I Swear I'll Make It Up to You (22 page)

“Sure.”

She turned to a friend of mine, who was standing next to her.

“Is he a rapist?”

“He's never raped
me
,” my buddy grinned.

That satisfied her. She threw down her cigarette, stamped it out, and looked at me expectantly.

“One sec,” I said. I walked back in the club, grabbed my jacket, and threw the keys to the van at Aaron. They hit him in the chest and fell to the floor.

“Tag. You're it.”

He looked at me, then down at the keys on the floor.

“Aw, fuck, man, come on, I can't—”

A moment later this girl and I were in a cab, headed back to my place. When I asked her name, she lifted her head from my crotch to answer, “Oksana.”

Oksana peeled her clothes off the minute we got into my apartment. She climbed up into my loft bed and laid there, full, firm breasts and a taut, muscular body. I felt like I was staring at a pile of amphetamines: I knew that it would ruin my life, and I could not wait to get started.

When I couldn't manage anything even remotely resembling an erection, she mocked me. “What am I supposed to do with
this
?” she said, flicking my useless cock, shriveled like some frightful war relic.

Later, she wept raggedly and spilled a sorrowful tale. A week after her father died of cancer, her brother had committed suicide, and she had found his body. Her fiancée had died a year previously from a drug overdose. Now her mother was dying of cancer. It seemed unreal, so much grief in one short life. I wouldn't have believed her story had I not heard stories to rival it.

It had clearly taken a toll on her. It was eerie watching her flip from coquettish to enraged to weeping to laughing hysterically, like a TV changing stations when someone is sitting on the remote. I couldn't make sense of all that loss—no one could—but maybe I could distract her for a minute, make her laugh? God knows I didn't want to be alone.

In the morning, I came to my senses. I could not tangle with her again. She was damaged. I mean, we all were. This world chewed you up. Especially women. But something about Oksana was different. I was like wet matches, but she was like wet dynamite.

She was a sweet girl, I told her, with a lot going for her, but we should go our separate ways. I wouldn't be good for her. She laughed, then pouted, but eventually she left. My self-preservation skills were finally getting better.

Six weeks later, I was still waking up to Oksana. I avoided her, ignored her texts, calls, and emails. I dodged her at my band's
shows, hiding behind mailboxes and potted plants like some soused private inspector. But Oksana was everywhere I went, not just shows my bands played but every show I went to, brash and flirty in one of those dresses where it's obvious the girl is naked underneath, eye-fucking me while carefully writhing a nipple free from the top of her dress.

When I quizzed her as to why, in a city of nearly 9 million people, she had glommed on to a penniless problem drinker with no interest in her, she couldn't explain her fascination with me. When I politely rejected her, she sniffled into her wine. Then one of those three ghosts she'd summoned that first night—brother, father, lover—would rematerialize. Tonight was her brother's birthday; it was the anniversary of her father's death; it was the anniversary of the wedding she'd never had, she'd had a horrible vision of her fiancée's dead body in a dream. The cancer had finally killed her mother, and, no, she didn't want to talk about it, but she couldn't stand to be alone, not tonight.

To resist her now was to court disaster. She would flip out, screaming. She'd throw glasses, throw punches. She'd demand to see the club's manager and make insane accusations. Without a doubt, Oksana was crazy. Not kooky or offbeat or eccentric—crazy, like slash-your-tires, stab-you-with-a-broken-bottle, burn-your-fucking-house-down crazy. Of course, the only quality that eclipsed her mental instability was her physical beauty. God, she looked amazing, hair and skin so white it appeared to luminesce in the darkness of my room, illuminated only by the glow of the digital numbers on my hated alarm clock, her body so long and narrow but still curvy and muscular, like a pale serpent. Poisonous, of course.

But those calves, the calves of a high school track star . . . and the first time I stuck my hand up her dress, she was soaking wet. Her eyes, intense and mercurial blue-green, like absinthe, one of them looking right at you: clocking, measuring, thinking, and understanding. And the other one in some fucked-up parallel
universe—Cocainia—untouched by reason, logic, reality, or a single word of warning that came out of my mouth.

Each time I encountered her, I coolly assessed that sleeping with her even once had been a mistake. Then I made a mental list of the specific ways in which sleeping with her again would tragically compound that mistake. Then I got shitfaced and took her home.

My loneliness was so intense, it was like a physical affliction. Disappearing into her body was the quick fix that made the condition worse. As neat a trick as it was to feel lonely in a crowd, it was some next-level shit to feel alone while you were
inside
someone else. She had accused me once of wanting to fuck her doggie-style in order to pretend she was someone else. I wanted her facing away so I could pretend I didn't exist.

Every time I woke up next to her, I'd hate myself for my weakness, for my willingness to drag others down with me, and I'd resent her for allowing it. Demeaning as that pattern of attraction and repulsion was for me, it must have been baffling and exquisitely painful for her.

My mother was back in the Virgin Islands, as she had free lodging with the owners of the property she'd managed the first time she'd fled the country and her hard luck. I bought a ticket for a three-week trip with my diminishing savings. Not cheap, but it'd be worth it to see my mother, dry out, make a break from Oksana, and dodge a couple of weeks of the miserable Brooklyn winter.

