Tabloid Dreams (7 page)

And it wasn't new to me, somehow, though it was something I'd left behind long ago. When I was a little girl I would lie in the field on my grandfather's farm in Connecticut and I would look at the clouds and I would see the usual things, of course, castles and horses and swans. But there were also faces in the clouds. Boys. These were boys that would appear over me as I lay on my back feeling the sun on my legs and opening to the life that awaited me, all the years ahead. The faces of boys would come to me in the sky and for a while I took them to be premonitions of boys who would one day love me, visions of their faces with wonderful, delicate varieties of brows and jaws and noses. And I loved them all, and each one loved a different aspect of me. This boy with a great pug nose was clearly a sports hero. I could ride horses with him. That one was a delicate boy with a weak chin, a poet; we would lie beneath the water oaks along my grandfather's stream and he would read poems to me. Another one with a high forehead was a banker and he and I would sit at night beside a fire and do my arithmetic together—I loved arithmetic and I thought I would always have these little puzzles to do. There were so many boys. Somewhere along the way, all that dreaming was lost and I just stopped expecting anything, really, from my sexuality. But as a child, I didn't think that one day I would have to choose just one of these boys in the sky. There were too many parts to
me,
you see.

The mistake I made was to talk about the change in my life to my masturbation therapy author. She was a psychologist, after all. And it was just conversation at lunch before the taping of Jenny Jones. I guess there was an implicit criticism about what she was saying in her book. You close the loop with yourself and it's not going to lead to healing. I didn't say it that way to her, but what else could she conclude? She was sitting across from me and eating red snapper and really enjoying it and it occurred to me that I hadn't seen her left hand come up from beneath the table for a while and I could see her vision of things: all the women of the world dining with their hands under their linen napkins and that's all they would ever need. So it was a mistake to tell her.

Then yesterday I saw the tabloid headline as I stood in a checkout lane at Gristede's and I looked at the story. They'd changed my name but every other detail was mine, and I knew I'd been betrayed. I abandoned my grocery cart and called my author. “What have you done?” I demanded. “Isn't that privileged information or something?”

“No,” she said. “I've only got a master's degree in psychology.”

“Are you sleeping with the tabloid editor?”

There was only silence on the other end of the line.

“Hypocrite,” I said.

Then when I saw him last night on the television and when my hand rose before the screen to touch him, I knew what was next. My butt burned for him.

The offices of
Real World Weekly
were in a recently gentrified brownstone in the East Village and I showed up this morning in a silk shift and I'd combed my hair out long and put a rose behind my ear. “Who shall I say is here to see him?” his mouse of a secretary said.

“Tell him I'm the woman from this week's front page.”

She narrowed her eyes at me.

“Tell him I saw him on TV and I hear a taxi's horn blaring in my ears and only he can make it stop.”

She gulped at this and turned her back to me and spoke low into the intercom.

He was there moments later, out of breath. He took one look at me and shot me that half smile with the dimple and he led me to his office at the back of the first floor. The room was stacked with newspapers and the clippings were all over his desk, and holding down a pile was a grapefruit-sized rock—dark and pocked—and on another pile was a brass stand with what looked like a shrunken head hanging on it. The little guy actually struck me as pretty cute.

“It's real,” he said.

“Who was he?”

“Some Amazonian. He can predict the future. We did a story.”

“And the rock?”

“Piece of a meteor.”

I looked at the editor, and his sea gray eyes were intent on me.

“Like the one hurtling toward the earth?” I asked.

He smiled and the dimple appeared.

“Don't move,” I said. “Keep the smile.”

But he said, “Coming to kill us all,” and the dimple went away.

“The smile.”

He looked at me closely. “Are you really her?”

“I edited
Touch Yourself, Cure Yourself.
”

“Holy shit.”

“The smile,” I said.

“Are you here as outraged victim or as . . .” He hesitated.

“As nympho?”

“Ah . . . yes.”

“Nympho.”

That brought the smile back and I reached out and put the tip of my forefinger, just briefly, in that little spot. It was a sweet little soft place, this tuck in the face of a handsome man who was full of irony about the way our world was considering itself at the end of the millennium. That made me run hot for the secrets of his body. But his question was very interesting to me, really. That part of me born in the crosswalk was starting to blur the boundaries the editor was suggesting. Victim or nympho. Rage or lust.

After I drew my hand back, I said, “Men in the imperial Chinese court bound their women's feet. Did you know that?”

“I bet there are modern footbinders,” he said with a rising in his voice like he'd just gotten a great new idea.

“Maybe so,” I said.

“In Algeria, perhaps. Or right back in China. But that's a little remote.”

“Would you like to understand them?” I said, and I was only just catching up, myself, with this turn in the conversation. I hadn't even realized the footbinders were on my mind, much less that I had some insight into them.

