CHAPTER ONE: QUEENSBORO PLAZA
Shortly after
earning her bachelor’s in business administration Eve Patricia accepted the
offer of an interview for an entry level job with a negotiations firm. As part of the process she was asked to take
a test in which she was presented with twenty fictitious negotiating scenarios
– some involved business deals, some concerned international geopolitical
crises, some focused on family tensions and personal relationships. In each case her task was to identify what
she believed to be the most prudent course of action – trying to work out a
compromise, sticking to her guns without giving in an inch, or complete
capitulation and retreat.
Later,
after gaining the position, her new employers told her that she had correctly
chosen in seventeen of the twenty. They
didn’t say which three she fumbled but in the three month training and
probationary period she often reflected on the matter and felt certain that the
ones she must have flubbed disproportionately included considerations of
proxemics.
Proxemics
– a field to which she had never given too much thought or attention in her
twenty four years, but her bosses and colleagues – seasoned professional
negotiators all – put such an emphasis on it that she was quite able, in a
short time, to appreciate its usefulness way beyond the confines of work, out
in the galaxy of everyday life.
This
appreciation broke into glorious blossom when Eve Patricia began her dalliance
with Harshwine, a gentleman twice her age.
Now - men of limited force and power in the cock
have to assess, from their own individual vantage point, how this will impact
upon a relationship with any given woman – not with women in general, in
archetype or Platonic Form, but very specifically with this woman here or that
one over there. Harshwine of necessity
had made himself a master of the process by his middle forties. He’d learned that he could pack a wallop with
a cornucopia of women through showmanship and spectacle – he didn’t need Viagra
or Cialis.
The
first tool in Harshwine’s arsenal of seduction was his apartment on an upper
floor of a spanking new high rise in Long Island City, Queens, with spectacular
views of the east side of Manhattan, the East River, the 59th Street
Bridge, and the Triboro and Hell’s Gate Bridges. The place was a firebomb of visual razzle
dazzle, and at night the contribution of the city lights was romantic beyond
speech.
Eve
Patricia was an example of a woman whose initial doubts and resistance could be
nibbled away at by this sensational apartment.
At twenty four she had a good job, was quite intelligent, loaded with
sharp wit, was emotionally stable and mature, good
looking and in shape – a catch and
a half. And so the question naturally
would arise: what would such an obviously desirable young woman be doing
fucking around with an older man who could barely slide the sausage in one out
of every five tries – not to mention that when he did it wasn’t very fulfilling
at all?
Thusly
it is that the puzzles of the human heart are pondered.
At
the prime of the getting to know each other phase, sitting in a Greek café on 30th Avenue ,
they spoke to each other about religious belief. She was a Christian by birth, indifferent and
certainly non practicing, but she had yet to experience anything like the kind
of nihilism on the cosmic level as expressed by Harshwine. “We’re tiny insects crawling on an
insignificant revolving rock, thrown in a remote corner of an infinite universe
– but we can’t live like that. We can’t
live our lives that way. That’s our problem. We have to infuse everything we are, have and
do with meaning. That’s it. The proverbial human condition – we have to
live as if our lives have meaning.” He
spoke with feeling; never before had she known a guy who could emote so
urgently and yet, simultaneously, communicate the savory in the mixture of
seared tuna burger, fries, and coleslaw that was pulsating through his mouth,
on his tongue, in the spaces between his teeth.
And he did it without spitting food.
They
bantered back and forth about the art gallery where they first met and the art
that was exhibited therein. For Eve
Patricia it was a tributary of her job – the firm was negotiating some issues
on behalf of the gallery, which was being sued by several artists it had
represented in the past. Harshwine – she
surmised, because it wasn’t entirely clear
– had some kind of friendship with
the gallery owner and several of the artists the owner was currently representing. Once or twice he gave hints of having been a
player in the art world of Manhattan
in the eighties.
Initially
she had conducted a deep internal struggle about spending the night with him in
his Long Island City
“I
want you to stay,” he’d said. “But I
don’t grovel. I’m not going to ask you
more than once.” He had sharp features –
his face was like a metal spike. There
was something edgily contumacious about the way it combined with his “don’t
grovel” personality that turned her on a bit.
Groggily
opening her eyes to her first morning in the place the word proxemics clamored through her mind like
a twister. The first principle of this
discipline was that people felt most comfortable, totally relaxed, in three
environments – their home, their place of work, and their cars. Eve Patricia felt comfortable in Harshwine’s
bed, which she took to be a good sign even if it contradicted the law.