St. John was gorgeous. The weather was divine. We were broke. God fucking damn it, Mom and I were always broke. My daily chore was to harvest all the green papayas and ripe coconuts I could find on our side of the island. Eggs with fried shredded green papaya for breakfast; a can of tuna and a coconut for lunch; stuffed green papaya or green papaya lasagna for dinner. Jesus, canned tuna and eggs, the protein of poverty, every day of my pathetic life. We even went chicken hunting one day, giggling together, trying
to snare one of the birds that had gone feral on the island with the long hooked pole I'd made to reach the mangos on the tops of the trees. All we got for our troubles were some funny looks from the local West Indians.

My mother and I alternated sleeping in the one available bed—a dilapidated old mattress with springs sticking into your back—and on the hardwood floor on a cushion from a deck chair that had been the dog's bed until she died.

Dry out? After years of rampant inflation, the price of local rum had risen to the princely sum of $4 a bottle—cheaper than orange juice. Alcohol wasn't sinful; it was sound financial planning, cheaper and more transporting than food. St. John may have been the worst place in the world to dry out, but at least I had finally made the break from Oksana.

I hadn't been back in New York for an hour before we were back in bed together. Jesus, I wasn't even drunk. We had sex twice. After the second time, she cried. I couldn't bear it anymore. I told her for the umpteenth time that we had to stop this, now and forever. It wasn't good for me. It was very bad for her. She shouldn't prostrate herself before any man, least of all me. Finally, she seemed to understand.

I locked my apartment door behind her, then walked over to the window to make sure she had actually left the building. I didn't know whether to feel sympathy or contempt for her frenzied attempts to pump hope into something so obviously hopeless. Oksana, it's a dusty fiberglass skeleton, like a prop from an Indiana Jones movie; no amount of CPR is going to bring it to life. I pitied Oksana, but pity wasn't love. If anything, pity was the opposite of love.

I crawled back into my bed and curled up in relief. Felt like a cold was coming on. I'd try to sleep in hopes of feeling better before my door shift in a few hours.

“You piece of shit, you're a fucking
doorman
,” the drunk chick said, her lip curling with contempt around the last word as she swayed in front of me. “Is this what you wanted to do with your life? Check fucking IDs and be an asshole?”

Point taken. It was pitiable, indeed, to be a thirty-two-year-old doorman on Ludlow Street in February. I'd lorded over Pianos four years earlier, a night manager high on power, drunk on top-shelf liquor. I'd had to beg the guy who fired me for a gig as a lowly doorman, like a dog returning to its vomit. Was I going to be
that guy
and inform her of my scholarly achievements? “Ivy League doorman” was like a garnish of edible orchids and coils of paper-thin-sliced blood oranges placed next to a huge, steaming dog turd.

I reached for the most sarcastic tone I could muster.

“Okay, I was kinda undecided before, but now I'm
definitely
going to let you in.”

A stupid line, less than I wanted to say and more than I should have. I stood between the girl and the door, so there was absolutely no confusion. Working in bars for ten years, you learn that monosyllabic grunts and hard stares are the best way to deal with irate partygoers denied entry. If everyone hated me, well, it was my job to be hated, and I was good at it.

The drunk chick—short with flat, dead-looking mousy brown hair, wearing an ill-fitting green party dress with a parka thrown over it to combat the cold weather—mad-dogged me as her boyfriend tugged meekly on her tiny arm. All her color, even the color of her clothes, was washed out, as if she were just a crappy, sun-bleached, low-rez printout of herself.

“This is your life? This is what you
do
?” she said. “Stand out in the cold and watch everybody else party and get fucked up and dance and get laid while you stand here? Are you happy? Are you happy with your life? Is this what you came to New York to do, to be a fucking doorman?”

Which finally hit a nerve.

It came out half hiss and half growl, the most cutting thing I could think of to say.

“You have bad skin.”

The nearby eavesdroppers recoiled. It was true; her skin was pitted and pallid and uneven. Sometimes cruelty flows through me unchecked.

The chick took an unsteady half step back with a huff of pain, then lunged at me. I swept her to the side with one arm, and she stumbled into her boyfriend.

Themy and Jimmy, the two bouncers, Greeks with chests so thick their girth must have exceeded their height, stepped in and quickly moved the girl and her boyfriend down the block.

The Greeks were old-school mafia strongmen. They liked me because, unlike most of the other doormen, I was comfortable with violence. Getting jumped was the only redeeming part of the job. I was allowed to fight back, spinning some frat boy's head with a hook or just dropping him with a kick to the side of his knee before the Greeks moved in. When a guy with his foot in a cast menaced me with an upraised crutch, I told him that if he hit me with that crutch, I would break his other leg, and he would crawl home. The Greeks laughed about that all night.

My right sinus, the one behind my preferred coke nostril, throbbed like someone was trying to jam a pencil into my brain. “Folks, please have your IDs out!” I called to the line and started shuffling more people into Pianos. My fingers were sticky with snot on their IDs. Weekend nights like this, all the fucking amateurs were out. Gone were the day-trader financial slime and their sublime, disgusting plastic porno angel dates. Even the clubby Israelis and Eurotrash had fled, replaced with fattening sorority girls, short men with adult acne, glasses, and black Amex cards, and foreign tourists, flabbergasted to be expected to both carry ID
and
tip their bartenders. I hoped I got every one of them sick.

I glanced at my cell phone to check the time while a chubby girl in leopard print, stinking of garlic, nicotine, and bubble gum,
rooted sloppily in her purse for her ID. A text had come in from Oksana: “im pregnant. its yours. thought it wld be selfish to tell you but fuck that. so tx a fuckin ton. i hate you with all my heart.”

I didn't get off until 4 a.m. It wasn't even midnight. Looking like a long night.