Apartment, page 5
“Mind if I take a look?”
“Be my guest,” I said.
From under his bed he pulled out a tool kit I hadn’t seen him move in and opened it in the bathroom. The inside glinted with dozens of implements. “That’s a serious tool kit,” I said.
“My dad gave it to me when I turned thirteen. Which is ironic, since he didn’t know how to fix shit.” He mock-grimaced and made his voice warbly. “And he left us in a broken home.” He picked through the kit for a few tools and stood barefoot inside the tub. “You know the last time the showerhead filter was cleaned?”
“I didn’t even know there was a filter,” I said from the doorway. “So, never.”
“Then that’s probably the issue. Plus the nozzles get clogged with mineral deposits over time.”
He’d yanked the shower curtain all the way to the end, but it was bunched up and blocked my view of his manipulations to the showerhead. All I could see was that he was unscrewing it then wrenching and fiddling with the tools as his left biceps pulsed.
“So who taught you this stuff, if your dad didn’t?” I asked.
“I have an older cousin who knows some things,” he said. “The rest I picked up by trial and error at home.”
“Is that how you know how to fix cars?”
“I don’t know anything about fixing cars.”
“But … your novel.”
“Oh,” he said. “I just read manuals and change up the words when I need to show the guy doing something. I’m not even that good a driver. I failed my test twice before I got my license.”
“No kidding,” I said. “It’s so detailed. You really fooled everyone in class.”
“If anyone else wrote it, they’d assume it was research,” he said. “But they think I have, like, motor oil running through my veins.”
He removed the showerhead completely and asked if I had a toothbrush I didn’t mind getting dirty. I gave him my current one; I’d gone to the dentist before school started for a cleaning and received a new brush. He scrubbed a small plastic object under the sink faucet then brushed the nozzles of the showerhead and asked for a piece of toilet paper, which he used to painstakingly clean between the nozzles. Crumpling the toilet paper into a ball, he arced it like a basketball.
“Jordan!” he said as it sank into the wastebasket. He looked a little embarrassed. “I regress to a fourteen-year-old boy when I throw things out. You a Bird man?”
“What?”
“Larry Bird,” he said as he screwed the showerhead back on. “I’m guessing you like the Celtics.”
“Oh. I thought you meant am I half-bird, half-man or something.” I didn’t like the Celtics, had never had any interest in them or their sport despite their run of glory in my youth, but the obsessive fandom of greater New England meant I’d picked up enough data to feign basic comprehension.
“I always thought Bird was better than Magic, except for his back,” Billy said as he replaced the filter and showerhead. “But Jordan’s in another league.”
“Uh-huh,” I said.
“I still can’t believe Magic came back last year. Can you imagine guarding him, knowing what could happen?”
I nodded.
“I wonder if those rumors about him are true,” he said. He stepped out of the tub and turned the faucet. Water streamed out of all the nozzles.
“Nice,” I said. “This setup’s already paying off.”
He opened the medicine cabinet and pointed to a small slot built into the wall. “What’s this, by the way?”
“My great-aunt told me it’s to deposit used razor blades. I’ve never used it.”
“How do you get them out?”
“You can’t.”
“They’re just stuck in the wall forever?”
I shrugged.
“So when they tear down this apartment, they’ll find a bunch of razor blades in the wall from nineteen-whatever?”
“It was built in 1947,” I said. “So, yeah, I guess.”
“Very cool,” he said. “A little time capsule.”
He stepped out of the bathroom and, before entering his room, noticed the photo on the wall of the pencil company union representative was askew. When he adjusted it, he discovered the nail holding it was loose. With one clean strike from the hammer in his tool kit, he drove in the nail farther.
“I’ve been meaning to fix all these loose nails around the place,” I said. “But I can’t find my hammer.”
“Or your sickle,” Billy deadpanned.
“I guess that’s why communism is dead,” I said.