Was
it a kind of Feng-Shui thing that he had what appeared to be hundreds of
fortunes from Chinese fortune cookies everywhere in his apartment? They were even in the bed, mixed up among the
sheets; she’d slept soundly on them all night.
TO
AVOID CRITICISM DO NOTHING,
SAY
NOTHING, BE NOTHING.
BY LISTENING, YOU WILL
LEARN TRUTHS.
BY
HEARING, YOU WILL ONLY LEARN
HALF
TRUTHS.
THE
GREATEST GENEROSITY IS NON-
ATTACHMENT.
WHAT
ABOUT THE BABIES? WHAT ABOUT
THE
SUNSHINE?
His
pad was best defined as a gigantic studio.
The first thing Eve Patricia always did when waking to the day was clean
the sleep crust out of the corners of her eyes with the tip of a index finger,
and as she did so here her line of sight focused on Harshwine across the room
rather silently doing Hindu squats.
Before her senses could perceive much else the land line phone rang
sharply twice and an ancient answering machine picked up. “Hi this is Harshwine, please leave a
message.”
“Harshwine
baby! It’s Prockahoon. Got your message. Ten o’clock is fine. My father’s check arrived here
yesterday. Look forward to meeting you
and your new young chickie wickie! Later
bro!” Click.
Eve
Patricia laughed, calling “Prockahoon?” across the room. “What’s his first name?”
Harshwine
grunted with effort, his body moving up and down. “Good morning to you too. I don’t even know…Lester? Les. Richard? Dick.
All I’ve ever called him for so long is Prock or Prockahoon that I don’t
even remember his first name.”
Eve
Patricia busted out in laughter every time she heard someone named Richard
called Dick; in grade school she had had a classmate named Richard Holder –
thus, unfortunately, Dick Holder. The
memory always floated in whenever she heard the names.
A
fugacious instant carried a stab, a twinge, a pang of buyer’s remorse through
the valves of her heart – he was so much older!
Yet it quickly passed.
“You
got some weirdo friends, old man,” she called out, rolling gleefully around in
the sea of Chinese
“Don’t
knock Prockahoon. He’s a great person to
have in your Rolodex. He’s a networking
machine. He has forty eight hundred
friends on Facebook.”
“What? Forty eight hundred?”
“No
lie.”
He
was picking up the pace with the Hindu squats, getting into a consequential
groove. His body created a silhouette
against a section of bare wall while his actual physical body moved against the
gray, bitter, incoming winter light.
“Animals in the wild,” he had stated to her the previous evening while
they cuddled, “are, universally and without exception, in better shape than
human beings. And they don’t lift
weights or work out with machines. So
what explains it?” She’d given a slight
shake of her to
indicate she had no idea and then
her attention drifted while he continued talking. She was a bit zoned out – his world, his
concepts, his ideas, the whole way he lived, everything was so alien. Just before they had hopped into bed and he
launched into his speech about animals he had been in the bathroom taking a
shower and she stood in the main living quarters studying his collection of
compact discs that was stored in tall shelves against one of the walls, shelves
that resembled bookcases. They went to
the ceiling; he had several stools on hand so as to be able to access the upper
shelves.
CDs
were objects that she was only peripherally aware of as existents, in the way a
Baby Boomer might be aware of a black and white television with no remote, six
channels, and rabbit ears. Fascinated,
she studied the rows of them, running her index finger along the spines. The principal source of her curiosity
consisted in this: out of the hundreds and hundreds of discs that there were
she realized she had never heard of any of the artists – not one. Was it possible? He’d been kissing her aggressively just
moments before, while a kind of music played that startled her with the
crashing urgency of its metaphysical sweep – she had reached across his body to
seize the disc on the night table beside the bed – Tony Williams, Civilization.
Back
to morning: she asks, “So is this the exercise you said you do five hundred of
every morning?”
“You’re
such a wise ass, little girl. I said I
do three hundred, five days a week, working my way up to five hundred.”
“You
got any coffee?”
“Right
there on the counter. I only have
standard ground ‘n’ pound supermarket coffee, no Raspberry Melon Asteroid
Latte.”
The
phone rang again before she was able to get out of the bed and she recognized
Prockahoon’s voice a second time, this time singing lyrics to the tune of The Surrey with
The Fringe On Top:
“Ducks
and geese will all come a honkin’
When
we go out tonight honky tonkin’
We
will ride them beautiful horses
Though
we should be takin’ some night school courses”
Click.
Eve
Patricia was wildly amused. “What! What the hell was that? Those aren’t the right words! He made those words up!”
“You
know that song, huh?”
“Of
course I know it! I played Ado Annie in
my high school production of Oklahoma
“That’s
one of Prockahoon’s hobbies, he ad libs lyrics to Rodgers and Hammerstein
songs.” He smiled – a consuetudinary
fleer of resignation and of circumstances.
