Ladies' Man Page 7

  There was a bulldyke, two stools away. About fifty. Short gray hair combed back with a little swept pompadour. She was staring straight ahead, near as I could tell through her bulging wraparound shades. A shiner peeked out beneath her left shade and she mechanically moved her cigarette between the ashtray and her lips over and over again as if she was a life-sized coin bank. She wore a short-sleeved black sweatshirt and a black leather wrist strap with dull silver studs on one wrist, a Florentine gold ID bracelet with LUCILLE in gold oriental letters on the other. I would’ve bet I could’ve made her too.

  I could’ve made the the world. I could’ve, just that day, made Charlene in the diner, at least two of those broads -from the coffee klatch and if I was really scrapin’ that old but not that old German lady. That was four. Four that day if I wanted. And Gordon. Oh my God, Gordon. My heart took off around the rib cage. She wanted it too. She was in her nightgown at two-forty-five in the afternoon.

  Outside it was dark. Nighttime. And nighttime was the right time. One seventy-five West Eleventh. Gordon. Time for love. I dropped a ten for the drinks and hit the streets. I was drunk. Piss me off. Not so bad I couldn’t walk straight and not so bad I didn’t know it, but still, I didn’t dig boozy elation, I hailed a cab.

  “Gordon.”

  “What?”

  “One seventy-five West Eleventh.”

  Okay, what would I say? Hey! I lost your order. I thought maybe you could give it to me again. I lost her order. She didn’t give me an order. La Donna, I could’ve, would’ve, given you the best. I thought of that vibrator again. Her thighs spread out like that. She had a beauty mark right between her asshole and her cunt. She told me her mother had said to her once when she was a kid that that was where God was marking a spot for a third hole when lucky for her he was called away on business. I had left my cigarettes in the bar. The cab pulled up in front of the brick building.

  Just be straight, man. Tell her, listen, you know what was really going down this afternoon so disconnect the phone and let’s git … it … on! Yes indeedy, I was almost to her door before I wigged. I couldn’t say that. It wasn’t my style. Go with the order story. Hey! I forgot “the order! What order? Oh Christ, yeah, ha ha, you didn’t order anything. Well, since you’re here why don’t you come in and have a drink? Ring the bell, chooch. Heavy footsteps.

  “Yeah?”

  A middle-aged guy in a T-strap undershirt, dress pants and slippers. His nose came up to my chest but his shoulders were a yard across. John L. Lewis eyebrows, fistfuls of black back hair like bear fur peeking at me over his shoulders. Heavy glasses and Maurice de la Creep face crevices.

  “Help you?” An arm like a crossbeam against the door frame.

  “Yeah, no, is this the Jacuzzi residence?”

  I didn’t even have my sample case with me. I heard her talking to someone inside. The , apartment was smoky and smelled like someone was cooking garbage.

  “Jacuzzi, uh-uh.”

  “Right, sorry.” Down the stairs and out into the night stone sober and into another bar. It was a gay bar. Twenty guys in crew cuts and RAF mustaches turned their heads when I breezed in. I did a quick 180 degrees and headed out the door. And they didn’t even know what they just missed. Because not only was it big, it was as thick as a woman’s wrist.

  I headed for another bar but changed my mind. Enough was enough. I tried walking around a little but it was too cold. I didn’t have my gloves or a scarf. I went to a coffeehouse down by NYU that looked like something out of the House of Usher. Ten-watt bulbs, carved-oak tables and chairs, miniature busts of Dante and Beethoven and hanging on the walls large portraits so old and dingy you couldn’t even tell if they were men or women. The guys hanging around were dead ringers for William Shakespeare. Two Arabic women in Gucci army fatigues yakking over cannolis. A girl reading a paper in the corner kept glancing up at me without raising her head, giving me the once-over as if she were wearing bifocals.

  I almost sat down at her table but was too beat to get into anything more. I ordered an espresso with lemon peel, no sugar thank you, sat back, closed my eyes and tried to get my bearings. Seeing La Donna in the sack like that scared me.