He snapped his fingers. “Appalachia,” he said. “We'll look there.”

“The men controlled their women this way,” I said. “But they also created this intensely secret part on the women's bodies. The bound feet were supposed to be covered up always, but I think there were times, very rare, when, in the middle of the night, lit by candles, this secret of the body was shared.” I'd moved closer to him and his gray eyes had turned back to me, though I sensed Appalachia lingering behind them. “They were like superpussies,” I said.

Now I had his complete attention. “This is very interesting,” he said, hoarsely.

“And that was the woman's control,” I said. “I bet a man in imperial China would do anything the woman would ask just for the privilege of seeing this secret thing.”

“I bet,” he whispered.

“Do you find a woman's foot beautiful?” I drew my fingertips down his cheek.

“Yes,” he said. “Sure.” He was breathing heavily.

“Will you please start with mine?”

“Yes?”

“Please. As you know from reading your paper, I can't wait.”

I took a step back and I slipped out of my shoes and I've got real good legs—I've had a lot of compliments in the past few months—and my feet are pretty, I keep my feet very nice. The editor-in-chief looked at them, and I could sense him trembling. Trembling and rising, in that secret part of him, a part which was hidden and bound until I chose to see it.

“Please,” I said. “Start there.” And I nodded to the floor, to my feet. “They've been covered up all day long. Nobody could see them.”

He wanted to. I could tell. But he was hesitating. “Down,” I said.

And he went down, onto his knees, and he bent to me and he began to kiss my toes and I thank my gypsy cab driver for teaching me how pleasurable all that can be and my hand was on the meteor and I picked it up and it was very heavy, very heavy indeed, and its heaviness sent a thrill through me, a sweet wet thrill, and I looked down at the straight white part in his hair, the very place where this meteor was about to strike, and I thought how sexy. How truly sexy is the secret shape of a man's brain.

“Nine-Year-Old Boy Is World's
Youngest Hit Man”

This guy Ivan over at the Black Sea Social Club on Sixth and Avenue A says that when he went shopping as a little boy with his mama in Moscow he'd go to the one big department store in town and he'd stand in line and sometimes it'd be for hours and they didn't even know what it was they was waiting to buy. Then it'd turn out to be some shit like socks or suspenders or a rubber bowl. A Russian Tupperware party, he says, is four hours in a line with strangers to buy a rubber bowl. But they had so little, you just got what you could. That's why he does the things he does now in America, because it's the land of opportunity. And it's never too early to get in on the action, he says, cause you never had to wait to suffer in Russia. There are no children in Russia, he says.

I like it when Ivan tells me that. Up to this morning. When I'm feeling bad about myself, I say to him, I maybe ain't no child but I'm little, and he tells me it don't make no difference. It gives you an edge, he says to me. I know what he means, but I'm always thinking I want my hands to be bigger. I want that right now. I like the Makarov nine millimeter okay and most of Ivan's buddies at the social club use it, but it's just a pound and a half and not even six and a half inches long. Just right for me, but that pisses me off. Like being a Yankees fan. It's right there, up the subway line, but it's not what you really want. Besides, Ivan and those guys aren't real Americans yet, and I am, and the one thing I got off my long-gone daddy was his daddy's Colt .45 pistol. The Model 1911A1. They started making this baby way back in 1911, that's why they gave it that model number. And nobody's done any better. My daddy told me that. I stole it from him a long time ago, long before I did these things for Ivan. It was when my daddy was too drunk to see and I got lucky because the next day he walked out and my mama and me never heard from him again and he didn't even have his daddy's gun. I did. And it's like if Babe Ruth was still playing for the Yankees today and he was in his prime. Because this 1911 can still hit. I just can't quite hold it yet to do the job. My goddamn hands aren't big enough.

Last night I was sitting at our kitchen table and Mama was fussing around making it look like warming up Spaghetti Os was about a ten-step gourmet thing. She was still in her terry cloth dressing gown, my mama. She hasn't got a man hanging around her these days. Hasn't had for a while. And I was just looking at my little hands lying there on the table.

“Wally,” she says to me. “Why you're always sitting around the kitchen in your undershirt.”

“I'm waiting for you to give me a beer,” I say.

She waves the can opener she's been struggling with for five minutes. “What are you saying? I never gave you no beer.”

“I can wait.”

“You're a little boy,” she says.

“Mama, you don't know nothing about it.”

She goes a little crazy at this, since we've had this conversation a few times before and she thinks she knows something about me. “I got eyes,” she says. “I know you. I been around you for only nine years and at the start of that you was about twenty inches long. You don't think I know what a little boy looks like?”

