Iris Has Free Time (6 page)

I didn’t return to the street fair the following weekend either, nor any weekend ever again. But this time, with the T-shirts, my quitting was tangible—my apartment was filled with hundreds of my unsold stock. And to make matters worse, I began receiving notices from the federal government. Something about there being a warrant out for my arrest regarding the “company” of which I’d named myself president. Since I hadn’t bothered to file a 1099—what’s a 1099?—“The Emperor’s New Shirt” owed roughly two thousand dollars in estimated back taxes.

Not knowing what to do, I ignored it. And not long after that, I moved. I broke my lease and moved into a new apartment located just above the Midtown Tunnel. Though I had decided by this time that I wanted to go to graduate school for English Literature, I still needed time to apply, which put me right back where I started: I needed a job. So when I saw an ad in the subway regarding a citywide teacher shortage, I figured since I couldn’t do, perhaps I might teach.

I got a job at a South Bronx public school so troubled that all the Teach for America recruits quit within the first month. Though I lacked the credentials, I was hired on the proviso that I enroll in education courses concurrently. And so I found myself all grown-up and firmly ensconced in a life that had nothing to do with any one of my very intricately designed daydreams.

I was a teacher by day, a student by night, and the serious girlfriend of a soon-to-be lawyer named Martin, whom I’d met one evening at Lex’s ’80s party. On the bright side, my new apartment, the one above the tunnel, had good closets, so I was able to stuff my T-shirts all the way in the back on a shelf behind the linens where, for a while, I never had to see them.

I finished out the year in the Bronx (the school, it was announced in spring, would be taken over by the state and restaffed), exaggerated my way into another job at a private school on the Upper West Side and, loading up on summer courses, earned my teaching certificate after two years. And then, just as things began to settle, just as it seemed the only thing left to do was get married and die, I broke it off with Martin, quit my job at the school, and moved again.

Packing all my things, the T-shirts were the last thing I found. Hundreds of them, stuffed in black garbage bags, evidence of a crime I could not forget. I couldn’t throw them out; I took them with me.

My current apartment on West Tenth Street has a small walk-in closet. For the last year, I’ve been storing the T-shirts on a high shelf in the back. When I run out of clean underwear, I’ll pull out a pair of Bad Ass panties.

After pulling on one of fifty left-over Second Base T-shirts, I gather up my dirty clothes and head to the Laundromat. Around my neck, the cotton hangs heavy. I mean, they’re great shirts, don’t get me wrong, but they’re conversation starters, like the guy at the print shop said, and I don’t want to talk about it. But there lies my punishment.

What is there to say? I shot the albatross and now I must wear it.

On my way out, I pick up a book of Coleridge poems. It’s for a course I’m taking on Romanticism in the graduate Humanities department at NYU, the only program that accepted me. With an undergraduate major in “Individualized Study,” my transcript—Fate and Free Will, Tai Chi, Voyages of Identity, Sense Memory, Poetry Writing, Tap—reads like the afternoon agenda at a posh mental health facility. Lacking the true English credits PhD programs require just to apply, I’ve had to enroll in this Humanities division. If college leaves most graduates unprepared for the real world, my degree, more ambitiously, has left me unprepared for academia to boot.

Anyway, I like being a student again, whiling away the hours in libraries and cafés, reading books I was supposed to have read back in college (
Madame Bovary
: I confess I only read the CliffsNotes.). “Youth is wasted on the young,” Shaw wrote. This is equally true of college. Certainly it’s the
raison d’être
of graduate students. But what does it matter what I study finally, when time is really what I’ve bought? Like I told the guy at the job fair, I’m working on a novel, that’s my main thing.

