Plays Well With Others Read online

  First I flash on him at his rosy best; then he becomes the final him (reduced to soup stock). I picture his crossbone’s skull still smiling so, the former lifeguard becomes a Medusa of IVs.

  And finally the big “Oh” strikes, becoming “Uh Oh.” Next, emotionally sidetracked, I literally forget which living party I first dipped in here to seek. (Literally. I am not making up one syllable of this fable. For many reasons, I couldn’t.)

  Enter: Stage Center

  met her at the VD Clinic.

  Like so many health services offered to the poor, this clinic’s emphasis seemed more on punishment through waiting than relief by cure. The building was a pretty Beaux Arts schoolhouse, tucked among mature sycamores at Chelsea’s edge. It was now reduced from primary education to basic regret. Barred and wired like a zoo, it was.

  The waiting room accosted us losers with overbright posters. I felt sufficiently ashamed without DOES IT BURN WHEN YOU MAKE WATER? IF so, YOU PROBABLY HAVE … a long list of fine print followed, spikey Latin names for what now crimped our love lives. (If my parents ever found out!)

  I had only lived here long enough to find one main friend and some nice acquaintances, the coffee shop, three students, a good used-book store on my block. But I’d somehow managed to become, being overly affectionate, instantly infected. (Robert consoled me: Hey, no sweat, at least I wasn’t staying home. I was out learning. I must be doing something right.)

  It’d been that Ed. All this, for forty seconds!

  Arriving, we were each assigned a number, then handed a serious chunk of two-by-four, pinewood painted white. Its edges blackened with two lines, every side showed our freehand patient-ID digit. (Was this block so huge to prevent our stealing it?). Clutching such anchors, we—the sexually experimental, the sexually disastrous—got sardined into a single airless narrow room.

  If you believe that Hell might offer jolly fellow-feeling among its sinners, a VD clinic’s lobby argues otherwise. Its water fountain didn’t work. Fluorescent light seemed bent on making your pores look huge, your beauty corrupt. I had played one semester of junior varsity (to please Dad, who felt only sadness at my benchwarming). Now, after waiting here one hour, I recalled the embarrassment of basketball physicals. I remember hearing other boys give their testing cough behind a curtain where our dull pediatrician squatted, laying hands on the family jewels of our whole village. Now, I peeped around at others ambushed by New York’s sexual dangers.

  Instead of feeling the shame demanded by poster cutaways of our inflamed parts, fellow addicts idly cruised me and one another. One painted lady, old enough to be my grannie, winked at me, then licked her lips. Please, Missus. Repent for maybe fifteen minutes?

  My poor parents would drive their Buick three states out of their way to avoid any of the syphilitics sitting here (me, included). Gum-chewing proved widespread. One creased widow all in black sat beside an eight-year-old granddaughter wearing what looked like her white confirmation dress.

  Across boundaries of class, race, sex, we scoped each other out, pictured each other at it. Yeah, it burned. Sure, we’d all been “grounded.”—Despite that, chastity did not seem a long-range plan for anybody present.

  There was just one ass on view worth—in my opinion—worship. With me this out of commission, call me a backslider … Said butt belonged to that young guy over there, short, punkish, built like a brick gazebo. See the one in Levi’s over near the building’s only pay phone? The kid under that handwritten sign reading PLEASE KEEP CALLS SHORT, ONE PER “CLIENT,” RESPECT OTHERS FOR ONCE.

  Ignoring this, the chain-smoker, wearer of slicked-back hair, jeans jacket, Levi’s, and old battered shit-kicking boots. A large hardbound red address book was opened against the phone’s coin box, placed there like some singer’s portable sheet music.

  One righteous ass. Very slowly did I guess that those minor unsightly swellings at its outer edges might just indicate Nature’s padding, the excelsior accorded only the holy lower productive regions of, well, a woman….

  Against my hopes and plans for the next few hours, this bad citizen with the great backside became, as I listened harder, a boyish woman (which actually ranks among my favorite kinds).

  I couldn’t yet see her face. But, jotting notes, sipping bottled orange juice, she had set up office on the phone’s brushed stainless ledge. Piled dimes were stacked Vegas-high. (Yeah, dimes. It was that long ago.)

