No Lease on Life (16 page)

Elizabeth gave him money. She never asked him to come for dinner. She never cooked. Even if she did cook, she wouldn’t have. She wasn’t Ron.

—You weren’t scary and threatening like that hairy, smelly guy on the block last year. He was kind of like a cartoon homeless guy. You didn’t know what he was going to do.

—I offered him a sandwich one time, and he said no. I was a cleaning man for the building next to me, and he’d been chased from another stoop, he began to squat on the property I was cleaning. I told him, Listen, if it was up to me, I’d let you stay here. But the tenants, there are children in the building, and there are ladies in the building who are frightened, so you can’t stay here. I tried to make that up to him by saying, Do you want a dollar or two? Do you want a sandwich? He’d always say, No, no, no. But I know he was hungry, he would scrounge around in the garbage can for something to eat. I knew he wanted to scare people away.

—You weren’t frightening. You were compelling.

Paulie’s eyebrows shot up. It was the other-people-are-other-people look.

—A lot of the young people didn’t really appreciate my craziness or my living on the street. They would use me as a target for their aggression. They would throw bottles at me and cans, and a couple of times I got into scuffles with people, because I was trying to make things better. I would tell people, Why don’t you loosen up a bit? They would take that as an attack on their being, so they would try to chase me, or punch me. I don’t recommend leaving home and trying to live on the street at this time. There are too many people who don’t appreciate that.

Elizabeth asked Paulie if he meant the crusties.

—I don’t understand what they’re about. Not that they have to be about anything, but they must have an idea of life that is different from most people. They don’t eat that much. I know they drink all the time, and when they’re done drinking they leave like fifteen bottles on the street. They break them on purpose. They’re interesting to me. They’re like gypsies. They’re being persecuted. They’re constantly moving from block to block to find a place where they can squat and not be told to move.

Elizabeth told him she hated the ground they squatted on.

—I want to have faith in them, and I think they’re important to the community because they’re a minority which I think should be part of the community and not shunned, pushed aside. Maybe they’re sick. I was sick on the street at first. I had my first breakdown, call it a breakdown, in 1967, my friends brought me to a psychiatrist, and he was giving me medication, and that seemed to straighten me out a bit. I wasn’t as crazy. But when I moved to our block, in 1971,I began to get sick again because I wasn’t eating right, and it was part of my illness that I objected to medication, and that was one of the major keys to my health. It keeps me from hallucinating, getting paranoid.

Paulie was a better person than she was. Elizabeth was unmedicated.

—Do you remember when we first began to say hello? she asked.

—No, he said.

It was always like that.

—I had a lot of things I was disturbed about. My kid brother died in Vietnam, and my brother and sister got married and they moved upstate. They didn’t like blacks, or third world communities. Most of my family was like that. When the poor people, the third world, started to move closer to them, they decided they didn’t want to bring their kids up with that, they thought it would be a bad influence. They gave up on me too. My older brother could have taken me in for a while, but there wasn’t room for me. My younger brother was my favorite, and when he died in Nam, around the same time, my mother was murdered. She was shot by my stepfather.

His face showed nothing.

—My brother died first. I told him you should try to think twice before you go in. He didn’t, he went and six months later he died. He got shot down at Hamburger Hill. They took a whole month to find him. I used to have dreams that he was captured and being tortured. You know, all those stories?

Elizabeth held Paulie’s rough hand. Her hand was proofreader soft.

—He was nineteen, he was gone. My mother got remarried to this guy who was a friend of the family. She was having a hard time with him too. He was a cop, and after he retired, they got a house down in Florida. I didn’t see the place, but I can imagine it was terrible. Then all of a sudden we get a phone call, Mom was dead, she was shot by our stepfather. They had a trial in Florida, I was sick, in and out of the hospital. I just couldn’t go down to the trial. My family was pissed at me. And revenge hit my family. They wanted to get this guy. My sister was afraid he was going to kill her, she was a little nutty. It wasn’t that way. My mother could get under your skin…

Elizabeth ordered another round.

