Naked (27 page)

I once worked as a runner on a construction site and lost my job when the head carpenter, a fully grown man with a Sir Lancelot
haircut, discovered I was a homosexual. We’d gotten along fine all summer, but the moment I questioned his thirst for beating
up transsexual prostitutes, he came at me with a hammer. The foreman had let me go as gently as possible, explaining that
if he ever hired an all-girl crew, I’d be the first person he called. For a long time afterward I thought of this head carpenter,
always placing him in a position of grave, physical danger. The walls of his cell were closing in. A train was headed for
his bound-and-gagged body. A bomb was set to go off and only one person could save him. “But first you have to take it all
back,” I imagined myself saying. “And this time you have to say it like you really, really mean it.” I fantasized about it
for a few months and then moved on to something else. My hands tend to be full enough dealing with people who hate me for
who
I am. Concentrate too hard on the millions who hate you for
what
you are and you’re likely to turn into one of those unkempt, sloppy dressers who sag beneath the weight of the two hundred
political buttons they wear pinned to their coats and knapsacks. I haven’t got the slightest idea how to change people, but
still I keep a long list of prospective candidates just in case I should ever figure it out.

Uta returned at five and enthusiastically inspected my work. The melted paint chips had hardened and littered the floor, as
crisp and curled as Fritos. She scooped up a handful, running them through her fingers like a pirate discovering a chestful
of golden doubloons. “Hey, Mr. Sharpie, are you sharp or what? Old Uta made a smart move signing you on, didn’t she!” She
stamped her feet upon the fallen chips, turning in a circle and snapping her fingers.

It occurred to me that she might be drunk, but Uta was the sort of person who didn’t need alcohol in order to make a spectacle
of herself. I had apparently passed her test and was invited to report back to work on Monday morning, when I could meet “what’s-his-hootle,
the colored guy.”

What’s-his-hootle was a tall, solidly built fellow in his early thirties who went by the name of Dupont Charles. In his moments
of repose, his eyes were hooded and sensually sleepy, peering out from a handsome face the color of the dark walnut stain
Uta planned to use on the woodwork. In the presence of authority, his expression would change completely. As if his features
were activated by an invisible pulley, his eyes would bulge from their sockets and his lips would stretch to comic proportions,
revealing a smile of frightening intensity.

“Well, I have a feeling you’re a pretty sharp guy,” Uta said to Dupont as I entered the room. “And that’s just what the doctor
ordered. Yes, sir, I need all the sharp guys I can get. What do you say, sharp guy, are you with us?”

“Oh, Miz Uta,” he said, “you know I is. I bees wit chu every stepa da way! You can’t find no harder worker than Ole Dupont,
less you puts ten regular mens together an’ beats ’em wid a whip.”

He rubbed his hands together and grinned in a way that made my jaws ache. Uta introduced us to each other and stood to watch
as we got started.

“You best be careful not to be holdin’ dat heat gun too close to the wood,” Dupont instructed me. “Elseways all this pretty
lady’s dreams be goin’ up in smoke and we sho’ don’t want dat happnin’, do we?”

“No, Dupont, we certainly don’t,” Uta said. “You keep on top of him and show him what’s what.”

“I sho’ will. Lord, I must be doin’ somethin’ right to have got me this fine job workin’ fah a nice lady such as yo’self.
I waked up dis moanin’ jus’ prayin’ you be haf as nice as you already is. Now here I bees workin’ longside you and this tiny
little man — oh, you done made me one happy fella, Miz Uta. One happy, happy man.”

Uta chuckled, brushing the hair away from her eyes. “You are an absolute treasure,” she said. “Both of you are just as sharp
as tacks. I guess I’m just one lucky somebody, aren’t I?”

“Pretty too,” Dupont added. “You bees jus’ as lucky an’ pretty as you can be.”

“You keep that up, mister, and I’m liable to get a swelled head.”

“Oh no, Miz Uta. Your head bees jus’ right. T’aint too big
or
small. Your head bees perfect. I wished I had me a right-sized head like yours. ’Stead mine be all swolled up an’ lumpy.”

“Well, it’s supporting a nice big brain,” Uta said. “You’ve got a good head on your shoulders, Dupont. You both do.”

Dupont beamed and I held my fingers to my throat, attempting to hold back the rising tide of vomit induced by this conversation.
Either he had been preserved in a block of ice for the past sixty years or this was some sort of an act. I prayed in favor
of the latter possibility, as I could not see myself having to spend eight hours locked in a kitchen with Stepin Fetchit.

