Manhattan Loverboy (13 page)

I was awakened to find a cop was shaking me. He told me to follow him. He led me to a desk where I was informed that I had no outstanding convictions and that the lab had determined that my grass was 100 percent catnip. Regarding the allegations of sexual coercion, the young lady had refused to press charges. In short, and much to their chagrin, I could go.

When I got home I couldn’t believe what had happened. Somehow, she had entered my apartment and had switched the fuse box and water mains to her half of the house. An intensive, extensive job in electricity and plumbing had been done in a matter of hours while I was in jail. I sat on the ground among the rubble caused by the quick construction, only to be awakened in a couple hours when the phone rang. Someone claiming to be a representative from my proofreading agency said, “Aeiou, how do you spell compassion? Don’t answer that; you might spell Rolaids. I just got a call from Reigert & Mortimer. Someone said you mis-spelled the word once too often and, unless you’re thrown to the winds, they’re pulling the account. Well I got news, ta ta…” Click.

In the five thousand years of recorded history, had there yet been a legal document with the word “compassion” in it?

Amy had put the wooden stake through the heart. She had not only gotten me fired, she had trumped up the charge that I was unable to spell the word “compassion.” What a diabolical sense of the acerbic!

Ironically (since I was just released from jail for not having pot), I retrieved my actual cache of pot from under the toilet and lit up to calm down. I also took out a line of acid drop papers that had the words “12-step program time” printed on them. Why? Why not?

I leaned against that wall dividing me from her and busily smoked a joint, trying to get over the loss of my crap-ass job.

Suddenly, though, I thought I felt an optic nerve pinch, but no! It moved! The wall! Just about a sixty-fourth-of-an-inch, but it actually moved into my half of the apartment. I stared at it some more, and through pin pricks of light I could see it recede backward. No longer trusting myself, I got my camera and patiently lay in wait for the beast to show itself. All the time, I wondered what the hell was going on. Was it an optical illusion? I touched the wall. It felt like half-inch drywall sections innocently anchored into aluminum studs, nonchalantly secured to joists—a very shrewd camouflage. I drew pencil lines along the points where the wall met the other walls, the ceiling, and the floor. After two hours, I did more acid to keep from falling asleep, and that’s when I saw it pulsate again. It only did it for a second, but I was able to snap the picture. The first thing next morning I took it to the Fotomat.

I waited.

Twenty-four hours later I got the film back. In the interim, when I came down, I figured it was all an illusion. My perception must have been twisted by the chemicals in my brain. But one little item changed all that. In one of the photos there was a slight blur in the upper half of the wall. Evidence of motion could be clearly detected. Regarding my case, I considered all my charges against her. First, she had made me sign a contract under pharmaceutical duress. But that would be my word against hers. To give me the edge of credibility, I quickly urinated into an empty Styrofoam cup that formerly held that morning’s coffee. The judge, if he so deemed, could analyze the metabolites (or whatever they were) in my specimen. After years of drug saturation, not to mention the joint I had just smoked, I was sure I would still turn up proof-positive, showing that any contract I ever signed had not been lucidly agreed to.

I also wanted to bring up the fact that she had her workmen intimidate me, but I had no witnesses, no bruises. She had had the water and electrical mains rerouted through her room; that was indisputable. But the “wall picture,” my Exhibit A, made me confident that I could win the case. The cup of urine, too, would be a help, but just to be safe, I spent the evening toking grass and blowing smoke bubbles in the piss through a straw.

CHAPTER SEVEN

ROACH MOTELS &
GLUE TRAPS

L & T, 110 Centre Street: Unprecedentedly, I was early. I entered and took a seat in a room that resembled a large storefront church. On the far side of what looked like an altar were the judge and his uniformed, overweight stooges. On my side were the pews, filled with angry and misshaped parishioners. I didn’t see Amy. With my cup of urine in one hand, a book in the other, I was an excerpt of
savoir faire
. I squeezed into a seat. Because my last name began with an “A,” my case would be on top of the cattle call. Reading Arthur Nersesian’s self-published classic,
The Fuck-Up
, I quickly heard the court crier cry, “AEIOU vs. RAPAPPORT.” His twisted pronunciation of my name sounded like, “Hey you!” and every twit in the place simultaneously pointed at himself and asked quietly, “Me?”