  That whole vibrator thing was very confusing to me. The more 1 thought about it the more stupid and embarrassed I felt. Big deal she was jerking off. If she was just fingering herself without the help of Con Ed, would I have wigged? Damn, I jerked off more than a monkey. But I wouldn’t if she was into… What’s the difference. She was alone and trying to get off and I blew in there like some heavy nineteenth-century wop and now she probably would have trouble coming for the next six months. Nice going.

  It was sexist of me. I didn’t wanna be sexist I felt much calmer—the only thing I couldn’t or didn’t want to think about was her buying the goddamn thing. Going into a drugstore and asking for it and paying for it with my money while I was whining and kvetching about having to fuck a milk bottle because my quote unquote girlfriend was having a hard time with sex. .

  But on the other hand, the other hand, the other hand. Sitting in that dinge among the busts and the oak, I was beginning to feel like Hamlet. The fact of the matter was she was probably crying in bed alone uptown. I always promised her I would be there when she needed me, and I wasn’t. She was under strain from Fantasia. I was under strain from chasing around some scuz who was into cooking garbage and balling apemen. Sex wasn’t everything. We were adults. I’d just get her to wear sweatpants to bed and everything would be cool.

  On the way uptown I bought her flowers. I had never bought flowers for a girl in my life. I couldn’t smell them because my nose was stuffed up from running around without a hat, but they were nice—orange, red and pale blue. Maybe I would bring flowers home as a matter of course. The new me.

  Out in the hallway I couldn’t smell her, but my nose was so stuffed I wouldn’t have been able to smell a corpse in a phone booth.

  The apartment was dark. Without turning on any lights I tiptoed down the foyer. The bedroom door was open. No lights on in there either. I soft-stepped to the bed and sat on the edge. “La Di?” I reached out and touched sheets. No La Donna. I hit the light on the night table. The bed was unmade. I tossed the flowers on the crumpled blankets. There was a note pinned to my pillow and my insides hit a bump: “i can’t believe I let you walk out ON ME.” First line and I felt a . flush of love.

  “I SHOULD HAVE KICKED YOU OUT. NOBODY EVER HUMILIATED ME LIKE THAT IN MY LIFE. I AM JUST AS ANGRY AT MYSELF FOR SITTING THERE AND TAKING IT AS I AM AT YOU FOR BEING YOUR USUAL SELF CENTERED SELF. GOODBYE.”

  My first reaction was to get an “oh my God” disaster rush like I had received a telegram that I had cancer. It passed. Then I felt scared, as if she were hiding somewhere in the dark apartment waiting to pounce on me.

  “LA DONNA!” I barked, like, if you’re out there don’t fuck with me. I hit the overhead light switch in the bedroom. That gave me enough illumination and courage to dart into the living room and hit the switch in there. I screamed. What I thought was another person was my image in the living room closet full-length mirror. I’d forgotten about that mirror because it was on the inside of the door and I never used that closet. It was La Donna’s, and it was pretty empty. As a matter of fact, the only things she’d left behind were her Frye boots and about six pounds of song sheets and music books. I didn’t know if that was supposed to be symbolic of something but I just closed the door. Then 1 chained the front door. I took off my coat, draped it across one of the dinette table chairs, retrieved the flowers, put them in water and started to change the bed sheets. The vibrator still lay where I had murdered it. I got another rush of dread but I picked it up with a dish towel and dropped it out the bathroom window, plugging my fingers in my ears so I wouldn’t hear the crash. It worked. I threw her letter in the garbage, fished it out and sent it for a one-shot flying lesson via the same window. I finished changing the sheets and checked the Post for the TV listings. Death Wish was on Tuesday Night at th
e Movies at nine, the Honeymooners at eleven and Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia was the cable TV homebox movie at eleven-thirty. Out of sight. The super had the heat coming up the pipes for a change. It was going to be a heavy TV night. But first, a little nappy.