When Uta finally left, Dupont stood at the window waving as her car disappeared into traffic. “Sayonara, fathead.” His voice
had changed both in pitch and timbre, and he no longer spoke with an accent. After turning on the radio, he took a seat on
the radiator and lit a cigarette. “You ever been to Tijuana?” he asked. Most of Dupont’s stories began with a question and
ended with an insatiable woman, buck naked and begging for more. In Tijuana it had been the dark-eyed innkeeper’s daughter
who reportedly shouted out the words “bueño!” and “grande!” as he took her from behind. Afterwards he had visited a nightclub
where, for no cover charge and a two-drink minimum, he had witnessed a prostitute get it on with a braying donkey. “For real.
After the show the club owner offered me the girl for free, but I said no because she was all stretched out. Say, you ever
put a saddle on a fat girl’s back and ride her until she drops?”

Dupont lived with his girlfriend on the north side of town. He said that being white and Jewish, she was so desperate for
a real man that she not only paid the rent and bills but also provided him with a clothing allowance. There were, he said,
some pictures he’d show me after his brother got through with them. “Have you ever gotten two sisters pregnant in the same
month?” he asked.

Uta’s car pulled up later that afternoon, and Dupont scrambled to collect his cigarette butts before turning on his heat gun.
“Dat’s how come I bees workin’ so hard,” he said to me as she entered the room. “I dreams a goin’ off ta college some day
and maybe bein’ a doctah or lawyah. Oh, hey, Miz Uta. You go get yo’ hairs done? It sho’ be lookin’ pretty.”

Uta said no, she’d just run a comb through it, nothing special. “What’s this garbage on the radio?” she asked, referring to
the station Dupont had settled on after she’d left.

“Is dat da radio I been hearin’? Sound ta me like two cats clawin’ they way outta a bag. When jew turn on da radio, Mistah
Dave? Lord, I guess I bees workin’ so hard I ain’t had da time ta hardly notice it.”

“Well
I
do and it’s giving me a big fat headache,” Uta said, resetting the dial to a classical station.

“Oh, I likes dat!” Dupont sang. “Dat dere bees the exact typo music I listens to at home.” He waved and glided his hands through
the air as if he were conducting a symphony, his heat gun shooting helter skelter and singeing the hair on my arms.

“Oh, Dupont, you are certainly one very special person.”

It was my habit to stop for a cigarette once every hour, and I saw no reason to stop just because Uta was around.

“That, mister, is one nasty habit,” she said. “You ought to do like me and quit cold turkey. It was hard, sure it was, but
I toughed it out and now I can finally see just how disgusting it really is.”

“It smell bad, too,” Dupont said, as if he could detect anything over the stench of burning paint. “It stink up da vironment
and cause folks ta get cansah, too.”

“That’s telling him,” Uta said.

“I don’t wanna get me no cansah, Miz Uta. No ma’am, I don’t want nothin’ preventin’ me from achievin’ my goals. I mona go
to medical school and learn how to be a doctah.

Then I mona go to anotha school an be a lawyah, and then I ain’t stoppin’ till I bees the president of da YOUnited States!”

“You see there,” Uta said. “Speaking on behalf of a doctor, lawyer, and the future president of the United States, there will
be no more smoking in this apartment.”

I carried my cigarette out onto the back porch, listening as Dupont promised Uta a position as his secretary of health. His
health was something he definitely needed to worry about, as I planned to kill him as soon as possible.

“Don’t think I’m not docking you for that little cigarette break, mister,” Uta said when I returned. “It was Dupont’s idea,
and I think it’s a good one. Why should he work like a dog while you sit on your duff puffing away like a chimney? Maybe a
dent in the old pocketbook will be the very thing that leads you to quit. Some people just have to learn the hard way.”

“Dat’s right!” Dupont said.

I asked him later why he bothered going through that foolish routine. He lit a cigarette and shrugged, explaining that he
needed the money. I said that I needed the money, too, but there was more than enough work to go around. Why bust my chops
and act like a moron when it wasn’t necessary?

“She likes it,” he said. “Big deal. If you want her to like
you,
maybe you should try a little harder, sharp guy.” He wiped the tips of his sneakers with a paper towel, saying, “Hey, did
you ever fuck a stout frecklefaced girl while her boyfriend was passed out in front of the TV?”

