The Poet : Chapters 8 & 9

 

EIGHT

 

You look like shit,” Jill said, the minute I stepped into the library. She went back to cleaning up whatever mess had been made from another in a long line of structural calamities befalling our old building. Today, with the wet vac front and center, it looked like flood waters from the public restroom.

I felt like shit. I had a headache and my asshole felt like someone had stuck a flame thrower up it. My cock hurt from Larissa playing tug of war. I felt terrible for the way we’d left things. I’d been hungover and hung-up on Carolina. I was embarrassed by what I’d done with Millicent and what I’d left in their shitter. Larissa didn’t deserve any of that.

“She’s late,” Hazel said, from her seat at the reference desk, catching me looking conspicuously around the library. By some miracle Willy Ableman was actually sitting next to her. And he was awake. He was kicked back with his hands behind his head; a gray, stained hoodie and his yellowing caterpillar moustache to boot. No one looked more relaxed than Willy. How could you not with the amount of time he took off. I was sure he’d gotten high before he came in. That or it was alimony day, and his gilded ex-wife had to pony up.

“Hazel, I thought you and I talked about your overuse of pronouns,” I said. I was not in the mood.

“Fine…then I meant your little Mexican honey.” That got a snicker from Willy.

“If you’re referring to Lena, her family is from Peru. Buy a globe.”

I started for the office. “And you’re late too,” Hazel shouted. “And late supervisors set bad examples to staff.” I turned and Willy nodded at me.

            “My ISIS meeting ran late,” I said. “But in the future, I’ll try to set a better example for you infidels.”

            Willy leaned in and whispered something to her. The fucking conspirators. If I was going down it wasn’t going to be at the hands of those two assholes. I went into the office. If I was lucky no more poems had been printed. Thankfully Sheldon hadn’t arrived. I went to my Gmail just to make sure my bloodshot eyes hadn’t been deceiving me at Larissa’s. There was Carolina’s email along with a brand new one. It had one line, umm…maybe not?

            Maybe not? Maybe not should’ve been the title of my autobiography.

“Rand.” A voice behind my back. Thick. Dull. Russian.

            “Oleg,” I said. By way of simply not giving a fuck about him. What in the hell did she mean, umm...maybe not? I saw that Carolina was online on her Gmail, so that’s exactly what I wrote her in a chat. Que pasa this…maybe not?

            Rand,” Oleg said again. “I must share this information.”

            “State secrets again?”

            Oleg shook his head. He was our building’s security guard; a short stocky Cossack with a bowl-cut of red hair that matched his equally red face and two remaining red teeth. Back in Moscow he was the head of the secret police, or so he said. But here in the good ol’ U.S. of A, Oleg worked security at a low-risk branch of the public library. He treated the little Chinese kids who came in here like gulag prisoners. I had to stop him from once trying to gaffle a seventy-year-old epileptic who went into shock. Oleg couldn’t drive or sign-in to his time clock properly. We fielded dozens of complaints from scared parents and battered vagrants who wanted only to use our bathroom. On lunches he spent the hour shouting in Russian on his cell phone, all the while eating some pulpy kind of oniony goulash for lunch. Oleg raised Hazel’s ire to new and unseen levels by leaving shit streaks in the toilet. That was the only thing I truly liked about him.

“Oleg I’m too hungover for you today,” I said. I rubbed my aching member. Carolina was in the midst of writing me back.

            “Rand, I go on eBay,” Oleg said. When he wasn’t terrorizing children or studying for his driver’s test, Oleg lived his life on eBay. “I buy movies. Russian movies.”

            “You got to be careful with that in these times,” I said. “They’re monitoring us. You buy one too many Kremlin gems and they’ll deport you back to Siberia, and you’ll be pounding rocks before you know it.”

“I buy no Kremlin. I buy secret movies. Bootlegs.”

I’m having second thoughts, Carolina finally wrote.

About a drink? I wrote. Then I waited.

“Rand,” Oleg said. Of all the women who couldn’t remember my name this man had it practically tattooed on his tongue.

“Bootlegs are a gateway drug, Oleg,” I said. Then I rubbed my crotch again because my dick really was killing me. I’d have to check that shit out in the bathroom if Scott hadn’t barricaded himself in there by now. Scott, shit, I still hadn’t talked to him about that Post-it note art. “You keep bootlegging it’ll lead to other things. One day you’ll kill some old pawn broker for her money and....” Oleg stood there with a clueless stare. I turned back to my PC.

You know what a drink means between the two of us, Carolina wrote.

It used to mean fun, I wrote.

I wouldn’t call that time at Rooney’s fun.

It was good enough to write a novel about.

“I buy fifty movies,” Oleg said.

“When does an intellectually diverse guy like you find the time to watch that many movies and still whip up a cure for cancer?” I said. “I’m not half a busy as you and I can’t even find the time to take a proper shit in some poet’s apartment.”

“I bid against man in Sheepshead Bay. I put in bid. He put in bid. I don’t make another bid, so man thinks he has movies. But what happens?”

“Anastasia reappears and, in the end, it was all Rasputin’s fault?” I said.

“No. I wait until last minute. Then Oleg swoops in and buy fifty Russian movies.” He laughed. Oleg had a loud, throaty, coughing laugh that sounded as if he had a piece of dumpling wedged down his throat. Hazel was most likely at her desk twitching from the sound, while Willy checked out her tits and figured out new ways to not come to work once the sick time ran out. “Fifty movies. Man in Sheepshead Bay have no clue what hit him.”

“I’m sure he was crying into his vodka,” I said. I wanted the guy out of the office. The room wasn’t big enough for me, Carolina on chat, and this inbred nephew of Boris Yeltsin. Then Larissa’s green Gmail light came on and I went incognito.

Did you log-off on me, Rand? Carolina wrote

Hiding from someone, I wrote

Typical

So why can’t we meet?

I just told you, she wrote.

You sure it’s not because of your rock star BF, I wrote. You thought I didn’t notice Godfrey Whitt siting at your table.

You refused to shake his hand, Rand. And gee, I guess maybe I don’t want to see you because I don’t feel like being harassed for writing a book, Carolina wrote. A book I had every right to…um…write.

You’re the one who initially wanted to get together, I wrote.

“There was preview on movie,” Oleg said.

“Oh Christ,” I said. “We’re going to keep doing this?”

There was a calamity of noise from the library; a rustling of what sounded like old newspapers and plastic. Then yelling. Jill and Sheldon. Her gruff commands. His lisping, whiney sing-songy tenor. The man sounded like a big, gay ostrich, but Sheldon had been married for twenty years. He had one semi-literate college-aged son and a daughter who flew the coup with the ink still wet on her diploma. There was more shouting. There was always noise at this place. You wouldn’t think the library was a refuge for quiet or serious study with the racket. It wasn’t. Those days of the library ended with the dawn of the internet era; silence’s death knell sounded with the era of chat rooms, online gaming, shitty ringtones and the smartphone.

“I just need them for some thiiiings,” Sheldon said, as he stormed into the office. He had about four huge fast-food bags with him. Sheldon, forever clad in khakis that were flooded, a plaid shirt, and one of those square, knit ties from the 1980s, proved that attaining higher education made one none the wiser when making wise food and clothing choices. I swear the man’s glasses were always crooked and the nest of wild curls on the top of his head gave him a mad genius look, even though Sheldon was a notorious idiot, known system-wide, for his inane questions at meetings that did nothing but suck up people’s time and their will to live. Unions existed for people like Sheldon.