  Her haircut was some tough delivery boy’s, a two-dollar jobbie done on Astor Place in three minutes, two per side, one fer top. The jeans jacket showed more wear than she seemed old enough to have yet achieved. Her address book might be the ledger of a prospering small-town hardware store. I shifted two seats nearer. From here, the book’s crisp penmanship, heightened by yellow Hi-Liter, appeared womanly in its forceful efficiency, then downright club lady-like.

  Equipment spread before her-him included a WW II silver Zippo lighter, a (sterling?) Deco cigarette case with its own built-in ashtray, a forties fountain pen whose pocket clip was a gold Cupid’s arrow, and the yellow marker-emphasizer favored only by “grinds” at my college. Orange juice rested at hand; every need she expected might jab her, she’d provided for. She seemed a person as complete, magnetic, and “portable” as Robert.

  Others, waiting to call home, would step toward the public phone. They’d see this short stubborn back, would note her array of gear and coins. Then they’d turn toward our crowd, dull-witted from the wait, and—making some expressive Latin shrug or comic snarl—they’d step outside to seek a street booth. What amazed me, even in combative New York, even in this ungenteel drip-ward, no soul had yet dared confront her.

  Plus, so dreamy an ass. One of those taut high-riders, its either outer flank as dimpled as my folks’ old Buicks. Half melons placed an eighth of the way up the back, just so. More a black boy’s than any white girl’s.

  I had brought along my thumbed paperback of Tender Is the Night. I trusted its misty Riviera terraces to offset my first low-down VD holding-pen. But instead of reading, I moved closer still. To her. I could now eavesdrop on this young person. The pay phone was bolted to a plaster wall. This offered the one visible surface still bare of posters blaming us for our little mid-leg peccadilloes, PROMISCUITY POLLUTES one stated in harsh orange.

  Here, across the only plaster wall left bare, generations of the sexually restless, waiting too long for cure, tried to set up something for later this evening. They had left graffiti, come-ons, insults against American health care, plus diagrams of what our room’s every occupant (except the child in white) already knew too well—exactly what a dick and pussy look like, enraged, up close and personal. No two, alas, alike. No one safe.

  My novel left unopened, I faced the backside of this perfect boy-girl-boy as she successively harangued, promised, charmed, appointed, and then cried some. I remembered Robert’s early question, about what I’d learned from sex; I determined, as a storyteller, to shape the news of this found character for R.’s amusement later over coffee. God knows, I had time; my client number was a distant 284.

  I heard her Southern accent come and go rheostaticly—as need (charm) required. While chatting, she idly touched her yellow Magic Marker to the scratched wall above her. Among the lurid brew of phone numbers and genital sketches, she’d make a dot here and, head tilting, another over yonder, all the while taking care of business.

  If her body seemed a boy’s in spareness, her phone talk proved curvaceous, spillsome, scarily and lavishly expert. Her tone reinvented itself with each call’s mission. She was a woman, I could now tell plain. Head bent, unaware of anybody hearing her, she would order, chuckle, offer wry asides, then poignant pleas. I heard her take every secretary (reached by chance) into her humid confidence. Her speaking voice could go so soprano or dive quite dusky—various—as an adolescent boy’s. Conspiring, her tone dropped low enough to produce a tropism of shameless tilting among those others overhearing. Even the pretty dark girl in her doily pinafore attended to th
e lady talking back, now begging, now being such a tease.

  Our receptionist’s miked voice issued from her glass booth like some Bingo caller’s: “One thirty-one. Oh One thirty-one? One thirty-one! All right, One thirty-one lost his place for good, so be it. One thirty-two.” #284 here sighed.

  The wall beyond the phone’s present boss had been painted a faintly nasty coral color then gouged by ballpoint. Tangled script told what Hector, at his current dosage, might be ready to do again to you by week’s end. Over this surface, our girl-boy steadily made stray squiggles. As she complained to a photographer that he had overexposed her recent paintings, that he must reshoot them all for free—pretty please?—as she killed his fee with such ease and over his many objections, she reorganized around her head and shoulders a growing set of speckles interconnected.

