Dogrun Page 10

  We were better than them, I thought before I could catch myself, referring to the Beautiful and the Crazy. As my energy dipped amid the lullaby of explosive tunes, I found myself drifting off to sleep.

  “You know, you’ll get a job without any problem.” Zoë had appeared out of the darkness. She must have presumed that my slumber was born of depression about losing the crappy job. Behind her, like a six-foot puppy dog, was the suit boy. She was holding his hand like a leash.

  “You’re looking for a job?” the suit asked in a reedy, arrogant little voice. “I’m the manager of the Kinko’s on Houston Street. I have a day shift that just opened. You can work for me.” Ugh!

  Behind the suit was a grinning Asian man who kept staring at my worn-out shit kickers. I wasn’t sure if he was friends with someone, so I didn’t respond, and he eventually receded back into the void.

  “Oh, giving her a job would be so wonderful,” mooed Zoë to her latest love farmer. She was taking intermittent sips from his Sam Adams.

  “It’s not the job that depresses me,” I finally revealed. “It’s Primo.”

  “That was her ex-boyfriend,” Zoë updated her nitwit.

  “I mean, his dog, his belongings, even his remains are in my apartment. I can’t get rid of him. Even his exes seem to be everywhere. And he was such an asshole. I found out he was cheating on me.”

  “What are you talking about?” she asked.

  “Tattoo Man said he slept with some dumb blond named Whorzy.” I appropriately mispronounced the offending name.

  “You’re kidding!” Zoë said and started laughing.

  “What’s so funny?”

  “I wasn’t laughing in amusement.” She paused. “Forget it.”

  “Forget what?” I asked.

  “You know what you should do?” Zoë began again, but laughing again, she caught herself, covering her mouth. “I can’t say it.”

  “What?” asked her postadolescent poster child. She whispered into his ear for about ten minutes.

  “Tell me,” I said, not really interested.

  “It’s way too wicked,” the suit deemed. “It’s the kind of thing you’d regret in the morning.”

  “Let me regret it,” I said, resenting the fact that Zoë had sacrificed me so that she could get closer to this Retardo Leonardo.

  “Where do you take dogs?” he hinted, adorably in the know.

  “The pound?” I guessed.

  “No! the dogrun.” Zoë snickered. “You should dump Primo’s ashes in the dogrun!”

  “Yes!” I screamed. It was so perfect. I bolted up. “Let’s do it right now!”

  “You can’t do it now,” the suit replied. “The park is closed.”

  Closing Tompkins Square Park was the basis for a bloody police riot ten years ago, but I didn’t give a damn. “I’ll pay the fines if we get caught.”

  “Let’s go,” Zoë said and gulped down the remains of his beer. We dashed out the door across Houston and up First Avenue, sprinting the entire way as though we might forget the idea.

  As we passed through the streets, I learned that the suit’s name was Jeff and that he was dressed in Geoffrey Beene. I asked them to wait downstairs and dashed up. When I threw open the door, the dog barked and cried and did a two-legged jig around me as I fumbled for the boxed Primo. I was about to slam the door behind me when Numb dashed out, so I brought her with me, down the stairs, and out the front door.

  We scurried through the Eastern European housing projects snaking along the bench-lined walkways where old ladies kvetched about their aches and pains all day. We hurried down Fifth Street between First Avenue to A and then north, passed the all-night Korean mega-market, and arrived at the closed gates of Tompkins Square Park. Although I hadn’t brought a leash, Numb was good about not crossing the streets without me.

  There were still a lot of people hanging out on the southwest corner of the park, and we didn’t want to get arrested, so we headed down Seventh Street, up B, and finally came to the dissolute eastern border on Ninth Street, where the dog was narrow enough to squeeze through the vertical bars. Zoë and I leaned forward and flopped over the chest-high gate. When Jeff jumped over, his suit jacket flapped open, and on his nice blue shirt I saw the word Kinko’s sewn over the right pocket in bright blue thread.

  “This alone is a sixty-dollar fine,” he pointed out nerdishly.

  At about a hundred feet into the park we were in the dogrun, and I took out the brown sack filled with Primo. As I carefully cut the tape and began tearing into its layers, Numb dashed around, sniffing traces of piss and crap. Finally I removed the cardboard box. Inside, a heavy glass jar held his remains.

  “Maybe this isn’t such a good idea,” Zoë uttered, perhaps sobered by the desolation of the park.

  “Why not?” Jeff shot back.

  “He was also capable of being quite sensitive.” Zoë grew maudlin.

  “Oh, please,” Jeff replied. “He was a mega-sleaze.”

  “You didn’t know him!” I snapped. “He was twice the man you are!”

  “Hey, lighten up!” said Zoë. “He was just trying to be supportive.”

  “At least he was an artist, not some wannabe accountant.”