“What things?” Jill said. “What things require fast food bags for storage?”

“Um.” Sheldon looked around the room for something, anything. “Good morning, Rand. Um…Oleg.”

“Top o’the morning Mayor McCheese,” I said. Oleg just looked at his watch. He was a notorious time keeper and had no qualms about reporting any of us late. I feared for what would happen to Lena when/if she arrived. There was still nothing from Carolina.

Jill crossed her arms. “You still haven’t given me an answer.”

Sheldon sighed. “I don’t know. Just stuuuuff.”

“You work in a library! You have access to boxes galore!”

He put the fast-food bags on his desk and stood there with his hands on his hips. “Rand, did you skip a management training meeting last week?”

“Would you consider simply not going as skipping something?” I said.

“Uh…” Sheldon thought for a good while. “I think so, yes.”

“Agree to disagree on that one, my man.”

It was a lapse in judgement, Carolina wrote

Kid, I got years I can make that excuse for, I wrote. Come on, just one drink.

“There is new Rocky movie coming out,” Oleg said to me.

“My rod is hard with anticipation,” I told him. Then I rubbed my aching crotch again.

“Rocky is fighting blond Russian.”

“Yeah, that was called Rocky IV, dude.”

“That meeting was required,” Sheldon said. “HR emailed me and said you missed the other two as well.”

“I’ll catch them on YouTube,” I said. “I’ll figure out how to stream them on Netflix. Maybe someone from HR could do a TED talk.”

Sheldon put the fast-food bags on the floor. “Do not do that,” Jill shouted. “I told you I’m not dealing with ants again.”

Sheldon picked up the bags as commanded. With the way Jill treated him you’d never be able to tell he technically ran this joint. At the words ants you could hear the loud horse clopping of Hazel’s boots, as she made her way toward the office. “I’m not cleaning up ants again,” she shouted, before she was even in my doorway. Then there she was. That helmet of black hair and another low-cut black shirt with the gleaming symbol of Italy resting between her tits. If you looked hard enough you could see where Willy’s eyes had burned two rosy imprints into her cleavage.

“I don’t understand why there were even ants,” Sheldon said. “It’s November.”

“It’s sixty-five degrees out, you moron,” Jill said. “Of course, there’s ants.”

“I heard it’s going to get colder,” Hazel said.

“Is no Rocky IV,” Oleg said to me. “Is new Rocky movie.”

I turned to the guy. He looked like a lump of spicy shit in a black rent-a-cop outfit. “Look, I don’t know what kind of bootlegs you’re buying, or how new, but Rocky Balboa fought a big Russian dude in Rocky IV, which came out in the year of our lord, 1985, right smack dab in the middle of my miserable, obese childhood.”

I’ll do coffee, Carolina finally wrote.

Coffee is for Republicans, I wrote. Coffee is too strong for Republicans.

No deal.

I need to talk to you about something anyway. Radio Silence again.

“All the same, Rand,” Sheldon said. He put the bags back on the floor. “HR wants to me to email them back a specific reason why you missed those meetings.”

“Tell them I’m a forty-two-year-old, functioning alcoholic” I said, “and didn’t want to spend one of my few remaining healthy mornings and early afternoons play acting out bullshit scenarios about five-dollar fines with a bunch of caffeine-hopped, philistine dipshits that I’m forced to refer to as my colleagues…or tell them that I had to stay at my job and cover the reference desk for a stoned, union-protected sexagenarian.”

“You play act?” Hazel said. “At meetings?”

“That’s what I mumbled to myself the last time I wrote out my student loan check,” I said.

“Pick those bags up,” Jill said to Sheldon.

“But…” he whined.

“Is no Rocky IV,” Oleg said to me. The angry, argumentative Russian was seeping out of him. “Is new Rocky movie.”

“I couldn’t give a crap less,” I said. An email showed up. I checked my inbox while waiting on Carolina to respond. The message was from Larissa.

So…Millicent may never want to speak to you again, Rand Wyndham. But I want to see you. Sorry for the awkwardness this morning. I didn’t mean to be curt or whatever. But…you know. I wanted to ask you if you wanted to do this reading with me, but I heard you hate doing them. And Gigi texted me and told me why it’s important you get in touch with Carolina. Getting Godfrey Whitt could really help Killian out. At least for a while. I thought there was something good and decent about you, despite what you say and what you left in my bathroom. Anyway, I’ll email you about the reading and you can decide. Or you can text me. Do you even have a phone? Also, we’re totally not courting, despite what Fidel says. Off to yoga.

L

“You’re always going on about your student loan people, Rand,” Hazel said. “Like you’re the only one with debt.”

“Leave him alone,” Jill said. “Go out there and do some work.” That caused Hazel to storm out of the office complaining to herself in her pigeon Italian. Jill turned to me. “That women and the Guido she’s married to got like a hundred thousand dollars stashed away, so I don’t know who she’s talking to. By the way Willy is sleeping at the desk again.”

Sheldon sighed. “Rand, I can’t tell them that you didn’t want to play act with philistines.”

“Then tell them I had the shits.”

“For all three meetings?”

What could you possibly need to talk to me about? Carolina wrote.

I need a favor, I wrote.

I’m not giving you money.

I don’t need your money. I need your talent.

“Well, I don’t know what to tell them,” Sheldon said. He fondled his fast-food bags for good measure.

 “Throw those goddamned bags away,” Jill said.

“But…” Sheldon started. Then he picked the bags up. Jill grabbed them out of his hands, crumpled them, and left the office with the withered bags looking like origami accordions.

“Wake up, you moron!” she shouted at Willy.

“I tell you is new Rocky movie,” Oleg said, angrily.

“Jesus Christ.” I turned away from the PC. I couldn’t believe that there I was having this conversation, these conversations actually, when, beer shits aside, I could’ve called in sick and spent the day potentially licking Larissa Haven-St. Claire’s tattooed body. “It’s Rocky IV. It’s Rocky versus Ivan fucking Drago. Apollo Creed dies. The movie is basically 90-minutes of Glasnost-bashing montages and Survivor songs.”

“Is new Rocky movie!” Oleg shouted. “Is new! Is new! Is new!” He started pounding on my desk like he was fucking Khrushchev.

“But I can’t write the HR department and tell them you had the…the…that you had bowel problems,” Sheldon said, practically whispering the word bowel.

My Talent? Carolina finally wrote. Now I’m intrigued.

She was as egomaniacal as every other artist on this planet. One drink and I’ll explain it all.

Okay, she wrote. Where?

Rooney’s, I wrote. Or rather the hipster abomination that was once Rooney’s.

No way, Carolina wrote.

Scene of the crime, baby, I wrote. Aren’t you at least curious?

No.

Yes, you are.

I guess I could say you were feeling just under-the-weather,” Sheldon said.

“The shits,” I said. “You can’t go wrong with the shits. Believe me I know.”

“I can’t write that.” Sheldon stood there with his finger on his mouth. He opened a desk drawer and stared inside. “Gee, I really wish that Jill hadn’t taken those bags from me.”

Okay, Carolina wrote. One drink. One drink ONLY. At Rooney’s.

And all will be revealed, I wrote.

Tomorrow Night. And then the little green light that signified Carolina’s online presence was gone. I went back to my inbox and started re-reading Larissa’s little note. I pictured her sitting in those black hot pants, thumbing away on her tablet. I’d probably do the reading.