  I woke up sweating like I’d just broken a fever. I whipped my head right and left searching for who knows what in the darkness, then flopped back and let out a cranky moan. There was no one in the world but me, and the world was my dark apartment. The digital read 10:40.1 hit the light on its lowest wattage, made it to my feet and squinted around the room for something to bring me back to earth. I turned on the TV. Two guys were bouncing up and down in the cab of a truck eating sandwiches and talking with their mouths full. I hadn’t had any dinner. And I hadn’t done my sit-ups. First things first I fumbled around the bed for my sneakers, got my barbell from under the night table and dragged my jockey-shorted ass into the living room. I did my hundred and fifty in the dark and went into the kitchen. I stared into the refrigerator spaced out, nothing really registering, absently fingering the muscles and ravines of my cast-iron, flab-free gut. The only thing with any potential was an unopened round cardboard of Swiss Knight cheese wedges, which I carried into the bedroom. It was eleven o’clock. The Honeymooners! I hit the remote control on the cable box and breathed easy. I knew every one of The Honeymooners by heart. There was something comforting about that show, something safe. Just having them on was like taking a tenmilligram hit of Valium. I sat there wolfing down cheese slices while Jackie Gleason rolled those eyes in that hippo pus for the ten millionth time since I was five. Talk about anchors.

  At twenty after eleven I started nodding out. I figured I could use a good night’s sleep for a change so I turned off the TV and the light.

  I sat up like a jack-in-the-box. It was 4:03.

  I had had a dream that my father apologized for fucking me over when I was an infant. I asked, “What happened?” He explained that he used to bring me down to the playground on a walker so he could pick up young mothers. When he scored he parked me in the woman’s living room while he did his business in the bedroom. One time when he left me in a lady’s living room her cat scratched the hell out of my legs. The reason he was bringing the whole subject up was that he had just received a check from the lady to pay for the damages to my legs from twenty-seven and a half years ago. While he was telling me this my mother stood, arms folded, nodding solemnly by his side. The main sensation I woke up with was feeling sorry for my father because he was hanging out with ladies in the middle of the day when he should have been working or hanging out with men. It was just a dream, but sometimes when I sacked out those things came at me with everything but screen credits.

  I couldn’t get back to sleep. The whole package of cheese slices was lying in my gut like wet cement. Work in four hours. Suck-ass work. I started thinking about La Donna. I kept seeing her stretch out her arms to me and it started ripping me up. I touched my stomach—it still felt flat. Stop it. She was gone. Maybe she’d be back and maybe she wouldn’t The more I analyzed it, the more I realized that vibrator incident was no accident. That little Tuesday afternoon flip of mine was called “Kenny Makes a Move.” A few times in my life I made moves—always with the grace and finesse of a butcher hacking up a mastodon, but they were moves nonetheless. I wasn’t saying that little scene was planned, but if I looked back at the big ones, the big moves, they all had the same MO. They seemed thoughtless and stupid or dangerous, but they always got me out of checkmate. I could remember at least three incidents where I had pulled some heavy number and changed my life. After high school I was still living at home. All my friends had split but I couldn’t get it together to leave. College was depressing, an extension of high school, a subway commute. I was dying, but I was afraid to leave. Then one night my junior year I fucked this girl in my parents’ bed when they were out After we finished I couldn’t find the condom. I had tossed it somewhere and couldn’t find it. When I came home from school the next day, the house turned into Guadalcanal. My old lady had found the condom that morning. It was in her slipper. By nightfall I had moved in with three guys from school living in Manhattan.

  Kenny makes a move.

  A year after that I was engaged to a girl I didn’t love. She had a screechy laugh and hated sex. Her father ran a chain of stationery stores. The deal was I marry his daughter and I would start out at the top. Two weeks after our engagement was announced I was feeling cocky. I figured I had it made so I quit school. Her old man went berserk over my disrespect for education and broke off the engagement.

  Kenny makes a move.

  Three years after that, I’m involved with a chick up in Woodstock who lived in a .cabin, ran with a heavy psychopathic drug crowd, thought Charles Manson was misunderstood, pushed coke for a living, had six cats and wanted me to drop everything and run off to Canada with her to open a health food store. I started pushing a little coke myself to make up for all the stuff I was snorting. All we did was snort and screw, snort and screw. And then I’d wheeze all night from the cats, drive the next ‘morning to Saugerties General Hospital; for allergy shots, drive to the city to work, drive to: Woodstock at night, and so on and so on. In those few months I had done so much coke the insides of my nostrils bad calluses, my eyes were bugging out of my head from fatigue and I was so paranoid about getting busted I had a permanent terror knot in my belly. When I tried to leave her she wound up in the hospital after throwing herself in the path of a car.