As I approached the bench, all the while looking for her, I bumped into some hyperactive post-adolescent who was carefully balancing a cup of soda. Perhaps it was his liquid Exhibit A. Of course it spilled all over me. The liquid had an acrid aroma to it. The kid raced off as if he had stolen my valuables, and the yeller yelled my name again.

“I’m Aeiou,” I said, trying to wipe the smelly stuff off my relatively good clothes. “Do I win by default?”

“We’re Rapapport,” I heard sung in harmony behind me. I turned around to see them: Four well-suited young lawyers, each armed with a briefcase, were casting a long, collective shadow over me. Amy was safely in the middle of them. It was like a Secret Service phalanx guarding their presidette. Whatever legal pyrotechnics they might have in their briefcases couldn’t rival the fact that I was right.

“Room six,” the head clerk announced. We all marched off to room six. A small room with two tables and six chairs was where justice would be meted out. A balding, older, overweight guy with an incredible goiter was the judge. As he mumbled some formalities and then read some forms, I couldn’t take my eyes off that enigmatic growth on his neck. It seemed to beckon me. Since I had brought the complaint, he asked me casually, “What’s on your chest?”

“Firstly, Miss Rapapport,” I pointed to her, “connived a lease out of me. Secondly, she divided my apartment in half. Thirdly, she has been moving the wall closer and closer into my part of the house, and the thing is, her yuppie friends have been conspiring to destroy my life. She also got me fired from my job for mis-spelling the word ‘compassion’ and…”

“No, no, what’s on your chest?” He pointed to my chest. My shirt and pants were filled with holes large and small.

“What’s that smell?” the judge sniffed. “It smells like battery acid or something.”

“They did it!” I hollered. The post-adolescent who’d spilled what I thought was soda must have been an agent of theirs. “They did it! She! See, I’m one of the normal people and she’s…”

“Enough! Prove it.”

“No problem.” Confidently, I held up the Styrofoam cup of urine and pulled out my photo and put it before him.

“It looks like a photo of a wall.”

“Isn’t it brilliant? The subtlety of it! Isn’t it just genius?”

“What the hell are you talking about?”

“Examine, if you would, the top left hand corner of the photo.”

“Yeah, so?”

“The wall is moving! The wall moved! She did something to make the wall move! She made the damned wall move. Her and those warlock workmen. This is indisputable.”

“No, it’s not. You could have moved the camera when you shot this photo. What other proof do you have?”

“This,” I said. He held out his hand and I handed him the cup. He sniffed it deeply.

“What is it?” he asked.

“My pee.”

He put the cup down and wiped his hand off carefully while I elaborated. “She drugged me, and cocaine-positive metabolites are in that vessel.”

“What other proof?”

“What else?!” Distraught, in disbelief, and dissed, I despaired and felt panicky. I soothed my anxieties by stepping a bit closer to the radiance of his glowing goiter. I knew if worse came to worst I could somehow appeal to the humility of his goiter.

“We’d like to state our defense,” they said in chorus.

“Go on.”

“Wait a second,” I said to the goiter. “May I approach the bench?”

“I don’t have a bench.”

“Can I whisper in your goit…ear?”

“My ear?”

“It’s urgent!”

“All right,” said the judge with some resignation.

I had no idea what I was going to say but I had to make it clear to him what was going on. I leaned over his goiter. It looked like a dinosaur egg. I smelled it. It didn’t really smell. It had streaks and colors running through it that seemed to be a great amalgam of mystery. It was kind of a great unification.

“Well?”

“Did you ever see
The Invasion of the Body Snatchers?
” I said in a whisper.

“The film with that tall British actor with the mustache…”

“Whose son cheated on Julia Roberts…”

“Yeah, Donald Sutherland!” he said.