We took the L to the 1 and exited the Christopher Street station to the chaos of its haphazardly intersecting streets and throngs of predominantly male partiers on the prowl. Billy’s head whirled around at a drag queen swaggering by on six-inch platforms. On our way to the unmarked venue on Bedford, we passed two men with bulging, gym-acquired muscles.
“Hi, boys,” one said.
Billy didn’t speak until the next crosswalk. “So this is obviously a gay neighborhood?”
“Chelsea is the main one. This is a little more mixed,” I said. “But the bar’s not.”
I was relieved when the crowd packed into Chumley’s battered wooden booths included plenty of women. We squeezed into an open spot by the bar facing a picture of Samuel Beckett, among other portraits of dead authors and book jackets. The old-timey atmosphere, soaked in soft amber lighting, felt comfortingly permanent. I ordered two whiskeys on my tab, telling Billy it would be easier this way and he could repay me later, though I planned not to remind him of the bill; I liked the idea of treating him on his first night.
“You said Hemingway drank here?” he asked.
“And Fitzgerald,” I said. “And Dylan Thomas, and a buncha others.”
“Is this, like, a literary crowd, then?”
“Nope,” answered the man next to us. He had a thick head of carefully parted white hair and wore a sloppily fitting button-down. “Half these assholes are in finance.” He introduced himself as Jim. “This your first time here?” he asked Billy.
“Only mine,” Billy answered. “He’s been before.”
“I’ve been coming here for thirty-three years,” Jim announced. “The first night was November 22, 1963, the day Kennedy was shot.”
“I was here the night of the white Bronco chase,” I said. “I’m not joking. Everyone left to watch at a sports bar.”
“That’s the difference between our generations,” said Jim. “JFK for me, O. J. for you.”
“Plus you got the moon landing,” Billy added.
“Well, we got Crystal Pepsi,” I said. “And Zima.”
Jim smiled thinly and asked what we did. I told him about the Columbia program. “I had a play run off-Broadway in the fall of 1965,” he said.
“I’ve never met a playwright,” Billy said.
“Then I got married,” Jim went on, “and had kids, and I got a job in life insurance. And I thought I could keep writing at night, or early in the morning, or on weekends, like Wallace Stevens. But guess what I learned?” He waited a beat, though neither of us was going to supply the answer we knew was coming. “It’s a hell of a lot easier to write poems in your spare time than plays. Never finished another one again.”
“Well, your wife probably appreciated the financial stability,” I said.
“Deeee-vorced,” he said in a singsong voice.
“Or your kids,” Billy tried.
Jim shrugged his eyebrows and wavered on his feet; he’d hid his drunkenness before but now evidently didn’t care. “I had the beginning of something good, and I stopped,” he said. I couldn’t tell if he meant his career or a specific play.
“You could always start up again now,” Billy said.
“Too late,” he said. “I’m out of my time’s joint. A real nowhere man. Doesn’t have a point of view. No one cares what I have to say anymore.”
“Naw,” Billy said, doubtless drawing on years of comforting abject drunks at the bar. “You’re not a nowhere man. You’re still here. We’re all still here.”
Jim gazed dreamily at the room. “Maybe,” he said and, with a hoist of his glass, disappeared into the crowd.
Billy was scribbling in a pocket-sized notepad. “What’re you writing?” I asked. “ ‘Don’t get married or have kids’?”
“Sorry, one sec,” he said. “Getting down his dialogue.” The page he was on was crammed margin to margin with his tidy handwriting.
“That’s smart,” I said when he was done. “I never carry around a notepad.”
He snapped the notepad shut and replaced it in his pocket. “I try not to take it out in public too much.”
“No, it’s a good habit,” I said.
He looked back at where Jim had gone. “Is this stupid, what we’re doing?” he asked.
“We can go somewhere else.”
“Not the bar. Getting a writing degree. It’s stupid, right?”
“Why? Because of that guy’s story?”