“There is new Rambo movie too,” Oleg finally said to me.

It was going to be a liquid lunch for yours truly.

 

                                                             NINE

 

“By the way,” Sheldon said. “Have you spoken to Scott yet?”

“We’ve had one or two conversations in our lifetime,” I said. “To be truthful I didn’t find them very memorable. And I’m a people person, so read what you want to into that.” He held up the Post-it note with my chicken scratch drawing on it. “Oh, I’d forgotten all about that priceless gem.”

“Well, Scott hasn’t. He was mumbling something to himself about it in the stacks the other day. And then Willy started complaining about it too.” Sheldon looked at the drawing. “It really is uncanny.”

“Is spitting image,” Oleg added

“Yeah, I’m the next Ilya Repin.”

“I think I’ll tell HR that you had severe stomach pains,” Sheldon said. “Or maybe since you missed three meetings, I’ll tell them that you have a chronic condition.”

I got up from my seat to go and find Scott. “That’s cool,” I said, in the doorway. “Stomach pains could be anything. They could mean something severe. Maybe the branch could take up a proxy monetary collection for me, get the whole system involved. Alert the media. Do one of those 5ks or special walks for yours truly. Get a Kickstarter going to help with the medical bills. What I’m saying is I can work with stomach pains. They’re almost as good as the shits.”

“But you can’t miss another meeting,” Sheldon called to me.

“I’ll even spring for the doughnuts next time.”

Willy really did look like he was asleep at the Reference Desk. He wasn’t because every time the patron standing in front of him spoke, he responded with apathetic shrugs and I don’t know. He truly was a gift to the profession. It astounded me that he never won the annual librarian of the year award. Willy was one of those who needed to be taken out to pasture and shot. Or maybe just dropped on an island and hunted for sport. Instead, he was my beast of burden. And I didn’t even want to deal with my own lack of ambition.

I’d inherited Willy Abelman and his malaise upon my return to the library. Back then the man was so destroyed by his divorce he wouldn’t even speak, unless it was to Hazel. Willy mechanically did his work, and little else. He stared at walls and he smelt like weed. But at least back then he showed up for work. He reminded me of this kid Liam that I supervised; another sensitive soul devastated by divorce and the inability to reckon with the fact that people become tired of one another. Except Liam smelled like piss instead of pot. Back then staff complaints had forced me to sit the man down in my office and explain the company’s grooming and dress code to him. Having my own piss stains on pants, I hadn’t even read the thing myself. I determined I’d never belittle another human being or myself again. With Willy I chose simply to ignore him and his plight. I didn’t speak to him, not even to say good morning or ask him how he was doing. I went to work not a social club. I think my apathy sowed the seeds of Willy’s hatred for me. When he started breaking out of his funk, our mutual silence turned slowly into complete, abject animosity. It always amazed me how easy it was to hate.

“Could you at least pretend like you work here?” I said to Willy.

“Sure thing, boss,” he said. He lifted a pencil and set it back down. Hazel snorted. He closed his eyes again.

The library patron breathed through his nose and turned to me. “Can you at least help me?”

“I doubt it,” I said. “This here is a dead letter office.”

“Boy, I really heard Sheldon giving it to you about missing another meeting,” Willy said without opening his eyes. “Bowel problems? Ha!”

“Someone already took the alimony excuse.”

 “And what’s this about a new Rocky movie? You supervisors sure do the heavy lifting around here. What a brain trust.”

“Is this how you people run this place every day?” the patron asked.

Of course not,” I said. “We can’t be this well-oiled of a machine all the time.”

“I want to file a complaint.”

“How patriotic of you.”

“If Jill thinks she can talk to me like that I….” Hazel started. But I wasn’t having any of it.

“Look, do either of you dedicated public servants know where Scott is?” I scanned the library again. Still no Lena. Oleg was now pleading with some drunk to get off the ground. The old booze hound had knocked over one of Scott’s picture book displays and might’ve shit on the floor a bit. The room certainly stunk of it. Jill was standing there with her arms crossed shaking her head at the two of them. She still had those crumpled fast-food bags in her hands. Milquetoasts, she shouted. Milquetoasts! In the distance another ceiling tile was hanging from the roof as water slowly dripped from it. If only the American Library Association were here to document this new low.

“Why do you want to know where he is?” Hazel said. “Planning to put the final nail in the coffin?”

“I thought he could spend this lunch hour sitting for me while I did his portrait,” I said. Then I remembered my audience and the fast trigger to HR. “That drawing wasn’t Scott.”

“It suuuuuuuuuure looked like him,” Willy said, waking up from another nod-off, and casually handing the patron a customer service form. The patron left in disgust. Well, we had fifty other branch libraries one could go to. “I didn’t know you drew too.”

“In regards to doing what else?” I asked. Hazel’s face had turned red.

“Oh, you know how the library talks,” Willy said. He was a sly one. The man’s eyes were bloodshot, courtesy of spending his morning break burning one in his car to Credence. “I mean all I have to do is mention you and the word head-butt and…”

“I don’t think I want to tell you where Scott is,” Hazel broke in.

“I finally want to apologize to him,” I said.

“So, you admit what you did.”

“Sure. And then after that I’m going to go on TV and admit to the Black Dahlia and the Jack the Ripper murders. I might’ve even been involved with 9/11. Who knows?”

“It really looked like him” Willy said. “Skipping meetings and insulting employees. They’ll hire anyone to supervise here.”

“And don’t you ever joke about 9/11,” Hazel said.

“You’re lucky someone didn’t report you to HR,” Willy added. “What, with your reputation here.”

Hazel snorted a second time. “Cartooning that poor man, Rand? Really?”

“You’re a devout Catholic, Hazel,” I said. “Is there no redemption?”

“Don’t you mock my religion either.” She clutched the cleavage cornicello as if it were a crucifix. Willy gave her breasts the old side eye. “Jesus would never heat-butt anyone.”

“Put him on a rush hour bus packed with people shouting on their phones, and I bet he might.”

“You can be reported to HR if you insult someone’s religion,” Willy said.

            “Aren’t you old, dope-smoking hippies supposed to play fast and loose with the law?” I said.

            “I…”

            “Scott’s in the staff room,” Hazel said. I started walking away as she and Willy got into a silent, heated debate. It was well-known but never discussed that Hazel’s brother-in-law sold Willy his weed. It was an exchange that started in order to ease his cuckold pain. Still, she lifted her head and shouted, “Tell Scott that he needs to start using the public restrooms if he’s going to be so long in there.”

            “And I’m not coming to work tomorrow,” Willy added. “Dentist appointment…or something…I’ll figure it out later.”

            There was no one in the staff room, just one long empty table where I spent lonely lunch hours trying to read books as Oleg shouted into his phone and Hazel and Willy said racially and ethnically insensitive things under the guise that they were actually being socially conscious. Someone was in the bathroom, though. Scott. I could hear the noises that he made: his shuffling while on the commode, the slight grunts, the coughing; the courtesy flush. All of Scott’s subtle nuances; the things that drove Hazel crazy. Good thing she didn’t write poems.