“He’s actually from Canada, that’s the remake.”

“Well, that’s the only one I saw.”

“That’s all right. Remember how pods from a foreign planet come to earth and replicate bodies of Earthlings…”

“What’s your point, son?”

“These people in front of us, look at them.”

“So?”

“They’re yuppies, right?”

“I suppose so,” he replied.

“Well, are they yuppies or not? Please correct me if I’m wrong.”

“Yes,” he conceded. “So what?”

“Where were they ten years ago?”

“I haven’t the foggiest,” he replied, and added, “If you’ve got something to tell me, you’d better tell it now because I’m all out of patience.”

“They’re from somewhere else—Bismarck, North Dakota. And they’re trying to peel us away. They lure us. They draw us out into their glue traps and then they drown us while we’re stuck there struggling and squealing…”

“I want to help you but…”

“Look, I can tell you’re one of me. Together we can take back all those goddamned buildings that they changed into their bases.”

“What bases?”

“You know, all those massive co-ops named after Midwestern states or Waspish names. The places that these guys had to bribe in order to get around all the local zoning ordinances and are built on New York landmarks!”

“Huh?”

“We can rebuild Penn Station and Moondog and the Third Avenue El and…it’s culture-cleansing!” I screamed.

“Were you born in this city? Is that it?”

“No, but…”

“Were you raised in the city?”

“No, but…”

“Well, then, what are you talking about?”

“They’re with the Mafia,” I finally said.

“The Mafia?!”

“One of them,” I muttered, stepping up closer.

“Which of these people,” he pointed to the group, “are with the Mafia?”

“No, I mean they are each with one of the many mafias.”

“And how many mafias are there?”

“More than I could ever count.”

“Look,” he exhaled slowly and, looking over to Amy’s band of thieves, said, “I see what appear to be four very expensive lawyers over there. And I see you all alone. In trying to balance the scales of justice, I’m extending a patience I wouldn’t normally extend here.”

“I appreciate that. These people are with one of the mafias. Yes, that’s what I’m saying.”

“What the hell are you talking about?”

“There’s the Irish Mafia in the church and police. The Jewish Mafia in psycho-analysis, Hollywood, and the literature of the ’50s. There’s the Indian Mafia on Sixth Street restaurant row as well as the subway newsstands. The Korean green-grocer Mafia. The Gay Mafia of the beat generation. Not to mention the Black Mafia in Harlem, the Russian Mafia in Brighton Beach, the Armenian Carpet Mafia…”

“Enough!” he put his hand up. “Son, you need help…” He rambled on. I had lost him, and saw that a supreme authority was required, the emergency cord, the goiter, an all-unifying force in a fragmented world. A rainbow organ, a multi-cultural growth, a great democracy of cells. I seized the goiter in both hands like a fallen sparrow and whispered sweet caresses into it. He shrieked, and the yuppies charged me. Court officers dashed in and helped them press the right side of my face to the marble floor. The judge ordered them to take me outside and set me free. The case was dismissed.

I don’t know what became of the urine specimen.

Even I know I shouldn’t have touched him. I’m convinced that some kind of mind-controlling inhalant was in that soda spilled on me in the cattle-call area. In the past, I had always been afraid of goiters. Once again, they had made a fool of me.

Two weeks later, an unoriginal countersuit arrived in the mail. They and the Japanese, no imagination, the lot of them, just replicating and mass-marketing the ideas invented by the likes of us. I had to appear in court, and it wasn’t landlord-tenant court, either.

It was the kind of court that had a bench, but the judge didn’t let you approach it. In fact, everyone seemed to shun me, even my Legal Aid lawyer, who seemed to feel that I had somehow gotten him in trouble. Whenever I humbly asked him a question, he’d reply with rolling eyes and opening lines like, “For the millionth time…” or “You again?!” A goiter in that courtroom would have been macheted from the neck like a coconut. I didn’t even bother to bring the “wall picture.”