Too Bright to Hear Too Loud to See (27 page)

“You, bellboy! Put those bags in my trunk.”

“You don’t order
me
around. I don’t work for you.” The bellhop turns to me. “Savages, every one of ’em. Hardly speak the language.”

My cabbie throws open the car door and stands next to the taxi, one hand resting on his trusty yellow steed.

“You bastard! You think you can insult me. You think you better than me?”

The bellhop holds on to the cart with one hand and gestures dramatically with the other. “See what I mean?” he says to me. “Savages.”

My cabbie walks toward us menacingly.

“Why don’t you go back where you came from,” the bellhop says, shoving the cart toward the cabbie, “before you have an accident.”

“You shouldn’t start a fight, old man. You might get hurt,” my cabbie says, stabbing his index finger in the bellhop’s direction.

That kind of behavior could get you kicked out of Africa, I think, and deciding it’s really not my problem, I go inside the hotel to change my money.

As soon as the revolving doors spit me out into the lobby, I know I’ve made a big mistake. Luxury hotels in foreign countries are one thing. They provide a kind of privileged anonymity. But this is just the opposite. The circular velvet couches, the white marble staircase, even the clinking of glasses I hear from the mahogany-paneled lobby bar. The smells, the sounds—it is all nauseatingly familiar. Only this time I am not a VIP. This time I do not even have a reservation. My heart begins to race.

I should have known. How could I not? And when I see the couple ahead of me hand their passports to the woman checking them in, I realize how truly stupid I have been.

“I won’t be staying,” I tell the bellhop, who’s patiently waiting to follow me to my room after I’ve checked in.

“Sir?”

“Put my bags back in the trunk and tell the driver I’ll be right out. Please.”

Crimson-colored anger appears at the top of the bellhop’s collar, travels upward, seeps into his neck fat, and spreads across his broad face.

“Certainly, sir.” He smiles with tight lips and a clenched jaw. When I get back in the taxi, the cabbie is wearing a shit-eating grin.

“I gave him a hundred dollars,” I say, and then wonder if that was enough to compensate him for his trouble and the inevitable shit he took from my cabbie.

Savijii’s smile fades quickly. “Where you want to go?” he asks.

“I don’t know.”

Savijii bangs his fist on the steering wheel. He’s muttering to himself in some third-world language. I don’t need to speak it to understand he’s pissed.

“I need a place to stay. Nothing fancy.”

Without another word, Savijii burns rubber out of the Sherry-Netherland’s cobblestone driveway and heads downtown, quickly leaving Central Park South in our dust.

“No hot plates, no music, no guests. You pay a week in advance.”

The ancient black man behind the desk at the McBurney YMCA has been rifling around the same drawer of loose keys for ten minutes. He is thin and bent and wears an orange Teamsters baseball cap, though knowing the details of the Teamsters retirement package as I do, I doubt that if he were an actual card-carrying member he’d have to work at all.

“That’s fine,” I say. He looks up at me and then past my shoulder to my belongings.

“Can’t leave anything out in the hallways. Violation of the fire code.”

“Okay.”

“Room ain’t big,” he says. Like it’s a threat.

“That’s fine,” I say. He goes back to rifling. “Laundromat’s around the corner on Seventh.”

“Fine. You do have a room, right?”

“Yeah, I got a room. Just opened up this morning.”

“Could that be the one you’re looking for?” I ask, taking a step forward and pointing to the lone key hanging on the bulletin board behind him.”

“You gotta stay back a’ the yella’!” he says, pointing to the broken line painted on the floor. I do what I’m told. He turns and pulls the key off the wall. “Two hundred twenty-two dollars. You pay again Friday before five if you want to stay.”

“Thanks, but I don’t think—”

“That’s your business. I’m jus’ informing you of the policy. Policy is you pay Friday before five if you plan to stay.”

“Okay. That’s fine.” I peel off the bills and he hands me the key.

“You damn lucky,” he says as he watches me fill out the dog-eared registration card. “Mr. Meyer just passed this morning. Well, we found him this morning anyway.”

I glance up at him. “Lived in that room for thirty-four years.”

“He lived at the YMCA for thirty-four years?”

“You got good timing. Before today I ain’t had a vacancy since 1978. I left you a fresh set of sheets.”