He took a long drag on his cigarette, his cheeks caving in, and ejected the smoke through his nostrils like a machine’s relief valve. “Maybe I’m just hiding this.”
“You’re hiding what?” I asked.
“Hiding in this,” he corrected me; the bar was loud. “From real life and a real job. I’m just bullshitting around in school so I can pretend I’m a writer for a few years.”
I’d met aspiring writers as an undergrad who were guilty of what Billy was talking about: ice-cold Didionites, guys who fashioned themselves Bukowski-style misfits or Pynchonesque geniuses or Nabokovian above-it-all aesthetes. One writing student wore a suit and bow tie to all the school readings, where he ostentatiously took notes from the front row in a leather-bound book.
“You’re the real deal,” I told him.
“Thanks,” he said. “Thanks, man. Sometimes I feel like the people at school—including Sylvia—are going easy on me, or kissing my ass. But it means something coming from you. But even if that’s true, which is debatable, if I want to make a living, this is the worst possible way to get there.”
“It could be worse,” I said. “You could be studying poetry.” I took the last sip of my whiskey. “Want another round?”
“I was actually thinking we should go home to get some writing in.”
“Oh, okay,” I said, disappointed at the premature conclusion to the night and wondering why he’d agreed to go all the way to the West Village for just one drink.
“I’m kidding.” He grinned slyly. “Let’s get hammered.”
As I flagged down the bartender, a girl bumped into Billy while maneuvering toward the bar. “I’m so sorry,” she said in a British accent, putting a hand on his shoulder.
“That’s okay,” he mumbled. He attempted to move out of the way, but the space was too tight.
“I can get you a drink,” I called over to her.
“I’m actually getting two—one for my friend.”
I asked what they were having and ordered for all of us. “So, I imagine you guys want to hang out with us now?” she asked impishly.
Billy and I looked at each other.
“Come on over,” she said and walked to the booths.
In my limited experience, when a woman at a bar invited you to sit with her and her friend, you unhesitatingly accepted, but Billy seemed reluctant. “This okay?” I whispered as we threaded through the crowd.
“Yeah,” he said.
We joined the two women in their booth, its table a scarified palimpsest of drinkers’ names. Naomi, the one from the bar, had a sleek black mane with a Sontagesque streak on one side, Claire’s tongue piercing glinted like a wet pebble in the cavern of her mouth, and both were in floral dresses, a trend that had apparently made it across the pond: they were “on holiday” from London.
“Claire writes poetry,” Naomi said after I’d answered her question about what we were doing in New York. “That’s why we came to this bar.”
“Cool,” I said. “Have you published anything in America?”
She smiled down at her beer. “Nothing anywhere yet.”
“Us neither. At least I haven’t. Have you?” I asked Billy, trying to get him involved; he hadn’t spoken beyond quietly introducing himself.
“Nope,” he answered.
After more conversation about where we all lived and what they’d done on their trip, with hardly a word from Billy, he excused himself to the men’s room.
“Can your friend talk?” Naomi asked.
“He’s just a little shy around new people,” I said, which seemed to be true; he’d been quiet at first with our Columbia classmates and had only lately begun speaking up in class and at the bar after workshop.
“Tell him we’re very nice.”
“I will.”
“And tell him,” she said, “that I think he’s a fucking gorgeous man.”
I didn’t know why I was the one to blush.
“So,” Naomi said when Billy came back, “where can a girl go dancing around here?”
I mentioned a dive with a dance floor near Washington Square Park I’d been to with NYU people. She and Claire stood up. Billy and I stayed seated.
“Coming or not?” Naomi asked. “My God. It’s like I have to spell everything out for you two. You Americans aren’t much for nuance, are you?”
I closed out my tab and we left with them, Billy and I in front as we smoked in pairs. The night wind carried the first crisp notes of autumn, a season I thought of as one of rebirth rather than death for its school-year associations.
“Naomi’s into you,” I said under my breath.
“Nah,” he said.
“She told me when you were in the bathroom.”