So now she's got me looking at my hands, like two goddamn little bath toys sitting on the table, and I'm getting some feelings I don't want to think about. “Shut up now, Mama,” I say.

She does. I should like that, but I don't, exactly. Then she says, real low, “So what will happen if I don't shut up?”

I don't have an answer for that. It's a stupid question.

She says, “Where do you go, Wally? When you're supposed to be in school. When you go out at night. I can't watch you all the time. What is it you're doing?”

I look at her and she kind of backs up a little bit, the can opener wobbling around in the air in front of her. I say, “Don't talk crazy. You're my mama.” My voice—I can hear it like it belongs to somebody else—is as tiny as my hands, a piping cute-ass little voice.

“What kind of answer is that?” she asks me.

“What are you talking about?” My head is full of static now, like a radio that's off the station.

So I do both of us a favor. I get up and go out. There's a couple of guys jittering around at the corner and I know they just see me as some kid they can cut up easy and I left my heat back in my room, so I go the other way. And I walk around thinking about my dad. He was a big talker. He was always saying, I'm going to make this score, I'm going to make that score. I didn't know what he was talking about back then. I was just a lad. Four or five. Something like that. I was still playing on the raggedy-ass swings and shit at Tompkins Square Park. I'd swing up and down and the chains would scream like I was killing them and when I was way up high all I could see, all around, was funky homeless people living in cardboard boxes or sleeping under newspapers on the benches, guys that would grab at you when you went by, some of them, guys that would do anything to a little kid. Those guys were everywhere in the place I was a kid, and so were the old Russian guys sitting around playing chess.

Is my daddy going to end up like that, wherever he is? Not like the Russians. He don't play no games, as far as I know. Like the homeless people. Is he going to end up living in a refrigerator box with a stack of old Sunday
Times?
I don't know. All I know is I got his gun. And I figure he was full of shit about all the big stuff he was going to do. To tell the truth, though, I'd like to meet up with him someday and see how he come out. I was thinking about that walking around last night. And I was getting pissed. I was thinking, I got a score to settle with him. I do. I wish I didn't. I wish it was simple, about him. But what am I going to do? I've learned how things have to be.

The first time Ivan sent me to do this thing for him, I was pretty nervous about it. Sure. That was almost a year ago. I've got a birthday next week. I'll be ten, if I live that long. When I just turned nine, Ivan called me in from the dark open door of the social club. I was just passing time in the neighborhood. Kicking a flat Coke can around, trying to make it stop on the sidewalk cracks. Telling other kids who passed by that I was going to kill them. Stuff like that. So this voice from the darkness says, “Hey, little man. Come on in to this place.”

I know the streets, and these guys were pretty new, but I could figure out this social club. It wasn't a place of perverts. It was a place of business. So I go in. This is when I met Ivan. “You want beer, little man?” he says.

“No,” I say to him, though I like it that he asks me. Now I would've said yes, but the first time he asked me, I was straight from punk stuff like kicking Coke cans and I wasn't ready to say yes.

“You know how to get to Brighton Beach on subway?” he says to me.

Thinking about it a little later that day, I liked that being the first question he had about me. Not do you think you can kill.

“I can find it,” I say.

“That's good,” he says. “You really want to kill somebody?”

This is when he shows me the Makarov. He calls it a “PM.”

I love that pistol at first sight. I bad-mouth it sometimes, thinking about the 1911. But it's the first one I knew I could shoot.

I ask him, “What's that, ‘PM'? You just use this at night?”

“You can use it at night,” Ivan says. “But it is Pistol Makarov. You want to hold this thing and maybe use it for me and then you can buy yourself something nice? You can walk around outside there and know you are big man already?”

My head was spinning from this. I had plenty of worries out there in the street. The guys in the park. The crackheads waiting in your building, in the shadows somewhere to grab you and if you don't have money to give them, they'll cut off your balls and sell them to herbal medicine stores for some kind of remedy. Stuff like that. I could use something to get people to pass me by.

“You want me to go blow somebody away?” I ask.

“You look like you could do it,” Ivan says. He's got a pale face and his cheeks are sunken in and he's real tall, taller than my dad. He's waiting for me to answer and he's not even about to smile. I look for that, for the bullshit, for the tease. But I can see he's straight.

“Yeah. Sure. I want to hold it,” I say.

He gives it to me and it's cold and it feels heavy at first. No heavier than a can of whatever dinner is tonight from Mama, but it feels heavier because it's small. That's a good way to think about me. I'm small, but I'm heavy. Like those stars somebody was talking about on TV. One spoonful weighs as much as everything in New York City. I held my PM and it was heavy like that and so was I. Any man try to touch me in some way I don't want, they couldn't even move me an inch. And now I had a thing that would kill their goddamn ass.