  “Screw you,” the suit shot back. Even in my rage, I noticed his lack of imagination in returning an insult. “Just because I’m wearing a suit, I’m guilty. For all you know, I’m an unemployed poet who just left a funeral.”

  “He’s right, you know.” Zoë stood by her just-met man. “You’re thirty years old. Time to get over the ‘down with the establishment’ crap.”

  “I’m twenty-nine and don’t need to hear some yuppie-looking geek judging someone he didn’t even know.”

  “No one ever uses the term yuppie anymore,” she re-replied.

  “Screw this!” Jeff stuck by his trusty catch-all phrase.

  “Relax, both of you,” Zoë said, but it was too late.

  “No! Screw this! I don’t need this.” Jeff marched out of the dogrun and back over to the gate.

  “Goddamn it, Mare! I liked that guy,” Zoë said.

  “Hey, at least I didn’t mug him for ten bucks.”

  She turned and rushed out, pursuing her Lego Blocks boyfriend. I was glad to be alone with Primo and his dog. I unscrewed the top of the heavy little jar and looked inside. He looked like some kind of powdered mix. But even if by adding water and stirring I could bring him back, I wouldn’t. I considered resealing the jar and heading home. But impulsively, I tossed the powder into the air. Numb thought I was playing and jumped into the cloud that was Primo. With her canine jaws wide open, the dog got a mouthful of her old owner. Then Numb looked around, puzzled at how something that seemed solid one minute was invisible the next. She shook off the powder and sniffed about. Primo was now a permanent part of the dogrun.

  When I heard a distant siren, I feared that we were going to be arrested. I collected all the incriminating evidence—container, box, and wrappings. Numb and I left the run. En route, I stopped at the big Korean mart and, as if I hadn’t consumed enough booze, bought a bottle of Miller Lite. I opened it and took a long swig as a cop cruiser passed down A. It slowed to a halt in front of me

  “Hey, lady,” called the cop on the passenger side. Except for a couple late-night stragglers, the street was empty.

  “What?” I asked and wondered how in the world he could have known I was in Tompkins Square Park.

  “You got some kind of ID?”

  “What did I do?” I said, earnestly. Femininity was a useful tool that, unfortunately, I had simply run out of at the moment. Straightforwardness was allowed at times. Wit, however, always threatened them.

  “No open liquor.” He pointed to my bottle. This “quality of life” law was suddenly being enforced along with other statutes that had been notoriously overlooked for prior decades. Harvard Professor Wilson’s landmark study concluded that if you scratch a petty criminal, a hardened felon lurks underneath: ergo, no beer. The cop told me to po
ur it out. I just did as told. No sudden moves. It wasn’t worth arguing with the police. Primo used to say they always won and sometimes left you aching.

  “What’s your name? If you don’t have any outstanding warrants, I’ll let it walk with a warning.” He was merciful. I stated my name, which he slowly typed into his little dashboard computer.

  As I waited for the result, I noticed CPR decaled on the side of his new white squad car: Courtesy, Professionalism, Respect. That was all I ever wanted from a boyfriend. Since I had no bench warrants for turnstile jumping or jury evasion, he let me loose.

  “Is that your dog?” The doughnut dipper pointed to Numb, who was leaving her urinary tag on the side of his car.

  “Did she crap?” I asked, looking around for a turd to fetch.

  “No, but she’s supposed to be on a leash.”

  “Oh, yeah. I have it at home.”

  “Well, walk it home by its collar, or I have to fine you.”

  I was just a grab bag of illegality tonight. I demonstratively held the dog that Tattoo Man declared as a female. The cop drove off, having made the city a better place. The dog looked up at me sadly like she’d done something wrong. I gave her a hug and let her go with a warning. Together we walked home.

  The next day I woke up early but had no job to go to, so I went back to bed. I got up again in the early afternoon to the phone ringing.

  I helloed groggily.

  “Hey Mary, it’s time for our second date.”

  “Fine,” I said without the slightest clue of whom it was. “When and where?”

  “You tell me?”

  “Dinner?” I asked and wondered if it could be someone I knew from school.

  “Dinner sounds great,” he replied. I wondered if I had ever slept with whoever this was. “Where shall we dine?”

  “Where did we dine last time?” I inquired, figuring that might release the necessary information.

  “You mean the Thai place?” he shot back. It was Alphonso the lnheriter, the paranormalist I met in the strip club.

  “Let’s not go there again. How about somewhere in the area? How about seven o’clock at the Sushi Garage between First and Second Avenues.”

  “I don’t know it.”

  “You can’t miss it. It’s a big garage on the south side of the street. Oh, but I have rehearsal at ten o’clock, is that okay?” In other words, are you going to be pissed for buying me dinner without so much as the possibility of getting to first base?