“Really? What’d she say?”
I paused.
“I can’t remember, but she made it pretty clear,” I said.
He glanced backward. “I feel like they can see through me.”
“What do you mean?”
“They’re from London,” he said. “They can tell I’m from the middle of nowhere.”
“You live in Manhattan now,” I told him. “You’re a grad student at Columbia. They’re probably intimidated by you.”
He arched a dubious eyebrow.
“And no one cares where you’re from,” I said. “You’re here now.”
The bar was a dank cave with a loosely delineated dance floor composed of people who resembled us. Young metropolitans in our demographic looked essentially of a piece then, as I suppose they always do, a refined conformity with grace notes of distinction always being au courant—jeans of mildly varying cut and wash, grungy flannels and Cobain cardigans, lanky locks on men, pixie cuts on women, almost to the point of gender convergence, and influenced, respectively, by the early-decade coifs of River Phoenix and Winona Ryder. The guiding tenet was not to look like you spent a lot of money on your appearance nor to look legitimately poor, which called for moderation. It was an unstylish microperiod, best banished to the back of the closet of fashion history, with a potpourri of nineteen-seventies artifacts thrown into the mix—a few bell-bottoms, collars spread like albatross wings, sideburns (Jason Priestley and Luke Perry); cultural nostalgia, so goes the theory, operates in approximately twenty-year cycles, the period required for impressionable teenagers to become adult tastemakers who seek comfort in the rose-colored remembrance of their youth.
I bought vodka shots for everyone, hoping to loosen Billy up, but he remained taciturn.
“I heard you’re a great dancer,” Naomi said to him after she got the next round.
He permitted a smile small enough that you could barely see his chipped tooth. “Where’d you hear that?”
“Everyone’s talking about it,” she said. “You want to prove it?”
Billy looked bashful. “I’ll go if you go,” he said to me.
I signed off, and our quartet migrated to the dance floor. Billy’s movements were restrained at first, but I kept plying everyone with drinks, and soon either the alcohol or the release from conversation did the trick for him. He was far from a graceful dancer, however: his motions were jerky, he was consistently offbeat, and his wild gyrations made you worry he might crash into you or elbow your face. Yet for someone who had been insecure about how he fit in, he didn’t seem to care how he looked on the dance floor, a more important trait than technical proficiency.
When Oasis’s “Don’t Look Back in Anger” came on, we paused dancing along with the rest of the crowd, but the entire room sang along to the trifling matter of Sally’s waiting—this was all we collectively had, we knew no protest songs, had little to protest—and I felt a swelling in my chest, a surge of joy flowering out through my limbs; there is nothing like crooning in a group to a chorus to communicate to yourselves and the world that you are young and drunk and unhindered by responsibility, that the future stretches out endlessly before you like a California highway.
The swampy air lacquered our skin, mine most of all. My back was soon as drenched as if I’d recently showered, but my undershirt absorbed most of the damage. Billy’s gray T-shirt was darkened over the chest and in the armpits. He appeared unaware, or at least unfazed. When the chorus of “Ironic” by Alanis Morissette started, his dancing grew crazier, like a spinning top wobbling out of control. He had to apologize to other people for knocking into them. I grew self-conscious and slowed down to a stilted sway.
Claire did, too. “This isn’t a very good song for dancing.”
“Isn’t it ironic,” I said.
“Just because we’re on a dance floor and it’s not a good dance song doesn’t make it ironic,” she pointed out. “This song ruined the public’s understanding of irony.”
“Like how ‘rain on your wedding day’ isn’t ironic. It’s just bad luck.”
“Exactly.”
“But maybe”—I let the suspense build—“that’s the ultimate irony of the song.”
“That a song called ‘Ironic’ and is supposedly about various ironies gets the definition of irony wrong.” She nodded approvingly. “That’s not bad. Did you come up with that?”
“I did,” I said. “All by myself.”
“And here I was thinking you had nothing inside that head of yours.”