On the table were two boxes of doughnuts and a bowl of fruit. The doughnuts had been there for almost two weeks. Hazel brought them in during a rare fit of goodwill and then got angry because we didn’t kiss her ass over them. I found my poems in a drawer at the reference desk the next day. The few times someone tried to throw the stale confections away Willy protested. Yesterday I watched him eat one that had pink frosting on it. The frosting had begun to recede due to age. Sadly, it didn’t kill him. I had no idea when the fruit arrived.

The door to the staff room opened suddenly. Lena. Tight stone-washed jeans with pre-made holes across the thighs and knees, like she’s been attacked by a tiger on the way to work. A red scoop-necked long sleeve t-shirt that clung to her beneath a leather coat. That long, black hair pulled back in a ponytail. That glistening, youthful brown skin she had; it was the kind that kept Republican politicians awake at night in holy terror. “Hey,” she said, and then went to the walk-in closet where the part-timers kept their stuff.

“Hey,” I said. I wanted it to sound casual, but my hey probably came out like the lovesick sigh of a teenaged boy. How long did mid-life crises last? Scott shuffled in the shitter and gave another flush.

“It’s like soooooooo nice outside,” Lena said, after she came out of the closet.

“It’s going to get colder,” I said.

“I’m late.” She crinkled her face. “Rand, what exactly is a fascist?”

“Any white male above the age of twelve.”

“Is that why I heard Willy call you that just now?”

“No,” I said. “He’s just an asshole.”

That elicited a smile and an eye roll. “Is Jill mad at me?”

“Not unless you’re a ceiling tile or a fast-food bag…but Hazel’s all hot and bothered and Oleg is ready to strike.”

“I had to talk to my teacher,” Lena said.

“Ah, college problems,” I said. “I remember them well. Anything good old Rand can help with?”

“How good are you with calculus?”

“About as good as I am with sobriety.”

“Ugh…why are you always drinking, Rand?”

“See, there’s this little thing called life,” I said. Lena smirked. “And while I don’t specifically remember asking for it, the nefarious behavior of my parents…

The staff room door flung open. Hazel. The buzzkiller of all buzzkillers. She pointed at Lena. “You were supposed to be here twenty minutes ago.”

She made a frightened face. “I know. I’m sorry.”

“Well, they need you out there,” she said. “Some drunk knocked over a book display.”

Lena smiled. “Was it you, Rand?”

“Not this time,” I said.

“Well, see you later.” Lena waved and left. There was a small pre-made rip right below her right ass cheek. Hazel would see that for sure, and it would be the last time Lena would ever wear those jeans here.

“And you,” Hazel said. “The library doesn’t pay you to flirt with women half your age.”

“We were discussing calculus,” I said. “And she’s more than half my age.” Hazel glared at me like I’d killed her dog for sport. Then she left too.

            I took a seat and waited. The toilet flushed again and then came the running water of the sink. Scott was a thorough hand washer. Despite her lunacy Hazel did have a small point about his bathroom habits. I’d once almost shit myself sitting in wait for the man to be done.

I started thinking about all of my failures and I got pissed off. I got up and grabbed both greasy doughnut boxes and threw them away. Fuck you Willy and your weeks old confection binge eating. Then the bathroom door opened and Scott came out; all two hundred and fifty pounds of cherubic, ruddy faced Scott. You could see burning red flesh in between the hairs of his coal-black goatee. The man wore sweater vests almost year-round. “Hi,” he said, his eyes cast away from mine as if he were some beaten underling.  “D…did you need the bathroom?”

            “No,” I said. “I was just sitting here thinking about that time Schopenhauer strangled his neighbor…and I got rid of those doughnuts.”

            “Oh. Willy said he was going to finish them off for lunch.”

            “Willy can eat pot seeds today.” I tried to look calm and pleasant. You needed kid gloves with Scott. And he hadn’t made a move from just outside the bathroom doorway. Plus, we’d both been burned by art. “It’ll actually be the healthier choice, if you can believe that.”

            Scott just stared at me, his eyes blinking.  He blinked a lot.

            “Anyway, man,” I said, trying to sound hip and with it. “Have a seat.”

            “Am I in trouble?” he asked. “Because I heard that crash outside and it wasn’t me.”

I laughed. I felt bad for doing so, but am I in trouble was the same reaction I always had when anyone told me to sit down with them. Of course, I usually was in trouble. “I just want to talk.”

            “Okay.” Scott cautiously moved away from the doorway and took the seat across from me. “What about?”

            “I was thinking about starting a librarian-only fight club,” I said. “What say you? I take on Willy and you get the winner?” Nothing. Just more blinking. “All right then I’ll cut to the chase…I’m sorry about that picture.” Again nothing.  More blinking from Scott. “And it wasn’t a picture of you.”

            “Oh,” he finally said.

            “See, I like to doodle while sitting at the reference desk.” Usually while Hazel bitched about minorities and liberals, but I left that part out. “It was really just a guy with a goatee and glasses.”

            “I have a goatee and glasses,” Scott said.

            “So do I…and millions of other sinister men have one too.”

            More blinking. “Yeah, I guess.”

            “Well, I just wanted you to know,” I said. Scott kept blinking at me. He was beginning to make me nervous. When I was nervous, I tended to babble. With Scott I had no clue what to babble about. Over the years I’d tried sports, politics, library business and dog grooming, all to no avail. Christ, I needed this to end soon. I grabbed an orange from the fruit bowl, and began peeling off the leathery rind.

            “I’m not in trouble?” Scott asked.

            “Why would you be in trouble?”

            “Well, I don’t know. Maybe if I did something.”

            “Did you?” I felt for the guy. Some people floated through their work day in absolute terror of losing their station in life. Scott was one of those. I never saw him relax. I never saw him fucking around on the internet. He walked around the library all day, sweating in that sweater vest, looking for work to do, thinking the rug would be pulled out from under him at any moment. When he wasn’t in the bathroom, that is.

            “No,” he said. 

“No worries then, eh?” I said, as I finished peeling the orange. There was a stack of napkins on the table. I took a couple and separated the pieces of orange onto them. I took a slice of orange and bit into it, squirting juice all over. It was sweet. It could’ve been sweeter.  “Do you want?”

            Scott looked down at the napkin full of orange slices, blinking wildly.  “If you want me to have some, sure.”

            “I asked if you wanted one, Scott.  Do you want a slice of orange?”

            “Okay,” he said, carefully taking a slice. He examined it for a second and then took a small bite. Then he took another. Soon the slice was gone. I pushed the napkin of orange in between the two of us. I grabbed another slice and so did Scott. Then I took another orange out of the bowl and began to peal that one as well.

            “You know, I used to draw,” Scott finally said. “I wanted to make cartoons or comic books.”

            “Me too,” I said. “When I was a kid.”

            “Bu…but I actually went to college for it.” Scott looked around the staff room, before taking another slice of the orange. The last slice before I had the new one ready. He didn’t even defer to me on that one. It was an improvement “Being a librarian is all right,” he said. “But I miss doing it…the drawing…I mean.”

            “So do I,” I said, finishing off another orange.

            “I like making things.”

            “It’s better than tearing things apart,” I said. “Maybe you should find some time to draw.”

            “Yeah,” Scott said.

Then I had nothing. I broke the new orange into slices, and the two of us ate it until there was nothing left but a soaking napkin, half orange-colored from the fruit, half-gray colored from the faded wood of the table.

“So…are we cool?” I finally asked.

