, he figured. They were all getting along fine without him, he was sure. He had certainly left them all enough money to, anyway.

So however impossible it might have been to utter the word no and dissolve his family, it was remarkable just how easy it had been for him to forget about them entirely. That he had left them forever never to see them again was already, in his mind, a fact. In these first weeks of his arrival in the city he thought about one or another of them only in the context of how distant, how unreal, they seemed to be. He could conjure his wife’s face only vaguely and Benji’s not at all. The most vivid was Sarah’s, but sometimes he caught himself confusing her face with Cynthia’s.

He himself hardly remembered who he was anymore. Who had he been all these years? And who was he now?

It was too soon to know.

The death of Robert Kennedy turns out to be an occasion of national teeth gnashing and breast-beating; it’s an event for which he himself has no particular feeling. The only politician he ever liked was Barry Goldwater, but this was only because Goldwater talked sensibly about taxes and government spending. The Kennedys are a phenomenon he doesn’t get. What that family of New England socialites had to do with poor black people in the south he just could not figure out.

He is alone in this, he can see. Everywhere he goes the conversation is about the assassination — how nothing will ever be the same, how they are living in dangerous times now, how this will define the era. And coinciding as it does with an occasion of personal upheaval, Doc begins to hear the disembodied phrases of national mourning uttered by people — at a newsstand, in an elevator, on a bus — as advice. Start from scratch. Do what needs to be done. Move on.

He starts seeing a sculptor who rents an old carriage house on Grand Street. The neighborhood — if it can really be called that — south of Houston Street, had been a major base for manufacturing at the end of the last century and the beginning of this one, but most of the businesses moved away, the rest forced out through the threat of eminent domain. Early in the sixties, many of the buildings had been slated for demolition to clear the way for an eight-lane expressway that would connect the Manhattan and Williamsburg Bridges with the Holland Tunnel. Apartments could be gotten cheaply, and artists took advantage of these raw spaces — some former printing houses, others former textile factories, grand old buildings with cast-iron façades, expansive views, and enormous windows — expecting that when the city got its act together, they’d all be kicked out.

In fact, this never happened. The expressway plan fell apart due to a change in political winds, and by the time Doc arrives, it has become a thriving creative hub. It’s not zoned to be lived in, but most landlords look the other way. Neither is it a neighborhood convenient for its residents. There are no groceries, few restaurants — the delis keep bankers’ hours. The nearest Laundromat is on Sullivan Street, many blocks away. The buildings are not equipped for tenants — bathrooms are multistall affairs in the hallway, without showers, no kitchens, no bedrooms or closets or proper ventilation. When he stays over — which is most nights — he is reduced to sponge bathing in the large slop sink in her studio.

The woman claims to be a lesbian, but this does not stop them from sleeping together. So far as he can tell, lesbian just means that she enjoys being pleasured orally — fine by him — and occasionally catcalls women on the street. She also claims to be an anarchist. They initially bonded over their mutual indifference to Robert Kennedy’s death. She likes to host parties, which he pays for. The parties last all night and into the next morning, and if one falls on a Friday, it lasts the entire weekend. He is free to sleep with whoever is willing, though he is often at odds with his desire to follow through with this invitation and his desire to get high, which precludes his doing anything sexually productive.

It’s at one of these parties that Doc meets the lesbian’s landlord, a tall man in his fifties who she says used to be an actor. Doc doesn’t recognize him, but the man does use old-fashioned turns of phrase, words enunciated to the verge of British. Doc tells the man that he’s interested in buying the carriage house. A month later, Doc finds himself in possession of the deed to the property and shockingly less money in his new bank account. He buys a sledgehammer and begins knocking down walls.

Don’t I get a say, his lesbian asks.

If you don’t like it, talk to your landlord!

He tries hiring an architect to build a kitchen and proper bathrooms, but he is told it’s against zoning law — so he goes out on his own. He finds a plumber and a general contractor. He pays them in cash.

The lesbian says he’s crazy. Who’s going to buy a luxury condo in this neighborhood?

The contractors are young toughs from Brooklyn who spend as much time working as they do trying to catch a glimpse of the lesbian, who tantalizes them all by walking around topless. They take long lunch breaks, openly indulging in marijuana and beer. Sometimes Doc joins them. Other times he finds this irritating and yells at them to get out. I’m not paying you to sit around and get high!

The place, raw enough before, takes on a bombed-out look now. The lesbian remains very tolerant of the state of affairs — the haze of plaster dust and the perpetual whine of the circular saw biting into a two-by-four — in part because she is no longer paying rent. Also, perhaps, she is beginning to allow herself to be taken in by Doc’s vision of what the place can become.