So I said yes to Ivan and he said good and he showed me how to use the PM and how to fieldstrip it and clean it, and it was real simple, only four parts, and I got my hands around it real good and I was hitting the target in the basement of the social club every time and Ivan never once changed how he talked to me, like I was no lad, and he gave me a beer later on and I didn't like it the first time.

But maybe that's the way it is the first time you do anything. One day I took the subway to Brighton Beach and it turns into an elevated train down there. I like that. You get to see all along the beach and even down to Coney Island. You can see the big Ferris wheel. I went on that once, but it wasn't so hot. I think I remember my dad throwing me up in the air when I was little. I've seen dads do that sometimes, like in the park and stuff, and the kids laugh and seem to like it, but those dads aren't so messed up that you just know, even if you're pretty little, that he's going to drop you sometime. I think going up in the Ferris wheel felt that same way, made me think of going up and coming down hard.

Anyway, I went to Brighton Beach that day and killed a guy for Ivan. I found myself thinking about my dad on the train and I touched my PM, which was in a little brown paper bag. Like I was carrying my lunch to school or something. That morning Ivan sits me at a table by the front window, though it's still dark cause the window's painted green. There's a hooded lamp hanging over the center of the table and Ivan is sweating from the lightbulb, and he says, “This is that day you will become real man.”

“I'm a real man now,” I say. “That's why you know I will go and do this thing. You have to be a real man already to waste a guy. Wasting the guy doesn't make you the man.” I figure if I can think as clear as that in school, all those dumb-ass teachers would stop messing with me. But I just dry up when I'm there with all the little kids. Arguing with a Russian thug in his club, I can do that.

He listens to me careful and thinks a moment and then he smiles at me. “You are too smart already. You turn into good hit man and someday we make you honorary Russian and you go far with us.”

“Thanks,” I say. “What do I do?”

And Ivan tells me about another Russian gang, the ­Arbat Gang, that's been pushing Ivan around. Ivan just wants Manhattan. He doesn't want to get involved with Brooklyn. But these guys won't leave him alone. They want to kill him. They're bad guys, they do their business all wrong. “When we take money from businessman,” he says, “we give him good vodka, make him feel nice and protected. If he does not want to do business, we can maybe talk loud to him, lean on him little bit. But he for sure doesn't want to do business with those bad gangs in Brooklyn. Those gangs will send their friends in Moscow and murder that businessman's father.” Ivan pauses to see how bad I think this is.

I don't bat an eye.

“And they kill his mother.”

I wrinkle my nose at this. That's pretty bad. I think of my mother in her terry cloth housecoat opening the door of the apartment and she's been trying to get a goddamn can of something open so she can eat lunch and some guys blow her away. That's pretty low. But I'm still keeping quiet.

“And all of his little kids. His little malchiki.”

Being a kid can be pretty tough. Gangs like that make it worse. “Look,” I say. “What the hell you think I've been shooting your paper targets in the basement for?”

So I find myself on Brighton Beach Avenue and it's stuffed full of cars and everybody has just learned how to use their horns, it sounds like, and with the el sparking and squealing overhead and guys hustling around in your face pushing sunglasses or knit caps or some kind of heart medicine and all kinds of other shit, with all that noise and action, I start to get a little nervous about what I'm going to do. Ivan says where I'm going, it's nice and quiet. Maybe one other guy to take care of at this time of day. But I'm starting to wonder.

I go on down the street and I'm passing by shops like Vladimir's Unisex and the Shostakovich Music, Art, and Sport School and the Hello Gorgeous Beauty Salon and there's just too many people around, all of them tall or fat or both and I'm getting goddamn tired bumping into belt buckles and saggy tits and I'm keeping my head down but they brush up against you, too, and I don't like to be touched. It makes me a little crazy sometimes. And I'm starting to worry that I'm going to take out my PM and use it on the next guy who bumps into me. But just thinking about the Makarov makes me calm down a little.

Then I get to the Gogol Cafe and maybe all the shit in the street is good because I'm ready just to do this thing and get it over with and I'm blaming this gang guy not just for killing little kids in Moscow but for making me walk through this goddamn crowded street. So this is his place where Ivan says nobody dares to mess with him and they never have and it should be easy. I don't know about that. It's somewhere between breakfast and lunch and the place is dim and it shouldn't be open but Ivan says to push the door, so I push and I'm inside and it smells like stuff that Chef Boyardee never dreamed of in a million years. And there's nobody around. All of a sudden I'm alone and if you want the truth, that's what scares me. Not what I was about to do or what might happen after that. It's standing there and, like, right away all the bustle is gone and there's only a dark room and if something is spooky, it's that. ­Being where there might be just one somebody else and you can't even see him.