—He murdered her, Paulie.

—He killed her, and he got an acquittal.

—On what grounds?

—Florida is kind of a conservative state.

—He didn’t do any time?

Elizabeth might not do time for doing a moron. She had more justification. Her action wouldn’t be personal. It’d be a social attack.

—My mother was the one who kept the family together, Paulie said.

The bathroom floor was wet. The stall was filthy. No one was hanging from the ceiling, no one was slumped over, dead, on the toilet, with a needle in her arm. The walls were zines.

DUCK LIPS. DUCK LIPS are a girl’s best friend.

Duck lips duck lips uber alles.

What can’t hurt you can’t be much fun. Maxine.

Josie gives great blow jobs.

My cunt is eden.

God is legally blind.

The STAIN…

The stream of hot yellow piss falling from her was satisfying. She was full, now she was emptying herself, it felt good even if it was nothing, and she was an endless river of piss. Elizabeth giggled. Some people believe drinking urine is healthy. People believe anything. She didn’t ask Paulie where he shit when he went homeless. She once saw a woman shitting in a phone booth on Wall Street. The cops were there in a second.

Elizabeth called the room from a phone booth next to the bathroom. The room needed her, where was she? Elizabeth heard disappointment in her supervisor’s voice. Rose Hill. Rose was the longtime head of the room. Elizabeth couldn’t handle the room without Rose. Rose Hill had a life outside the correctional facility. On Fourteenth Street, there was an actual building with her name carved on it.

Paulie went his way, Elizabeth went hers. He waved at her, she waved at him, and then he kept waving, but he didn’t turn around, he just waved, his hand flapping behind his back. He kept waving it as he walked farther away. He was already in his world, and she was in hers.

A sandwich walks into a bar and sits down on a barstool. The bartender says, I’m sorry, we don’t serve lunch.

A white woman from out of town is staying at a fancy hotel. She gets on the elevator. At the next floor Lionel Ritchie gets on with his dog. The singer commands, Down, down, lie down, to his dog. The woman drops to the floor.

It was a short cab ride, just four avenues west, seven blocks north, walking distance. She was late and high. The driver understood English. He didn’t want to talk much. He knew his way. He was tuned to a radio talk show. The talk show host was railing against welfare queens. Taxi drivers turned their radios loud to enflame passengers who were easily driven mad in snarled traffic. There was only one furry deodorant object dangling from his rearview mirror. She tipped him. He didn’t say thank you. She slammed the door hard.

She always tipped, except the time she hailed a cab after a late night at work.

—Tompkins Square Park, please.

—You’re taking me to the cemetery.

—What’d you say?

—You’re taking me to the cemetery.

The cab slowed approaching a red light. Elizabeth opened her door and jumped out. She slammed the door hard. Taxi drivers hated that.

The proofroom was air-conditioned. One of the two obese men, the nicer, funnier one, was there. He didn’t sweat much, except for the top of his bald head. Beads of sweat collected there. He had ten fragile hairs, and the sweat flattened those. His bald head was damp and shiny. He was fastidious about his appearance. Roy called him Proofroom Fats.

Proofroom Fats was in an OK mood. When the other obese man wasn’t around, he was nicer to Elizabeth.

Jean-Henri Dunant. 1828–1910. Swiss philanthropist, born in Geneva, inspired the foundation of the International Red Cross after seeing the plight of the wounded on the battlefield of Solferino. His efforts brought about the Conference at Geneva (1863) from which came the Geneva Convention (1854). In 1901, with Frederic Passy, he was awarded the first Nobel Peace Prize.

Gisela was right. It didn’t mention his incarceration in a mental hospital. Probably censored by the Swiss government. Everyone else in the room was sullen. The room was correcting articles about the richest people in the world. They read about personal net worth and assets slipping from $2.2 billion to $1.8 billion. She’d been in the room, off and on, more than seven years. She’d cut her proofroom teeth reading about prisons managed by private corporations which profited off prisoners by cutting out desserts, about the parasitic nature of senior citizens, who vote, that’s all, so why bother about them, they’re just a drain on the economy. The first year was the hardest. She became used to it. Newcomers found it demoralizing.