Scott nodded. He got up and went back into the bathroom. Guess the orange didn’t agree with him. I went out into the library and hid in the non-fiction stacks, as Hazel and Willy shouted out like they were talking in a Klan-friendly bar. The Black this. The Muslims that. God bless the Orange-faced billionaire. I thought maybe I should say something, like about decorum or using your inside voice. But what could I really say? Half the people in the library were shouting into their cell phones or playing loud video games on them. I thought about having to do this job for another twenty-five years. I thought the American work force was akin to death. Really, I didn’t think about anything, except that I needed a drink. I thought maybe I’d email Larissa back; see if she wanted to get drinks too.

The Poet : Chapters 6 and 7

SIX

 

I got off the G train at Carroll Street after witnessing two three-hundred-pound Latina women, with the word juicy written across both wide expanses of their asses, go at it like wrestling bears over a cell phone. They were sincerely pummeling each other for the device while their tired children cried, and other riders filmed them while laughing. The sight of those two beating each other down for a seven-hundred-dollar phone while oblivious to their offspring and the camera’s gaze made me sad for America. What were we becoming? Self-involved animals who took dozens of photos of ourselves daily; a citizenry who sat idly while two people demolished each other for a gadget? Maybe we already were that kind of beast and we just needed the genius of Steve Jobs to show us. We truly did deserve an orange-faced, racist, xenophobic billionaire with the I.Q. of a third-grader and a small-dick for president.

Carroll Gardens was one of those shabby chic mixes of old Brooklyn neighborhood holdouts and the waxy-bright gleam of hipster gentrification blight. Larissa’s block, on the other hand, was a complete and total shithole. Quite a few blocks removed from the swirl of old Italian restaurants and artisan ice cream shops and mommies pushing babies named Finn or Harper around in block-wide strollers; it was the last remaining eyesore in the gentrified hood. Some of the buildings looked bombed out. There were shopping carts everywhere. They were full of glass bottles and aluminum cans. Cars zipped by on the BQE at all hours creating a constant buzzing of noise. Mutts barked. People shouted in their apartments. At one end of the street a pack of teens huddled around each other. They were all dressed alike in red, satin jackets, shouting and screaming and all calling each other racial slurs as pet names. How sweet! The neighborhood had its very own gang.

I rang the buzzer. “Oh, it’s you,” Gigi said when she finally answered the door.

            I pointed to the kids dressed in red jackets, who’d been eyeing me during my wait. “What’s with the jets and sharks down there?”

            “They’re supposedly harmless according to Larissa and Millicent, if you consider them saying they want to put a baby in you, or catcalls about your ass and guess-timations on your breast size harmless.” That night’s ensemble: Doctor Who t with his magic box plastered on it; faded shorts that, for some reason now, had a part of the pocket hanging out; combat boots with just a touch of navy blue (also Doctor Who related) socks.

            “Speaking of, you know your wardrobe this mild November night is starting to make me appreciate the damage we’re doing to this climate,” I said. “And genre writing.”

            “Doctor Who is a TV show, she said. “And it’s supposed to get cold soon.”

            “That’s what I keep hearing. Missed you at the reading tonight.”

            “I was doing things for Larissa.”

            “Lipstick lesbians?”

            A sigh of exasperation. “Rand, why do you have to make everything so dirty and disgusting?”

            “I am the world I live in,” I said. “And gender fluidity is the new norm if I’m to believe what I read in the papers and online.”

            “Yes, but with real people living real lives against a hetero-normative society,” she said. “Not the sick porn fantasies that you have in your head about LGBT people.”

            “Don’t you mean LGBTQIA?”

Gigi shook her head. “I’m going back upstairs.”

            I caught the door before it closed. Gigi had no sense of humor. Millennials relied on one-hundred percent, pure, street value optimism with no irony allowed. My generation couldn’t spell the word optimism; that’s why we grew up into adults who shunned public service and political office. It probably didn’t help that I told bad jokes and had a bad habit of leering when I spoke to women under the age of thirty.

            “Doctor Killjoy is here,” Gigi announced to the party. There was a chorus of groans, and Fidel shouted The Bard of Bay Ridge from Larissa’s living room. In that moment I knew how both Charlie Brown and Charles Manson felt.

            All alcohol and poetry and no protein made Rand a hungry old codger. I went right for the spread on the kitchen table. I couldn’t recognize any of it. Most of the stuff was vegetal. I recognized Brussel sprouts and a bunch of salad bowls. There was chili but it was of the Tofu variety. I mixed a spoon around in it. Onion city. Fucking vegans. They ruined everything for the simple carnivore. For some odd reason there was a tray of Jell-O shapes in the center of the table. They were risqué shapes: boobs and cocks. Someone did have sense of humor. They looked to be the only edible thing. I went to town on them.

            “Those are full of vodka,” Gigi said, as she came back into the kitchen with empty chip bowls. I tossed two more boobs into my mouth. She pointed to a closed door in the kitchen. “The bathroom,” she said, as she headed back toward the party. “For when you inevitably break your streak and vomit.”

I took one more Jell-O shot cock for good measure. I grabbed a bottle of beer from the fridge, another fucking burnt toast tasting IPA, and then made for the living room.

Larissa lived in a glorified storage container. Three grand to live on the shit block of a trendy neighborhood in a narrow railroad apartment that circulated no air. Only in New York. The bedrooms that Larissa and her roommate had were more appendages than actual rooms. They were little pods. There were bookshelves and books strewn throughout. Larissa’s roommate, Millicent Xiao was a painter, so there were tons of shitty paintings on the wall. Most of them were black with slivers of color. Clyfford Still they were not. There were sculptures that looked like found junk or torture devices; they rested on coffee tables. You could hear the roar of the BQE and the shouts of the gang from the unseasonably open living room windows. It was hot as balls in the place. I wondered where Larissa had the space for all that scantily clad yoga.

“Hey Doctor Killjoy,” Killian said.

He made room for me on the couch. “I’m not a doctor until I’ve completed the residency,” I said.

            “Yeah, well, I’ve always been a sucker for a good title,” Killian said.

            “I want that book,” Fidel said to me. “That Carolina chick’s book.”

            “You have that book,” I said. “It’s called my book. Just publish the fucking thing.”

            “We’re hurting for novels, Little Bukowski.”

            “I have novels,” Gigi said.

            Fidel shrugged. “Yeah…but…like for kids…”

            “I’ll write you a novel,” I said. “I’ll write you two novels.” I had some of the bad beer. “I’ll sit in an oubliette like de Sade and write a tome in my very own shit.”

            “When?” Fidel asked.

            “As soon as my ever-fornicating upstairs neighbor moves out,” I said. “And I find some way to euthanize the dog that lives across the street.”

            “Oh, there goes Rand blaming the world for his problems again,” Gigi said. She glared at Fidel. “And YA books aren’t just for kids, you ageist crank.”

            “Who’s Carolina?” Larissa asked.

            “My newest arch enemy,” I said. “I need to remember to add her to my enemies list.”

            “Rand’s old flame,” Killian said. “Or whatever. No one knows the real story.”

            “She does,” I said. “And there truly is a thin line between love and hate.”

            “And speaking of hate,” Jackson Urban said.  He was sitting on the floor across from me. “What’s with you and that Bob Kauffman shit?” Do I do that to you? Do I sit there and scream shit while you try to read? Do I say, hey, look everybody, fake-ass Bukowski is at it again slurring his words!”

            “Usually you’re on your phone texting your old man for rent money,” I said.