“He’s, um, he’s just a little offbeat.”
“Just
a hunch – you’ve been friends a long time?”
“A
long, long time. Look – he’s a
weirdo. When we visit him you’ll see
exactly what I mean. Just ride the
flow.”
“The
first time he called he said he had his father’s check – what’s that all
about?”
Harshwine
hesitated, his lips shut tight and twisted up in a sign of internal
debate. “His father sends him money from
Florida every
month. He uses it to pay me the rent.”
“Does
he work?”
“He’s
some kind of statistician but obviously it doesn’t pay much. He can’t hold a real job. His credit is destroyed.”
“Go
on. What’s wrong, trouble
breathing? Should an old man like you be
talking and working out at the same time?”
“You
know, for such a fine young hoochie mama you certainly are a wiseass.”
“Just
playing with you!”
“I
know.” They both smiled.
“How
many so far?”
“Sixty.”
“On
the way to three hundred? Should I just
come back tomorrow?”
“Make
the coffee.”
“What’s
next, Zen? Are you going to sit cross
legged on the floor and contemplate an empty flower pot for sixteen
hours?” Giggling, she rose from the
bed. The evening before, three times, he
had noticed that the way she got out of bed was
extraordinary – instead of just
rolling out of it on the side she shimmied her way down to the foot of the bed
and got up from there.
“Everything’s
right on the counter in the kitchenette.
Now if you can shut your wisenheimer, sarcastic ass twenty four year old
mouth I really need to bear down and concentrate so we can get out of here and
start the day.” The plan for the day was
to walk the length of Crescent Street to Broadway then along Broadway to
Steinway, visiting Prockahoon and several other of Harhswine’s tenants. He owned nothing but, rather, rented
apartments and then sublet them to others for virtually full price, the profit
being in the fact that he sublet one apartment to two, sometimes three
roommates who all paid full price. It
was an astonishing arrangement that he had learned from Paul Zane Pilzer. The apartments were all over Long Island City
and Astoria . And yet, to fill his days and nights with
meaning, he himself worked as a common waiter in the kind of sprawling,
gargantuan diner owned by Greeks which used to be everywhere in New York but
were rapidly succumbing to modernity.
“Great,”
said Eve Patricia. She stretched her
foxy arms and legs mightily, opened her mouth to give a craterlike yawn of
morn, and got to making the coffee. The
kitchenette’s huge window looked right down at the Queensboro Plaza
Prockahoon called
a third time. “Did I tell you I was
tutoring some ESL students? Fairly
advanced. Much more drive and motivation
than native born American kids. One
assignment was to write about something they saw on the news. Kid picks some union on strike out west
someplace. She writes “The rank and file
union members were menstruating on a picket line outside the corporate
offices.” Broke my heart to have to
correct her in front of the whole class that she meant demonstrating.”
Completely
nude and, to her own surprise, completely uninhibited she made the coffee while
feeling the crinkle of two Chinese fortunes under each bare foot:
OUR
PURPOSE IN LIFE IS NOT TO GET AHEAD OF
OTHER
PEOPLE – BUT TO GET AHEAD OF OURSELVES.
TURBULENCE
IS A LIFE FORCE, IT IS OPPORTUNITY .
LET’S
LOVE TURBULENCE AND USE IT FOR CHANGE.
IF
YOU HAVE NO CRITICS YOU’LL LIKELY HAVE NO SUCCESS.
WHAT
ABOUT THE BABIES? WHAT ABOUT THE
SUNSHINE?
In spite of, almost in defiance of,
the ferine weather she felt not at all chilly.
The steam in the apartment blasted through the pipes with the sensory
vigor of a stalking leopard.
The
truth was that something about the whole scene was exciting her in new and
novel ways. Here she was – a fairly
typical, average girl from the Midwest trying to make a life for herself in New York , a story that
has been repeated hundreds of thousands of times down through the ages. And here she was with this sexy (if mostly
impotent) older guy with the insane apartment and “don’t grovel” attitude;
somehow he communicated to her by everything he did that he was thrilled to be
with a sexy young babe but that he really wouldn’t be any big deal if she were
to go. This was something so different
from the way guys her own age behaved with her – like meek little lapdogs –
that it spun her mind. And, in spite of
his lack of, err, situation he had sexually intoxicated her the previous
afternoon and evening in ways guys her own age had never even approached
before.
In
Queens Center
She
stood naked with her arms folded across her chest watching his old electric
coffee maker huff and puff and drip drip drip.