  Soon a yellow structure, like concentric rinds of a pumpkin, emerged, parenthecising the telephone. Her yellow marker on coral paint gave off a pumpkin’s pinky orange that exuded power and, soon, an odd well-being. We all slowly saw—since half the bored waiting room had now begun to look her way—that these were huge yellow legs she’d started drawing. Drawn from the waist down, open legs, a giant’s, welcoming. Crosshatching, she soon created a roof of potent guardian thighs around atop this very telephone. She did it unconsciously, head tilting side to side, her conversation unabated. So short, she had to go up on tiptoe to reach the navel part of it. This was like watching another person daydream, but in a thousand nervous yellow lines.

  Now our communal phone—itself clappered directly between the most gorgeous rounded pair of legs—suggested ample male equipment. Bell Tel.

  The girl seemed to take in the whole surface—venereal pleas and all—and to unify it. Her lassoing yellow pulled the coral tone forward, it forgave the nasty drawings, it laid on them a whole new scrim of form and color.

  If, earlier, only I had watched her, now even the receptionist—interrupting her own fingernail painting—sat transfixed. The art rendered was no vandalism. Our group seemed to feel that. People literally leaned toward her now, as if in protection, as if dreading (and half hoping for) a security guard to come and try to bust her for malicious doodling. We’d pollute him so fast.

  Instead of seeming harmed, our room (in a way, come to think of it, this really was ours, wasn’t it?) was prettier and funnier and even more strange. But more militantly strange. Her curious wit, in taking the only hot line out of Drip Central, and clamping thighs so Whitmanesque around it—her compositional sense in letting the drawn skin not quite touch the mounted phone’s hard edges, the fact that these great legs, the perfect crotch, proved sexless—offered free rein for all our venereal imaginations.

  I recalled from school that the word venereal derives from Venus, our goddess of love. Lovesick. That sure described most all art lovers present.

  Even the charming girl-child sat literally opened-mouthed, staring up at the colossal legs and, working hard between them, their boy-sized creator. Rounded via a series of short straight yellow lines, thighs seemed rendered by raw magic—less by one person’s skill, more through our group will, some group dream—half-horny, half-ideal.

  Only the artist herself was as yet unaware of how much acclaim her own enormous lower body had snagged. I, meanwhile, heard her book a flight to Savannah, then confirm this with her mom (the accent pitched at its lushest). Her former efficiency changed; squared shoulders bent inward, she leaned against the shelf (she left off drawing!) and her brisk boy’s voice grew still and snively, so low that we were all forced to shift whole inconvenient inches closer. “I’m not. Cain’t, Mom. They hate me anyway. I’d feel like a complete fool in pearls and a Peter Pan collar, Mom. If I am paying to come see you, and I am, I’ll do it wearing what I fuckwell usually wear, Mom. Mom? …” There was a definite hangup and we watched the artist fall a bit against the cold black phone, and cry but in heaves, a bitter, tearless way to do it. I looked down at the curly child beside me, she shook her head and glanced up, sad. We both then gazed protectively, consensual, toward the artist.

  I’d seen her moods swerve with each call, whipping forward, drawing back, responding to however much the other party gave or exacted.

  Finally, coins all spent, red wine ordered by the crate at 20 percent discount, please, the photo session rescheduled free, a gallery owner slated for “a studio visit,” whatever that was, a date shyly accepted with Moishe, an Israeli med student she had only heard about through friends, reservations secured for a Strindberg play but in discount student seating, please, and no, sir, she did not have her student ID card on her because she and her roomie had just been mugged and this’d be her first outing to try to cheer that battered lovely friend, sir. At last, collecting herself, she gathered her gear, stuffed her pockets, opened her cowgirl backpack, closed her big book, reclaimed the emptied orange juice bottle, snapped her ashtray shut, lifted the huge block of issued wood, and turned.

  To such applause. I guess you can say I led it. Or maybe I just joined in after others started it—even the amplified receptionist did, beating wrist to inner wrist, careful not to smudge her nails newly red.

  Now I saw that this artist girl was a definitely girl. As pert as pretty, vague as tough. I saw her face was fox-shaped and that her eyes were still unfocused, wet, from crying at her mom. The hair stood up in front, a dark cowlick like some boy’s age ten, but it was overhennaed, nearly purple-black.