            “Always my old man’s bank account.” Jackson shook his head. “Yeah, my dad has money. My dad not me.”

            “Can I have some of his money?” I said.

            “You’re always acting like you’re broke, Rand,” Gigi said. “Like you’re still working in warehouses or whatever it is you write about, instead of collecting a pension and sitting in a library all day doing nothing but reading the New York Times and watching teenage girls bend over to shelve books.”

            “She’s twenty,” I said. “And I still have work-related PTSD.”

“You know you’re like the only one here who doesn’t have to have a roommate.”

“I…I don’t have a roommate,” Killian said.

“Yeah, but you have like a cat, right?” Gigi said.

“Hey, I’m not trying to be difficult,” I said to Jackson. “I just tease, man. And I get it. I empathize. In fact, I marched in the Black Lives Matter rally last year. Remember we met up on the street?”

“The fuck does that have to do with anything I just said?” Jackson said.

“About as much as it has with you using a nom de plume on stage and in real life.”

“Man, my name is Reggie Jackson. I can’t be an effective poet and be Reggie Jackson.” 

“But you can be a mediocre poet and be Jackson Urban?” I said.

“Fuck you, Wyndham,” Jackson said. “And fuck Reggie Jackson.”

            Gigi scoffed “Plus, Rand, you had a Strand bag and a bag from Lids that night,” she said. “I wouldn’t call that showing up for a protest.”

            “A man can’t shop and protest at the same time?”

            “You weren’t even there for the protest,” Jackson said.

            “Yes, I was, Reggie,” I said. “And I was there for a new Mets hat.”

            “He was,” Larissa broke in. “I remember you sending an email out to people asking them if they wanted to join you.”

Gigi, Jackson and I gave her a what-the-fuck look. They knew as well as I knew that I’d sent no email like that. But I could’ve. Who knew what I did when I was drunk. I left pools of invective all over the internet when the vodka took hold. Maybe the sozzled me had a progressive, political side. Or an altruistic side. Who knew how many suicides I’d stopped? How many fat kids I’d saved from attacking another bag of cookies? How many regimes I’d thwarted? How many donations I’d made to Planned Parenthood and the ACLU. A protest rally might’ve been just the tip of the iceberg.

“I’m sorry I couldn’t join you,” she said.

            “Well, you should’ve,” I said. “Streaming Netflix all day is no excuse for eschewing the value of social protest.” Larissa gave me a dark look. “Or giving the old economy a boost. I mean where’s your Mets hat, Miss Haven-St. Claire?”

            “Sports are dumb,” she said.

            “I’m just saying you shouldn’t be rude, Wyndham,” Jackson said. “That’s all.”

            I got up. “Hey, next time you read, Reg, I won’t even go.”

            “That would be preferred,” Gigi shouted after me, as I went to get another beer. I wasn’t alone in the kitchen, but one minute, staring at all of that bad art, before she followed me in.

“You can’t bear to be without me,” I said. “Should we tell Reginald now, or give him the coveted surprised cuckold role?”

            “Shut up, Rand,” she said. “And it’s Jackson.”

“Ms. Jackson if you’re nasty.” Gigi gave me a confused look. So much for the old New Jack Swing. I checked out the bad art. “I think these paintings have to power to turn people against supporting creative endeavors. You get a GOP-heavy senate committee in here and I guarantee you the NEA is done in minutes.”

            “Millicent actually lives, like financially, off of her art.” Gigi glared at me. “Look, I need a favor. It kills me to say that to you but I do.”

            “I don’t do favors for people. It’s a moral and ethical thing that I have.”

“I want you to get in touch with this Carolina.”

            “Yeah, and I want to wrestle her and Goth girl on my bed,” I said. “But I don’t see that happening anytime soon.”

            “I’m serious, you patriarchal asshole” she said. “And Larissa is like emo-punk, I think.”

            “And I’m not serious?” I spied a jug bottle of wine on the counter and poured myself a glass. I took about half down while Gigi poured herself another one too. I had two cock-shaped Jell-O shots then decided I needed real food. I went to the fridge. There were two slices of cold pizza in it. They were as good as mine.

“Killian needs your help,” Gigi said, as I cautiously ate the first piece. “The store is in bad shape. We lost a lot of customers when they put the Barclay’s Center in.”

“And Carolina is going to resurrect the profits like Jesus Christ? You people have a more inflated view of her than even I once had.”

            Gigi had some wine. “It’s not her,” she said. “It’s her boyfriend. Godfrey Whitt.”

“What kind of fucking name is that?” I said. “That’s an asshole’s name.”

            “Like you don’t know him.”

            “Every pseudo intellectual asshole comes in my library asking for his book.” Still Gigi grabbed a NY Times Book Review off a kitchen chair. She flipped to the best sellers. In at number three was a book called In the Seconds before Impact by one Godfrey Whitt. “So?”

            “The book is like a masterpiece,” she said. “It’s about this guy on one of the flights that hit the World Trade Center. He imagines his whole life and life in America post-9/11 in the seconds before impact. Rumor has it Whitt like thought about the book for thirteen years after 9/11 and wrote all 1200 pages in the last two years.”

            “He must not have a Twitter account or Netflix,” I said.

            “He’s big time,” Gigi said. “He even predicted that orange-faced billionaire would run for president.”

“So did The Simpsons. Why don’t I try Matt Groening? At least he’s not the guy putting it to Carolina?”

            “You’re so crass. Killian saw them together at the Cornelia Street reading. You, dumb box of rocks that you are, were actually sitting at a table with Godfrey Whitt.”

            “That explains the hard-on and the unwarranted sense of literary accomplishment that I’ve been feeling lately.”

            “Riiight,” Gigi said. “Killian thinks that if you talk to Carolina maybe we can get Godfrey Whitt to read…but he has too much pride to tell you this himself.”

            “You know I have a better chance of making things worse,” I said. “Like molten lava apocalyptic, destroy Pompeii worse.”

            “That’s what I told him,” Gigi said.

            Then she frowned and walked away.

 

 

                                                                      SEVEN

 

I drank my wine then poured another copious glass. I stood there trying to figure how in the world I was going to convince Carolina of anything, when Millicent Xiao came stumbling out of the bathroom. She gave me one of those detestable looks that the world handed out to me daily. Not unwarranted, mind you. But she didn’t leave. Instead, she got herself a huge glass of wine and lingered around the food table. She wasn’t a bad looking woman; stringy brown hair with one side shaved and dyed in streaks of aquamarine; Millicent had those thick glasses like all the rest of the artsy fartsies, only hers were green. She was in all black.

            “You look hot in that,” I said, in an effort to break her icy stare.

“I know.”

            “I didn’t mean it that way.”

            “Old men who chase young women disgust me.”

            “Me too,” I said. “That’s why I mostly walk.”

            “You’re like that carroty-hued xenophobe running for president.”

            “I want everyone to be free.”

            “You say you hate my paintings,” Millicent said.

            “But I love art for art’s sake.”

            “I can tell by your face that you hate them.” She ate two Jell-O shots without chewing.

            “My face has had perma-frown since I turned forty,” I said. “You’ll have to dig deeper to see just how boring and pathetic I actually am underneath this glowering visage.”