  Then one fine day after we’d been running together for three months I left the house to go into town. She was with friends in the city at the time. I was in town an hour when I heard a tremendous explosion in the distance. Fire engines, sirens, etc. I had left the gas on and blew up the cabin. Killed all six of the cats and destroyed ten thousand dollars’worth of cocaine. Kenny makes a move.

  Something else all those moves had in common: they always ended in throwing the baby out with the bath water. I didn’t talk to my parents for two years, I never finished college, and I could have killed somebody in Woodstock. And now La Donna was gone and something in me still ached for her. Ached for when it was good with us.

  I could even remember the exact day everything started going downhill. It was a Tuesday in October. She had told me over breakfast that she had been taking singing lessons since August, was running into a financial snag, and asked if I could help her out.

  I gave her a lot of grief about expenses and even got into some hoopla about the energy crisis and we had an enormous riff. Then a strange thing happened; about halfway through the fight we did a complete turnabout, from her asking for a few bucks and me witholding, to me demanding all future bills and she not wanting a dime. I persisted and wound up paying for the whole shot: I have no idea why I did that, but I’m sure it had nothing to do with me having a heart of gold under a gruff exterior. As a matter of fact, the money was the least of it as far as the fight went. I was pissed because she had been taking lessons for two months without telling me. I felt cheated on. I felt like she only bothered to tell me because she was in a financial hole. That night for the first time since we met I didn’t want to screw. I didn’t even want to hug. She cried herself to sleep, but I wouldn’t even turn my face to her. Halfway through the night I woke up feeling lonely and out of it. I wanted to forgive her, to cuddle, but she wouldn’t even let me touch her. And it had been a little like that ever since.

  And that was one major difference between La Donna and the others. I was used to women chasing my ass. A lot of times a big problem was having to face their sexual desire, which felt totally unreal given the crap that would be going on between us. With La Donna I was getting the straight arm, not giving it. And it made me horny beyond endurance.

  I started feeling myself up, hugging myself, stroking my thighs and balls. I even popped a finger up my ass and passed it under my nose. I started pulling my dick thinking of La Donna. Me banging her wasn’t doing the trick. Suddenly I flashed on somethin
g that sent a baby-sized roller coaster from my brain to my fingers. Nineteen seventy. Army reserve boot camp. Three guys out on maneuvers. Pitching a tent near a stream. Me, Jerry Wexler and Willy somebody. Staying up talking about pussy, busting cherries and oral finesse. Waking up in the middle of the night. A hand pumping my cock. I pretended I was asleep and squinted my eyes without moving my head. A spot of silver, cold, going up and down on my cock. That silver moving fast like a blip on a radar screen leaving a trail of its own image. Up and down. A ring. A silver ring. That memory got me so shook I popped like Vesuvius. I never found out which guy gave me that hand job.

  I cleaned myself off with the cardboard from a laundered shirt sticking but of the garbage can. Four-twenty-nine. All I had to do was look for that silver ring. All I had to do was remember the next day instead of seven years later.

  I turned on my lamp, twisting my head away from the light. I touched my gut again. It was still flat. I lay there staring at the spots of buckling paint on the ceiling. Stop it. I hit the buttons on the cable box, gave the dials a quick spin, scored for twenty minutes’ worth of The Three Stooges dubbed in Spanish, then switched to some organic-looking bozo in rimless glasses and plaid shirt sitting behind a telephone switchboard. He had long, stringy hair, a hairline that receded to his sideburns and a forehead you could have landed a 747 on. He smiled out at me like he didn’t realize he was on the air. It must have been a local cable TV station. The; black and white reception had that cheap shakiness like the roving eye cameras in a supermarket. A telephone number zipped in under his chest and he came to life:

  “Well, it’s five a.m. and I’m Rod Ramada, so Rama-da’s in and it’s time lot Rod Ramadda’s Swapline.” ,

  “Rod Ramada,” I repeated out loud. His voice was soft but not rich, like a college DJ. .