I enjoyed Dupont’s stories in part because I never quite believed them. It wasn’t, say, his seventh-grade math teacher measuring
his erect penis with a slide rule that captivated me, rather it was the notion that he thought I might be impressed. He knew
I had a boyfriend, yet he persisted with his questions. “When was the last time you poured motor oil on a college girl’s titties?”
Like the act he presented for Uta, this seemed tailored to accommodate his notion of what he thought I expected him to be.
To the landowning business-woman, he was the grinning minstrel, standing upon an overturned bucket to deliver his hopeless
State of the Union Address. To what he considered a sex-crazy homosexual, he was the indefatigable stud, roaming from haystack
to canopied bed to service his ever-expanding flock of enthusiastic bitches. I suppose we all bend ourselves to what we perceive
as other people’s expectations, but to go so far as to outlaw smoking suggested a serious personality disorder. Who was he
to his mother? To his girlfriend or father? In his attempt to be all things to all people, Dupont had succeeded in being one
of the most mysterious people I’d ever met. Coma patients reveal more about themselves than he did.

For lunch we usually took forty-five minutes and ate cheeseburgers from a stand down the street. When Uta was around, Dupont
suddenly switched to eating rice cakes and a cup of plain yogurt, her personal favorite as she was trying to work off the
weight she’d gained since calling it quits with cigarettes. He’d shovel it down in five minutes, wipe his lips with the sleeve
of his shirt, and return to work, regarding me as if I personified everything that was wrong with shiftless, fat-dazed America.

“I likes to eat da natural things what God set upon the plate of Adam an Eves,” he’d say. “Don’t take much ta make
me
happy, no ma’am; the littler I eats, the happier I bees.”

“That’s because you’re like me,” Uta would say. “You’re a sharp person who eats smart.”

We’d been at it for close to three weeks when finally it was time to switch off our heat guns and move on to the next phase.
Uta had a system for stripping wood that involved using sawdust rather than steel wool. We painted the chemicals onto a patch
of woodwork, packed it with sawdust, and scrubbed the area with a brush, removing the varnish to expose the natural oak that
probably hadn’t seen the light of day since Uta’s friend Hitler was a young boy in lederhosen. Her method was quicker than
using steel wool — cheaper, too — as the sawdust was given away free by the neighborhood lumberyard. The problem was that
the sawdust had a way of infiltrating any unguarded part of the body, coating our hair and settling into the ears and nostrils.
It crept through the eyelets of my shoes, into my socks and pockets, and clung to the sweat of our faces so that by the end
of the day we all looked frighteningly alike. With our matte, beige faces; red eyes; and plush, dusted hair, Uta, Dupont,
and I could have easily passed as members of the same grotesque family.

Uta was away one morning, visiting her accountant, when Dupont asked, “Have you ever loaned pictures of your girl-friend to
your brother and gotten them back all covered with stains?” The answer was clearly so obvious, he did not hesitate for a reply
but rather handed me a stack of Polaroids wherein a washed-out, naked, and bored-looking white woman posed upon a brown corduroy
sofa, clutching a variety of household objects in her vagina: a flashlight, a hair-brush, a family-sized tube of toothpaste,
and what looked to be a bottle of either shampoo or dish detergent. “That’s my girl!” Dupont said proudly. It was his hope
to get the pictures published in what he referred to as “one of the magazines.” Toward the bottom of the stack were portraits
of Dupont, sitting on a rattan throne and wearing nothing but pale blue socks and a pair of aviator sunglasses. His face was
twisted into a sneer, and he was leaning forward, propping his chin upon the handle of a cane carved to resemble the head
of an angry lion.

In situations like this I tend to comment on the details that might allow me to walk away as quietly as possible. “That’s
some chair,” I said. “Where did you get that picture you’ve got hanging on the wall there? It always cheers me up to see a
kitten sleeping in any kind of a basket.”

“You ever fuck a Jewish girl up the butt with the tip of a cane?” he asked.

We had finished stripping all the woodwork and were preparing to apply the stain when Uta announced that following this next
stage of the game, she would no longer be needing us both. Her friend Briggs would drive in from Michigan to lend a hand when
it came time to apply the finish. “I’m sorry, guys,” she said. “You’re both as sharp as you can be, but Briggs is practically
family and has a lot of experience with polyurethane.”