            “It’s because you’re a man,” she said. “A white man in so-called post-racial America. You feel that everything is being taken away from you. You feel your powers of persuasion slipping. That’s why you and your ilk are rallying around that sexist beast. You detest successful women and minorities. You hate that your role in the world order is becoming more and more subservient. You hate that you will one day no longer control the vote. Your sway in America is diminishing. And that is exactly what I express in my paintings. You have no choice but to hate them. You hate diverse beauty because you can’t understand it.”

            “And I can’t stream movies or get my employees to show up for work,” I said. “I’m fucked the whole way around.” I went for that other slice of pizza. “Also, you use too much purple and black.”

            “Criticism is the last refuge of a scoundrel, white devil,” Millicent said. “And you stole my leftovers.”

            I ate pilfered gluten-free vegan pizza and looked at some of the art on the wall. “I don’t really have hate in my eyes,” I said. I pointed to a particularly ugly painting that was yellow and orange. “I mean there’s the end of your ofay patriarchy right there. What’s the point in me doing anything but waving the white flag and going gender fluid?”

            Millicent got close. Her breath was a touch stale but tolerable. I cupped my hands to my mouth. Mine smelt like roadkill dipped in cheap vodka. “You’re a liar Randolph Windrip,” she said softly.

            “Rand.”

            “Like the atlas?”

            “And just as tread upon,” I said. I took a few bites on the slice. “Sorry about the pizza.”

            “It’s in your privileged nature to steal and pillage,” she said.

            “I’ve purloined a few grapes in the produce aisle. I won’t lie about that.”

            “I have more art in my room. Would you like to come inside and hate it as well?”

            I chewed slowly. I considered my options. “Haters gonna hate, right. At least that’s what my grandma always told me.”

            Millicent’s room was so small her bed was actually pressed up against the door and the door would only open half-way. The walls were painted black, which would’ve been cool if she were fourteen, but maybe not so cool for someone hovering around…whatever age she was. But if Larissa could dress like Courtney Love’s younger sister and I could still put on baseball hats backwards and wearing rusty earrings, then Millicent could paint it all black. All bets were off these days.

I was thinking of getting a green mohawk myself.

There were several pieces of art taped on the wall. They were mostly drawings. There were a few collages of women’s breasts melding with American flags. I didn’t hate all of it. Some of it was quite good. I know Killian had one of Millicent’s drawings in his office, and he always touted her work. She didn’t need me to boost her. Still, a complimentary word or two was the right expression for the moment.

            “I like the bold use of…” I started to say. But Millicent pushed me face down on the bed. She jumped on top of me and started grinding her pelvis into my ass.

            “You like that, poet bitch?”

            “I’m not adverse to…” Millicent lifted my head by the neck and kissed me.

Finally, I managed to roll over. But again, she was on top of me. Our lips met. She was kissing too hard for this to be enjoyable, so I tried slowing her down, easing into it. That wasn’t happening. She kissed me like she was trying to bore her mouth into mine. She tongue-fucked me. The curled mother was six-inches long unfurled and pierced. The stud hit my bottom teeth like an anvil. I dropped the pizza slice on the floor. Just as quickly we came up for air.

            Millicent rolled off of me. We lay on our backs. You could hear faint traces of the party through thin walls, and the TV from the neighbor upstairs. “I did all of those drawings in a fit of rage when my boyfriend broke up with me.”

            “A bad break-up?” I said. “They say the end of long-term relationships is akin to mourning a death.”

            “We dated a month.”

            “Some love burns out quick.”

            “He said Brooklyn wasn’t big enough for both our genius.” I tried to get up to retrieve the pizza slice but Millicent pushed me down. She seemed very, very fucking drunk, which was probably why I was getting kind of lucky, minus the few teeth I might have to replace. Half of her rolled over onto my chest.

            “What kind of art did he make?”

            “Alternative finger painting.” Millicent looked at me. “Why do you hate my art, Rudy?”

            “It’s Rand,” I said. “And I told you I don’t hate your art.”

            “I can tell by your face,” she said. “You look bored.”

            “Continued scrutiny into my physiognomy aside; I’m an American. I don’t understand art except to roll up to a painting in a museum and take a selfie. My eyes have been trained to look bored. My constitution tells me to pour battery acid in a placid lake, and play my car radio too loudly while driving above the speed limit holding a Coke in one hand and my cell phone in the other. I laugh at the caloric content listings in fast food restaurants…and then I double down.”

            “This country is horrible.”

            “The worst.”

            “I feel no freedom here,” Millicent said. “Everyone is so dull and common.”

            “You should see my neighborhood on NFL Sundays,” I said. “Nothing but a bunch of overweight guys in Giants and Jets jerseys. They look like high school girlfriends wearing their boyfriend’s clothing. And now I gotta kiss Carolina’s ass to save Killian’s store.”

            “Do you always complain in non-sequiturs?”           

“I’d like to think that I’ve perfected the art. I once complai…”

            Millicent started kissing me hard again. If I didn’t slow us down her tongue would break a tooth because I hadn’t been to the dentist since the Clinton era. I started kissing her softly. It felt nice. Millicent was a good kisser.

But just as quickly she stopped kissing me and pushed me off of her. Millicent got up. She paced around the only small landing strip of room she had. “This is wrong,” she said.

            “We’re artists we’re carefree,” I said. “We’ll blame it on the Jell-O shots.” But that wasn’t good enough. Millicent looked down at me with her hand over her mouth like I’d just farted in bed. Her green glasses were askew. Then she tore out of the room, but not before her door bounced off her bed and pinched her in the doorframe like a squashed bug. She stepped on the slice of pizza too.

I closed my eyes and laid back. Millicent’s room was better in the dark. I could feel myself drifting in and out. The sounds from above me faded. The sound of the party faded. I could still hear the fucking BQE however. I pretended the noise of the cars was the noise of the fans in my room blocking out Brooklyn. I was almost out. Then I was out.

The door opened and there stood Larissa Haven-St. Claire in all of her Goth glory. Emo glory. Punk glory. I had no fucking clue. She was standing in some undefinable kind of glory. “Not the room I expected you to end up passed out in,” she said. “At least you didn’t puke on the floor.”

            “Millicent wanted to show me her paintings,” I said. “She took me for a regular Ambroise Vollard. I’m going to send her my student loan statements to set her straight.”

            “Leave her artwork alone,” Larissa said. “It picks up two-thirds of the rent.”

            “Maybe I am in the right room.” I looked around. “How long have I been out?”

            “About two hours,” she said. “The party’s over. Millicent’s coming down off her E now, and would like her room back.”

            “I’m going to have to doss here,” I said. “I can’t drive.”

            “You took the train here.”

            “I can’t suffer the subway off-hours in my fragile state.”

            I followed Larissa into the living room. Millicent jumped up from the couch and tore past us. She flung open her bedroom door but it bounced off the bed again. The door hit her square in the face. But our girl recovered enough to get inside. She slammed the door. Within seconds we could hear the sound of muffled mopey music from back in the halcyon days of the 1990s.

            “You’ll have to excuse her,” Larissa said. “She’s harboring a secret crush, and she thinks she ruined things by getting high and kissing you instead.”

            “And to think she and I were going to run away to Vietnam together,” I said.

            “You bastard.”

            “Huh?”

            Larissa’s lips were on me. A crazy artist and now a pseudo-goth-emo-punk poet. This was Rand Wyndham’s lucky night. A Haley’s comet kind of night. We kissed for a while. Eventually we pushed our way into her bedroom, and got right on the bed. Larissa wasted no time. She had my belt undone and the fly down. I pulled that t-shirt dress up and put both hands on that wonderful, thong-clad yoga ass. She was jerking away at the old cock like she was milking a petulant cow. It hurt too much for me to get horny. I kept worrying that she’d rip the thing straight off. I put a hand down Larissa’s panty and started playing with her pussy.