She was enjoying luxuriating in a new feeling, a bold female confidence,
a completely new vista of experience.
Everything felt right.
She
poured out two cups of coffee and sipped her own. She said “About last night.”
“Yeah?”
He was sweating now, locked into a steady rhythm.
“Are
we going to do that again?”
“You’re
damn right we are. Ha! You like that?”
“Loved
it.”
“Great.”
“No
one’s ever spoken to me like that before.”
“I’m
sure.”
“You’re
grunting. With the effort.”
“Of
course I’m grunting with the effort. You
think this is easy?”
Here she made the
decision to have a little fun with her older man. She replicated the exact pitch, cadence, and
syllable count of his remarks. “Bah (Of)
bah (course) bah (I’m) bah-bah (grunting) bah (with) bah (the) bah-bah
(effort).” And she began to mimic his
execution of the exercise the revered Hindu squat, playing up awkwardness and
goofiness out of all rational proportion.
Both laughed – she out of genuine delight and he placatingly. It was an advantage of experience he enjoyed
merely because he was older – he could plausibly fake a placating laugh and
present it as a soldier of reality.
He
said, “Is this what you do as a dispute resolution professional? Practice mockery?” That made her laugh even
harder.
After
a time both were sufficiently coffeed up to dress and embark. Again he noticed an unusual habit of hers –
she put on both sock and shoe on one foot first, leaving one bare and one
completely ready before doing sock and shoe on the other. While she was bent over in the chair he
observed therewithal that she was a willing and enthusiastic participant in the
mostly completed overall societal tack to a wholly commoditized concupiscence;
in other words, she liked to wear Victoria ’s
Secret thongs.
Crescent
Street was cold and windy. The day was
gray. They moved arm in arm past some
rundown apartment buildings.
“Talk
some erotic shit to me,” she said suddenly out of the blue “Whisper in my ear.”
“You’re
such a bad girl.”
“Come
on. Turn me on old man.”
“Here?”
“Yes. Here. Now.”
He
pulled her hat back over her ear. They came to a halt at a red light and he
whispered into her ear the following: “That
postmodernism is indefinable is a truism. However, it can be described as a set
of critical, strategic and rhetorical practices employing concepts such as
difference, repetition, the trace, the simulacrum, and hyperreality to
destabilize other concepts such as presence, identity, historical progress,
epistemic certainty, and the univocity of meaning.”
She
threw her head back and her face looked like St. Theresa in Bernini’s statue.
“Oh you sexy motherfucker,” she breathed.
They
came upon a greasy spoon. A feeble
middle aged woman was fighting the wind, trying to open the door to get in but
the wind kept blowing it shut. She tried
once, twice, three times before she finally almost had it open but a strong gust
came in and blew it shut once more with a slam.
The final insult came when the wind blew her hat off her head and
whisked it off to eternity. The woman
howled and ran off down the street.
At
what was still not the nicest part of Crescent Street they came upon an
unusually large, beautiful and well kept home with a white picket fence around
it and an impeccably manicured lawn.
What? Here? It was if a fleet of giant helicopters had
picked it off a movie set and lifted it to Crescent Street. There was a terse handwritten message on the
front gate, held there with industrial tape:
DEAR
DOGS: Please curb your human pets.
They stopped for the briefest
instant to read the note, then continued without remark. Eve Patricia intuited a pair of connate eyes
observing them through curtains
“I’m so curious
now about this guy Prockahoon. Tell me
some more about him.”
“Umm..I think
possibly he’s a little too intent on creating magnificent experiences that
bring beauty to the soul.”
“What do you
mean?”
“He has a lot of
unmastered sorrow.”
In
the middle of the animated conversation about the oddities of Prockahoon that followed
- which they were about to experience any moment now - they finally reached the
intersection of Crescent Street and Broadway, where the following epic vision
greeted them.
Six
or seven homeless men, evidently acting in concert, crouched low with their
trousers and underwear down around their ankles, shitting into the palms of
their hands and flinging the clumps of shit at people. For a second the surreal character of the
scene froze Harshwine and Eve Patricia in their tracks but in the ensuing few
seconds a humble, frail elderly lady dressed in her Sunday best took a furious
log right in the back of the head; the force of the blow might have been from a
brick as it knocked her forward a couple of steps. She staggered, clutching at a parking meter
for support. People were screaming,
guiding young children to safety, waving their arms, diving for cover. Shards of feces slapped into a fruit stand, a
car windshield, a bicycle that was chained to a pole. The shit seemed to stream out of
the bodies of the homeless men in unending supply. Their shriveled cocks and balls stood in the
raw, chilly air like petrified prunes.