“Thanks, I appreciate that.” I am in the right place at the right time. I can’t remember the last time that happened, I think, as I drag my shit up three flights of stairs. And I have to admit, I feel only slightly guilty that Mr. Meyer had to die to make it happen.

The following Friday, I am standing at the desk handing over another two hundred and twenty-two dollars. I see now how this could easily turn into thirty-four years. The majority of the all-male residents here are either gay or over seventy. And so far everyone I’ve met has been quiet, clean, and discreet. Tony—I think that’s his name—scrubs our open communal shower stall with Ajax at least daily.

Staying at the Y is much like living at a monastery. Without the sex.

Chelsea is loud and bustling and there is very little green. I don’t know what to do with myself, so I look for bookstores. In the six years since I left the States, the smaller independent bookstores have been mostly replaced by big chains. I don’t mind. It just means I can be even more anonymous. I find myself gravitating to the Parenting section at Barnes & Noble, flipping through books with titles like
Helping Your Child Through Divorce
and
The Divorced Dad
. As if I am a responsible parent. As if I am a father who is going to have weekend visits and pay doctor bills and attend Christmas pageants. Every day, in every branch, pregnant women holding stacks of baby books look at me with contempt. The impending split must be my fault. How could it be otherwise? That poor woman, that poor child, they think, as they lay a protective hand over their ballooning stomachs.

Sometimes I take Willa’s picture out and look at it in front of these women. I keep it with me. It came off the cardboard key chain long ago. I have re-glued it over and over but it keeps falling off, so I carry the whole thing around in a Ziploc bag. The tacky, mottled blue background of her first-grade school picture makes her look ordinary. Her hair is combed back and kept neatly in place with a red floral headband that matches the dress she is wearing. This is my picture-day daughter, not my real girl.

I drift from Parenting over to Psychology/Self-Help. The titles run together like raindrops on a windshield. Glossy pictures of confident, self-satisfied experts stare out at me. For $16.95 they promise to change my life, solve my problems, increase my concentration, improve my memory, manage my time, fulfill my potential, discover my sexual self. They all have the answer.

My eyes fall on a small pink book—no author’s picture on this cover. I pull it from its snug place between
Beating the Blues
and
Be Your Own Therapist
. The pages of the pink book are made of cream-colored parchment paper, the edges uneven, like the ones in those leather-bound volumes of Dickens and Chaucer people keep on their bookcases but never read. I let the thick, soft pages stroke my thumb as I flip through the book. The pages stop turning and fall open. The words fly at me: “I have felt the wind of the wing of madness.” I slam the book shut and shove it back onto the shelf.

That night I take two sleeping pills. I wake up a little after 3:00
A.M
. My heart is racing. My mouth is dry. The sheets are cold and damp. There is sweat in the creases behind my knees and on the insides of my elbows. I go into the bathroom, run the cold water in the sink, and put my mouth under the faucet. I walk back to my room and stare out the window at the streetlights and the traffic on Twenty-third Street. The grimy, ugly street has grown on me. Like mold.

I open the window and stick my head out to make sure it is all still there, that I am still here. Bodega, Chelsea Hotel, stained mattress left sagging at the curb four days ago. My world is as I left it. But when I close my eyes, all I see are images from my dream.

My daughter is three, maybe four. She stands over me with a giddy look on her pink-cheeked face. She is wearing a party dress—one of those frilly things that stand out at the bottom—and patent-leather Mary Janes. I reach out to hug her, to tell her I am sorry, that I’ve missed her. Her lips part, revealing little cat-like white teeth. She raises her arm and in her tiny, dimpled hand she holds a gun. She raises the other hand and waves at me. “Bye-bye, Daddy,” she says in a tiny voice. And she pulls the trigger.

A breeze blows across my face.

The wind. The wing. I can feel it coming.

I do not go back to sleep.

I do not go back to Barnes & Noble.

Lately no one and nothing can keep up with me. Not traffic or store clerks or elevators or the old lady with the walker in front of me on the sidewalk. Especially not her. Her I want to kill. I try to pass her on the right but her walker is too fucking wide. I try to pass on the left but a woman with a double stroller the size of a goddamn Winnebago beats me to it. She flashes me an insincere “I won this round” smile. The kind of victorious New York expression reserved for total strangers.