            “I don’t want to have sex tonight,” she said.

            “Even if you wanted to,” I said. “I’m drunk. And the equipment just doesn’t spring to life like it used to.” I listened to the muffled music through the wall. “And how can you fuck with this music?”

            Larissa kept tugging away. “I’m almost interested in you. And I don’t usually like guys who look like they’re perpetually stuck in rush hour traffic. But I’m intrigued by your poems. I like how you write about those guys in the bar, and about women, in this day and age, like you honestly have no clue that we’re living, breathing, thinking human beings.”

            “And here I thought I was a trail blazing feminist,” I said, getting a couple fingers in her.

            Larissa gasped. “You border on the offensive and retrograde.” Then she rammed her tongue down my throat while she continued her death grip vice on my cock. I thought about how I’d need to start reading a thesaurus if I wanted to continue coming to the Xiao-Haven-St. Claire abode.

We stopped kissing. Larissa released my cock from her stranglehold and I took my fingers out of her. “I thought you said I was a genius.”

“I said I found your poems intriguing,” she said. “But I’m drunk. Tomorrow, I might hate them.” Yeah, and hate me, I thought. Larissa squeezed my cock and started tugging away again. Eventually I had no choice but to head down there myself and ever-so-kindly move her hand away “Is something wrong?”

            “No,” I said. “I just might need that thing later.”

            “I want you to read with me,” Larissa said.

            “We did that tonight.”

            “Like now. Let’s sit across from each other on the bed and read our poems to each other.”

            “What the shit?” I said. “Are you fucking with me?”

            Larissa rolled off of me and pulled down her t-shirt dress. I sat up and looked down at my limp, manhandled cock. I could hear crying or moaning coming from Millicent’s room. The sound of a genius at work. She made my head hurt. Or, rather, two hours without drink was doing that.

“I think I’m drunk,” Larissa said.

“Cool…let’s get some shut eye.”

            “On the couch.”

            “For sure.”

            I downed a glass of someone’s leftover wine then promptly passed out. I woke up a few hours later to the clatter from the BQE. I got up and the room spun. My mouth felt like someone had taken a shit inside of it. And shit was exactly what I had to do. The good old Rand Wyndham bowels never failed me. In the kitchen was Larissa’s tablet. I took it into the shitter with me. I barely got to the bowl before I exploded a torrent. Eventually I settled in with the stink. I touched the screen. Sylvia Plath’s doomed expression looked back at me while my bowels exploded anew. I logged on to my Gmail. There was one single, solitary email. Carolina. It read, yes, like the end of a fucking James Joyce novel.

            Then I heard Millicent say. “Who’s in the bathroom?”

            “Rand,” Larissa said. She yawned. Christ, they mere feet away from me. Fucking New York City apartments.

            “Who?”

            “You should know him, considering you made out with him last night.”

            “Oh God no.” I could picture Millicent with her hand over her mouth. She thought my mouth was bad wait until I opened the door and she got a taste of what my ass could offer. There was nary a can of air freshener to be found. But Carolina had said yes, so what did I care for clean air. “Tell me I didn’t kiss that man on his mouth.”

            “You sure did,” Larissa said, as I dropped my last load. Did they even care that I could hear them in there? “And don’t say it like that.”

            “Why?”

            “Because he’s…”

            Then there was whispering. I tuned it out. Millicent sounded sharp and Larissa sounded pleading. Eventually there’d be that knock on the door, and I’d be asked to leave. I shut the tablet off. No point in reliving Larissa’s poems, or mourning poor Sylvia. But Larissa wasn’t so bad, right? We all had our quirks. She seemed to like me, which didn’t happen often these days for yours truly. Age was making me the forgotten man. And when Larissa wasn’t playing the poet, she seemed like a decent human being. I needed to know more decent human beings.

            “And there’s pizza on my floor,” Millicent said.

Oh, how my dick hurt though. If we ever messed around again, I’d have to beg Ms. Haven-St. Claire to use the fine art of finesse. I swear she rug-burned the poor stick. I looked around the closet-space of the bathroom. There was no toilet paper on the roll. Or in the cabinet under the sink. Shit. There was a copy of Poets & Writers magazine on the floor and that would have to do. Nothing like wiping your ass of hungover beer shits using ads for upcoming poetry contests that were predetermined in-house at said university anyway. When I went to flush the toilet, handle broke off. Fuck.

Then came the knock on the door. “Um, excuse me,” Millicent said. “Other people need to use the bathroom.”

“If I were you, I’d go outside,” I said. “Or go make nice with the upstairs neighbor.”

“I’m serious.” More pounding. Fine. Fuck her, I thought. I opened the bathroom door to face Millicent all morning disheveled and puffy-faced. I moved an inch and she pushed past me and slammed the door. “Christ,” she said through pock-marked wood.

“What did you do?” Larissa asked, from the kitchen sink. She was in a pink t-shirt that didn’t cover the belly button. It had black skull and crossbones on it. Her shorts looked more like black hot pants than sleep attire. There were tattoos all over her arms and legs. Hell, even Larissa’s coffee mug looked a mix of morbid and hot-to-trot. “And your fly is open.”

“Your toilet is broken,” I said, zipping. Millicent’s groaned and gagged; gurgling noises hastened her trying to fix the commode. “And why do you subscribe to Poets & Writers?”

“Coffee?” Larissa asked. She held up and empty, ghoulish mug. It might’ve had a pentagram on it.

“If I drink coffee I’m going to vomit.”

“So just leaving?”

“I’m late for work,” I said. “If I’m nothing else I’m dedicated to my profession.”

The toilet flushed. Or tried to flush. Behind the door Millicent started shouting, “No, no, no.” Then you could hear the plunger go to work. If only the woman had more patience, I could’ve fixed everything on my own.

“You don’t look like someone who cares about being late for work,” Larissa said. She sounded that mixture of sad and mad. I knew it well.

“I’m trying to teach an old man a life lesson, plus we got this ant infestation and…”  

She shrugged. “Whatever.” She stared at me. She kept the coffee mug to her mouth. 

I fumbled around. I rubbed my hands on my dirty jeans. “Um…why don’t we do a movie or something?”

“A movie?” She laughed. “Seriously, Rand?”

“What in the hell do people do on a date now?”

Larissa sighed and set down her mug on the table. “Well, I hope you get in touch with this Carolina,” she said. She came over to me and unlocked the front door. Going through the archway it was my turn to shrug. “See you.”

“I had a good time with you last night,” I said.

“Mmmm hmmm.”

“I really did enjoy talking to you.”

She pursed her lips. “Maybe you are too strait-laced for me.”

“If it helps my case,” I said. “I’m thinking of getting a Mohawk. A green one.”

Larissa shut the door and I was out in her gray, ugly hallway. I could hear chipper morning news voices coming from the apartment next door, and the ranting cadence of the orange-faced, bloviating billionaire. There was ominous bass playing from upstairs. There were two cockroaches duking it out over a morsel in the corner, and from inside Larissa’s place I could hear her and Millicent arguing through the bathroom door about iPads and toilets. I’d made everyone miserable again. That was usually my cue to leave. So I did.