In addition to Romanticism, I’m taking a class called History of the Novel, which, it turns out, has been a controversial art since its inception. We’ve been reading all about Anthony Comstock’s banned books and yesterday had a long discussion about the growing fear in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries that novels were perverting the minds of the young, particularly the minds of very young girls. The professor distributed this text from an 1815 almanac:

After he finished reading it aloud, everyone was excited and a wonderfully interesting conversation ensued. Instead of leaping into the fray as I usually do, however, for a while I just listened. Looking around that safe, warm, wood-lined classroom, out the window of an old brownstone situated comfortably at the edge of Washington Square, and then back across the conference table, at the animated faces of my impassioned peers—eager full-time Humanities students like me, young, unemployed, would-be writers and poets, possessed by literature to the point of total incompetence—it hit me: The real danger of the novel is that it might make you want to write one yourself.

That winter I was in the grip of abstract furies.

ELIO VITTORINI,
CONVERSATIONS IN SICILY

It goes like this: Felix will call from a noisy bar and tell me he’s in town, or from a mutual friend’s apartment telling me to come over, or from his car while en route to a party telling me to be downstairs in five minutes; he’s picking me up. If I decline, he’ll tell me it’s going to be so much fun that I can’t afford to miss it, and if I come and hang out with him and his friends for a few hours, it
will
be so much fun, I
couldn’t
have afforded to miss it. And then the night will wind down, and everyone will take off to their respective apartments, and Felix will give me a lift back to mine and end up staying for the next three or four days.

“Wake and bake!” he sings, when I find him in the kitchen watching
Soul Train
, making breakfast, and smoking what’s left of a joint. “It’ll help with your hangover,” he says, passing it to me. I exhale in a chain of rueful coughs. He pours me a glass of water from the tap. The Bastard Felix—my shame, my solace.

Like a child born out of wedlock, Felix is a roommate born without a lease, a bastard roommate whose origins are illegitimate. Under a mess of broken crackers, he just appeared on my couch one morning. Swaddled in my throw blanket, there was Felix gently snoring, the ignominious offspring of another long night of terrible fun.

I don’t much mind having a bastard, and Felix for his part is quite happy with the arrangement. I have a pretty decent apartment, what he calls my dukedom. There are certain records of mine he likes to play, certain cheeses I keep in the fridge that he enjoys, and I’m okay with him leaving a few things, too. After he’s gone I’ll discover a pair of fresh socks he’s stuffed discreetly between the wall and the sofa; a T-shirt stuck in with my books, folded up small between
The House of Mirth
and
Martin Eden
; or some very expensive volumizing hair conditioner that one of his girlfriends gave him hidden beneath the sink, behind the toilet-bowl cleanser. “She works for a cosmetics company,” he explained when I asked him about it. “She suggests I play up my curls.”

It’s not an uneven trade either, lest you think he’s taking advantage of me. We have a lot of fun together for one thing. And for another, if I get drunk and pass out somewhere, he’ll wake me up, help me home, and then in the morning take care of breakfast. Felix can make a meal out of anything—a lonely onion, a packet of mustard, salad croutons. . . . This is partially how he earns his keep. He’ll tell high-spirited jokes to ameliorate your hangover while finally putting to use that two-year-old can of olives you thought you’d never eat, that weird jar of pickled mushrooms that came with the apartment, and an unopened container of paprika.

Since the host wherever Felix is staying is usually too much crippled by the excruciating hangover that almost always results from a night out with Felix to prepare any food himself, Felix’s bizarre meals come as a sweet relief. Only very rarely are his dishes inedible. Once, for example, he made these deviled eggs using chocolate syrup, and another time he made tuna salad with cocktail olives and some other odd ingredients I wasn’t able to identify.

Inspired after one of his better breakfasts, Felix and I came up with an idea for a TV show. We’d call it,
The Wandering Chef
, and it would follow Felix as he wakes up on strangers’ couches and makes breakfast out of whatever they happen to have in their kitchen. The first segment would show him coming to in a room where a party was recently held:

Felix sits up, yawns, stretches and then, delighted to find a roach lying in a nearby ashtray, pulls a lighter from his pocket. Relighting the joint, he inhales deeply until there is nothing left but air between his fingertips. After a moment, the person whose home he passed out in wanders through and, surprised to find Felix (with a whole camera crew) on his couch, awkwardly says, “Hey, man. I didn’t know anybody was still here.” Whereupon, groggily but cheerfully, Felix replies, “Mind if I cook up some breakfast?”