That I have been forced into a holding pattern causes rage to rise in me. My tsunami. My chest constricts and I am painfully aware that suddenly, inexplicably, there are tacks and shards of glass circulating through my veins.

I slip between two parked cars and walk briskly down the street. In the street. No pedestrians to worry about, to slow me down. Except now and then when I encounter another fast walker like myself—someone who has abandoned the sidewalk for the fast lane. And then I am relieved. Because everyone in New York is impatient and irritable and agitated. So there is nothing wrong with me.

The Piccadilly is the answer to my prayers. I discover the enormous used bookstore accidentally. Apparently I am the only person in New York not already familiar with “the Pick,” as it is known.

It is easy to get lost in the Pick—not just in its famously daunting miles of labyrinthine aisles, but to lose track of time, of proportion, of perspective, of oneself. It is a drug. And within a week I am a junkie.

At first I need help navigating the Byzantine shelving system and outdated store maps. When I first begin coming here, spending long, languid hours during which time finally slows down for me—the only time during which I can finally take long, slow, albeit musty breaths—I am as lost as anyone else who first wanders into the Pick. And so it annoys me when, seeking help, service, or aid of some kind from the sales staff, I find a young man wearing a bright red Piccadilly shirt, his “Pick My Brain” badge pinned over his heart, hiding in a secluded corner of the Military History section. He is wearing a Walkman and shamelessly filling up multicolored note cards with information from books he obviously can’t afford to buy or isn’t allowed to xerox.

“Excuse me,” I say loudly. But since he doesn’t hear me, I walk up, grab a hold of the ladder on which he is perched, and give it a good shake.

“What the hell, man?”

“What’s your name?”

“Cecil, why?”

“You work here, Cecil?” I ask, as if the answer isn’t completely obvious.

“Yeah?”

“I thought maybe you were a customer impersonating a salesperson.”

He pulls his headphones down around his neck. “Can I help you with something?”

“Yes, actually. John Berryman.
Dream Songs
.”

He points in a general direction. “Poetry. Aisle 18b.” Then he puts his headphones back on.

Not that the aisles actually have numbers on them.

“Thanks for your help, Cecil.”

But I am only annoyed with Cecil until I don’t need him anymore. Which isn’t long. Very quickly I find a much more dedicated salesperson who, as luck would have it, also has breasts, which she has done a wonderful job of showcasing. She has customized her child-sized Piccadilly T-shirt by taking scissors to the neckline,
Flashdance-
style, so that it now hangs provocatively off one olive-skinned shoulder.

Now, after months of trying to navigate its topography on my own, Nicki—that’s her name—has become my own personal Beatrice of the Piccadilly, taking me by the hand and guiding me through every nook and mouse-friendly cranny, explaining the nuanced maps, even teaching me the secrets of the aisle numbering system.

She too has a tag pinned above her heart. And though by now I no longer need her assistance locating books, I often ask if I can “pick her brain.” But Nicki, who is studying Library Science at the New School, takes her job very seriously. So she only helps me on her lunch hour. Usually downstairs among the ergonomics textbooks or in the Typography section. Rare Typography. Nicki once confessed that she finds the old letters and typefaces to be quite a turn-on. She likes to put on the special cotton gloves used for handling rare books and, bending over so that her nose is almost but not quite touching the pages, she inhales their smell while slowly turning the pages.

I have not yet confessed to Nicki that I find her turn-on quite a turn-on. As do I the Technicolor bras she wears underneath her Pick T-shirt, their straps always visible on one shoulder or the other—fuchsia, lavender, aqua, fire-engine red. Never beige. Always something cheerful and impractical. One day maybe, one day. For now, admiring her ass as I watch her inhale antique ink is enough to get me through the day.

Cecil’s lack of work ethic no longer bothers me. Now I find him endearing. Technically, Cecil works at the Pick inventorying and shelving. But what he really does for at least ninety percent of his shift is research for the dissertation he’s writing as an NYU graduate student in American History.

He’s passionate about his dissertation topic on the three thousand Jews who fought for the Confederate Army, and I admire that. Now when I see Cecil’s pale, skinny arm peek out of the Military History aisle, his ink-stained index finger pointing unhelpfully in some vague direction of the cavernous store, I wait for the disgruntled customer to emerge, usually muttering obscenities. Then I help them find what they’re looking for. Because I really don’t want Cecil getting in trouble with Tina and Terri.