  We, the clap-infested, clapped. Glad at having something positive to do, and for one of us!

  She shifted from a facial “What … ?” to “Oh, that,” to “Well, okay then” to “So, you noticed, hunh?” Her features did this at a speed peculiar to those born stars. Like Robert, her movement from hidden sadness to full center stage showed the unaccountable and selfless speed of starlight.

  Then she did the most divine little impromptu bow. Her arms held lots of gear; but it was this clunksome bow that broke my heart and made me fall even faster for our pocket Venus with her felt pen, her oh-so-felt pen!

  The bow was like a little boy’s, some freckled ruffian forced to join his sister’s wedding party—a kid already secretly liking the rental monkey suit but griping about it anyway. On the cue: “Bow”—forced, he places palms (front and back of cummerbund) and flops forward. Her bow was just that sweet, half-geeky, formal, hopeless—and therefore somehow male.

  I decided only, Here she is. I got a sinus burning and one jet of scalding water within either half-shut eye. It is still my own sure sign of a sure sign.

  She was 282. But, owing to the receptionist’s interest, and with universal agreement from us usually crabby waiters, the art girl (as she was soon called) went right to the head of our line. Without doubting she deserved it, showing no surprise at all. Smiling, she disappeared into the hall of cubicles. Then 283 was summoned, and turned out not to be the grandmother.

  It was instead her formerly virginal-looking girl-child wearing white. The kid proceeded through a door with uneasy glances back at grannie. We all gave such mean looks to that lubricious old woman. Profiteering on her grandkid’s chaste treasure?

  We were soon left to look only at a peachy four-foot crotch exuding well-being, a benediction we all sorely needed.

  I wound up in the cubbyhole right across the hall from snubnosed art girl, #282. I saw that, even waiting, she bent, drawing, cigarette smoke half obscuring the NO SMOKING sign. She sensed appreciative observation (was that the usual oxygen she lived in, thrived on?)—she glanced up. I must have been grinning, because she smiled back a crooked fellow sufferer’s smirk that filled me with a troubled, tumbling sort of happiness.

  Behind me, another poster. Now, as she watched—pencil in one hand, her Camel gone all ash in the other—I pointed to my wall’s big black letters: DO YOU DRIP MUCH? And, from her plywood closet toward mine, she aimed the pencil right at her implied pussy and announced, “Jackson Pollock.”

  I laughed, as she had known I would.

  It was her compactn
ess, her coiled cowlicked snakes-’n’-snails potency; it was her outdoing boys at greaser boyishness and undercutting girls asleep in their own unnoticed power. It was her knowing the very image out there that would stir, then unify us all. She did things without planning them, but they turned out right anyway. It was how, in breaking laws, she’d already made the day for eighty strangers before she even noticed us behind her. It was her weird combination of garden-party girlishness and toad-collecting male-childness, stripes of the mild and the rude jumbled side by side.

  “What?” she asked, of my staring across the hall.

  “You.” I pointed. And she made a mouth, but with a strange respect in it. As if I had just gotten some essential coded joke. Eyes lowered, she said mostly to herself, “Yeah, well …”

  We were prescribed the same high number of two-toned, aptly clown-colored pills. “What a coincidence,” she said very flat. “I caught my dose of it from a boy named Delbert. You, too? Well, avoid all Delberts. Name like that, shoulda fuckin’ known.”

  On the wall beside her, the same poster asking, DOES IT BURN WHEN YOU MAKE WATER? She now jerked her brush-cut head its way (face very fair, hair tinted wound color, the nose’s three freckles an actual shade of pink). “No, nurse,” said she. “‘When Angie Makes Water, Angie Makes Water. But When Angie Burns, Angie Burrrrns.’”

  And, guileless, she grabbed the crotch of her jeans as if there were more packed in there than there must have been.

  It turned out to be her name—Angelina Byrnes, sometimes Alabama, sometimes A. Z. Byrnes. I told her I was having coffee with a friend who would like to learn of her existence and that she must trust me in knowing she would like this person very much back, and how he would change her life, as he’d changed mine.