A snail goes to the police station. He’s all beat up. The cop asks who did it. The snail says, a turtle. Can you describe the turtle, the cop asks. How big was he? What color? The snail says, I don’t know. It all happened so fast.

After five years, she was allowed to attend the veterans’ party. It was in honor of the boss’s birthday. Employees were given bonuses equivalent to the years he’d lived plus how many they’d worked for the company. There was a system to the giving that was strictly followed. The boss handed envelopes to all the workers after lunch under a circus ten.

The veterans were transported to the boss’s estate by bus. Two busloads of workers arrived at the estate on a warm morning in September. They were allowed the run of the place, allowed to see the master’s bedroom, swim in the pool, play tennis. Elizabeth hung out on the lawn and avoided the main house. She watched the misshapen scene. The servants, the house slaves, served canapes. The house slaves wore white aprons over black uniforms. They scorned the field slaves, the workers brought to the main house as a treat by the master. The house slaves’ disdain was painted on their pinched, colorless faces. They held the silver trays painfully far from their bodies, for the field slaves, the lowlife from the city.

Elizabeth didn’t eat the cheesy hors d’oeuvres. She talked to people from the room. The proofreaders were scattered uncomfortably over the plush, rolling green lawn. They were unsuitable, not designed for it, eyesores to the house slaves.

One of the boss’s sons appeared. The nice, quiet one. He was taking pictures. Without a word, he shot them.

—You didn’t ask for my release, Elizabeth said.

—Your release is when you sign the back of your paycheck, he said.

He snapped another picture. He didn’t take his eyes from the back of the camera. It took a second, then he realized the naked truth of his words. He became flustered and loped off.

—You could get fired, the nasty obese man warned.

—He doesn’t have the courage of his convictions, she said.

Toadies are taking over the world was what she thought.

A man was fucking a girl in the ass. He comes and says, wasn’t that amazing? She says, Actually I found it humiliating. He says, That’s a pretty big word for a ten-year-old.

Elizabeth wasn’t going to this year’s veterans’ party. The supervisors weren’t happy about it. In a feudal place, employees were expected to show their servile gratitude to the boss.

She worked with her feet on the table of her cubicle, if the editors didn’t barge into the room to check up on the misfits, who were in charge of correcting them, which was a joke, and if they did, she read copy with her feet on the floor.

Paulie’s mother kept his family together and got murdered by the man she loved. When Paulie went homeless, he got better.

Elizabeth would be here forever for a home and get worse. She was silent, intent upon being silent. She surveyed the room. The readers were concentrating on little black marks on shiny white pages. Doing cold reads.

Elizabeth caught several big mistakes. She corrected them, tidied them up. She was paid for that. She was a superintendent like Hector. But she did her job.

If the errors had gone into the magazine, the room would be in trouble. After the issue appeared, and the offending mistake on the offending page was noticed, it would be copied and sent to the senior editors, maybe even the boss. They’d return copies of the page or pages to the supervisors of the room, and the proofreader would be talked to, and individuals would be warned if it was the second time, fired if they’d been responsible for several mistakes or for one really serious, embarrassing miss that made the company look bad.

A proofreader capped the “t” in a sentence about “tony Bennett College.” “Tony Bennett College.” He was fired.

That was before Elizabeth arrived.

In time every new reader was told the tale of the proofreader’s Tony Bennett error, usually over take-out food. The newcomers learned they could be fired for their errors. The longtimers laughed so hard they couldn’t eat. Except for the obese men. They could always eat.

The room parried its futility, fought against its marginality with righteousness. They discussed their endangered work, how no one cared about mistakes in books and newspapers, how editors and especially writers didn’t know what they were doing.