“Nah,” the host answers, “but my kitchen’s completely empty.” To which Felix responds, “I’ll just have a look.” He opens one cupboard after another before, wild-eyed, he cries out, “Waddya mean ‘empty,’ you got baking soda and dried parsley! Let me see what I can do.”

Cut to twenty minutes later, and we see Felix serving what he calls “an egg substitute.” The host digs in, “Hmmmmm,” and shakes his head. “How did he do it?” the host asks the camera now. Cut back to the kitchen twenty minutes earlier, and the audience gets to watch Felix create his meal from scratch and cook along with him at home.

The credits roll as the host and Felix enjoy their breakfast. “Just like Pellegrino!” the host exclaims, following a sip of his Alka-Seltzer water. Then Felix takes a sip of his own glass filled with watered-down ketchup. “Hmmm, just like tomato juice!” he says, raising his glass for a toast.

We have lots of ideas, Felix and I. Since he’s around so often, we get to talking and come up with all sorts of stuff. I try to write down the ideas as they come to us, in order that we return to them once we’ve finished the joint, that round of backgammon, or “The Hokey Pokey” (I have it on record; mostly I play it at parties, but one time Felix decided we should get some exercise). We’ve got some pretty good ideas for screenplays, too. My favorite right now is
City Squirrels!
, in which New York City in the not-so-distant future is overrun by vindictive squirrels. It’s like
The Birds
meets
Escape from New York
but with squirrels instead of birds.

I’m more of a scheduler than Felix is, so I’ll say, “Felix, here’s what we’re gonna do. At 1:00, we’re gonna work on
City Squirrels!
Then at 2:00, we’ll have a fifteen-minute dance break. Then we’ll do an hour’s worth of revision on whatever we’ve come up with.” We’ve never actually gotten to the revision stage though. Usually, we get stuck arguing over details. For example, Felix thinks the squirrels should be noticeably demonic looking with extra-red eyes, while I think it would be much scarier if the squirrels looked completely normal.

“It begins in Tompkins Square Park, where the squirrels have gotten into some hypodermic needles left over from the ’80s when the park was overrun with junkies, which causes them to mutate and become extra aggressive,” he says.

“No way! No one should know why it’s happening. It should be an existential apocalypse, a scourge open to interpretation!”

We’re never able to resolve these disputes so usually after arguing awhile, we’ll just move on to a different project. I’ll get out my crayons and coals and suggest we clear our heads by drawing and return to the script later. I have a drawing table in my apartment, so friends are always making things when they come over. I usually draw The Naked Woman—the heroine of my comic book, which is on sale at St. Mark’s right now; I’ve sold three copies. I’d started out trying to draw classical da Vinci–style nudes, but my nudes tended to look more cartoonish than Vitruvian, so I figured why not go with it, and gave her a drink and cigarette and began adding speech bubbles.

Felix likes to make drawings of hungry monsters eating their spectacles and the spectacles of others, or hungry spectacles eating monsters. He’s very creative. All of our friends are aware of how creative and talented Felix is—though he’s primarily an actor/comedian, he also paints and draws—which is one of the reasons we let him stay on our couches. We’re like patrons of the arts, sponsoring him, until he makes it. The other reason, I think, is loneliness. Sometimes it’s just nicer to wake up to Felix’s antics than to the terrible sadness that tends to come on huge after a night of furious drinking. Felix will tell jokes and goof around, and you’ll just be too busy laughing or trying not to laugh to review your own foolishness from the night before. Breakfasting with Felix allows you to put off that moment of reckoning, at least for a little while. Though lately I’ve been putting mine off for too long.