One of the men had some kind of pukey green liquid ground into, frozen
into, the scum white of his beard.
Several of them bounced on their toes like athletes, fecal balls in
hand, stalking for possible targets. Eve
Patricia thought she saw a young girl with shit dripping off her eyebrows,
hanging like icicles, but she couldn’t be sure of this. In a moment police cars with blaring sirens
screeched up. Officers advanced upon the
men brandishing riot shields for protection against any errant projectiles.
Like
many in the area, Eve Patricia had been snapping pics and shooting video with
her cell phone all the while. She was
usually not one for such activity but this was extraordinary and she felt it
was her duty to mankind to have some record of this occurrence. No one would ever believe it. It was the kind of episode that in previous
epochs lived only in the cracks of sidewalks and the cracks of history.
The
building where Prockahoon lived could justifiably be called a tenement. Seeing this gave Eve Patricia a look into
Harshwine’s character that she previously hadn’t had. She reminded herself that he was renting this
apartment from the landlord, say, for a thousand dollars a month and then
subletting it to Prockahoon and someone else who each, in turn, pay a thousand
dollars a month to Harshwine. Eve
Patricia had once taken a history class on the classic robber barons –
Commodore Vanderbilt, Jay Gould, Amasa Stone.
It fascinated her.
In
the hallway of the building they took off their hats and gloves, still partially
in shock, and waited to be buzzed in.
Their cheeks were red and their thoughts askew.
“Did
that just really happen?”
“Yup.
We just witnessed a small army of homeless men throwing shit around,” she said
dazedly, as if giving a report to an uninvolved third party.
The
buzzer buzzed with sharp anger, a crow in flight. Harshwine turned the knob and nudged the door
open with his shoulder. There was no
elevator in the building; they went into the vestibule of broken dreams and up
the creaking staircase to the fifth floor.
Sounds mogated outward from behind apartment doors: a woman moaning in
pain, children screaming, mindless cartoon laughter, conversation in
indecipherable foreign languages, pounding music. A child’s tricycle with a flat tire was
outside one door, upside down and precarious.
Eve Patricia thought she saw a discarded, half chewed pork chop on a
step but she couldn’t be certain.
When
at last they arrive at the apartment Eve Patricia smiled upon noticing Chinese
fortunes taped to the door, under the peephole in a vertical line:
EVEN
A HARE BITES WHEN CORNERED.
GOVERN
A FAMILY AS YOU WOULD COOK A
SMALL
FISH – VERY GENTLY.
TO KNOW THE ROAD AHEAD,
ASK THOSE COMING
BACK.
THE PALEST INK IS
BETTER THAN THE MOST RETENTIVE MEMORY.
WHAT ABOUT THE
BABIES? WHAT ABOUT THE
ECOSYSTEM?
“The
bell doesn’t work.” Harshwine made a fist, ready to pound on the door, but she
grabbed him by the wrist to stop the knock.
“What?” he asked, surprised and a trifle irked.
She
pointed with her index finger at the peephole.
A bloodshot eyeball had silently appeared behind the glass. The eyelid fluttered up and down a couple of
times.
“Prockie
babes, wassup!” Harshwine smiled.
The
eye completely disappeared.
“Prockahoon!”
Harshwine called.
Nothing. Harshwine rapped on the door and called some
more.
Nothing,
again. Eve Patricia knocked on the door
with both fists playfully, emulating the movements of a rock and roll
drummer. Only quiet in return.
“Shit,
I have to pee like crazy. Prock, come
on! It’s Evie and I!!” But nothing happened. After several more moments of pleading and
imploring they gave up and turned to go, flabbergasted. Then the door opened.
There
stood a gentleman about Harshwine’s age whose bushy eyebrows met, forming a
V. His cheeks had crazy, even insane
hollows but his nose retained stateliness and augustness whereas his eyes had
the aforementioned bloodshot zing of rock stars after they thoroughly trash ten
thousand dollar a night hotel suites.
Unattended hair grew out of his ears.
The black hair on top of his head was mangled and his facial skin bore
craters, the remains of thousands of pimples.
A very loose blue T shirt, old soiled jeans, and snakeskin boots – once
probably awesome but now most deplorable and ungratifying – covered most of the
pasty undernourished body. All the
fingernails were bitten and chewed except for the pinky of the left hand, which
had been allowed to grow long, thick, and disgusting.
As
Harshwine simply stood there saying nothing, Eve Patricia extended a hand and
said, “Mr. Prockahoon, at last we meet!
I’ve heard a lot about you. My
name is Eve Patricia.”
“This
isn’t Prockahoon,” Harshwine said.