  “That’s all right, if we can get together by seven.”

  “See you then.”

  Soon as I hung up, I suffered the acute and divine epiphany of being jobless. It was the modern equivalent to what medieval monks recorded after weeks and even months of starvation and sensory deprivation. I lay in bed and watched the moments break into phenomenal particles of panic and could actually see the divine crack of God’s ass as he completely turned his back on me. I rose, dressed, grabbed doggy, and went to the ATM where I checked my balance. Doing some basic math, I realized that I had about three weeks before I would be in debt. I got a New York Times and a cup of coffee and brought the dog back home. Flipping through the classifieds, I looked for employment. I saw a couple of lousy-looking, tele-sale jobs and realized that this was going to be a real disaster. I cringed at the thought of having to start the whole job search again, updating my bogus résumé, finding a costume that made me look responsible and professional, and then, worst of all, making calls and going for torturous interviews. Instead I turned on the TV and watched some white-trash sex nuts charging at each other on the Jerry Springer Show. For all the country’s political sensitivity and moral outrage, we secretly hungered for pornographic gladiator fights. Numb put her chin on my knee just like she used to do with Primo.

  Bored, I decided to peek into Primo’s stack of banana boxes. I opened the top one. It mainly contained his clothes: novelty T-shirts that said things like Tm with Stupid,” endless plaid flannel shirts, boxer shorts, and various distressed denims. The second box was filled with “edgy” trade-size paperbacks that every cool dude in this neighborhood owned; the banal Beats, the usual hip crime novels, Charles Willeford and Jim Thompson. At the bottom of the box, predictably, was a half-drunk pint of Jack Daniels. The last banana box contained his files: letters, articles, photos of him posing playfully with various strangers in front of local landmarks—the black cube, the old Orchidia restaurant on Second Avenue and Ninth, the old Saint Mark’s Theater. There was a newspaper clipping depicting him raising his fist defiantly during one of the Tompkins Square protests. I found a birthday card from Sue dated 1982, wishing him a Happy Thirtieth. When I did the math I instantly realized with horror that he was forty-six. Then I located a second birthday card from someone named Reno, also wishing him a Happy Thirtieth. This card was dated 1986.

  Evidently he had rolled the mileage meter back more than once. Toward the bottom of the box I unearthed another birthday card—from 1973—which wished him a Happy Thirty-Two, and I knew for a fact that he wasn’t that old. He had rolled the mileage forward as well. I excavated a small yellow envelope that contained diamond-shaped blue pills. Upon rolling them into my palm and inspecting them, I concluded that they were relatively new. I wondered if they were some kind of recreational drug or a medication. I slipped them in my shirt pocket, intending to check them out.

  I kept digging through the box, sifting through scraps, articles, bills, receipts, and clippings. To my surprise, I ferreted out a yellowing manuscript held together by a broad rubber band. It appeared to be hand-typed and was entitled Cuming Attractions, by “Primo Teev.” Real clever. As I flipped through it, scanning some of the pages, I saw that it involved two girls, Daniella and Virginia, and some lecherous downstairs neighbor, Floyd. Occasional passages of florid prose leaped out from the otherwise crass and mechanized pornography. The copyright date at the bottom of the first page read 1979. The final page was numbered 256. On top of everything else, Numb’s old owner was a pornographer, making me feel gladder still that I had expelled his lusty dust in the dogrun.

  I turned the TV back on and again picked up the classifieds, but it felt like a weight in my hands. How long could I exchange the priceless years of my youth into thirteen-dollar-an-hour paychecks and grind that into nothing? I felt like I was paying my dues over and over for a membership into hell. Primo’s death had truly smacked me with the awful realization that all life eventually comes down to is an unexpected fuck-you ending.

  The one awful option to sidestepping the hell of tall glass skyscrapers and stilted behavior was the Kinko’s on Houston Street. I could apologize to suit boy and work with a crew of Gap Kids, five and ten years younger than I, Xeroxing documents mindlessly. At least I wouldn’t have to totally restrain myself, because losing that job wouldn’t really matter.

  I picked up the phone and called Zoë’s work number. Someone else picked up her line, another temp who was probably temping for a temp. When I asked for Zoë, I was told she’d been shipped upstairs with no forwarding extension.

  “Damn.”

  “She’ll be back down here briefly in about a half an hour to collect her things, but then she’ll be going right back up,” the temp added.

  “Can I leave a message?”

  “An incredibly short one.” I could hear other phones ringing in the background. I asked for her to call me. Then I dressed and went out to the kitchen to see if my never-present roommate had left any interesting tidbits in the fridge. On rare occasions, there was a box of cereal and I could usually sneak a cup without her noticing it. But as I helped myself, the dog started jumping underfoot, almost knocking me down. She was stir-crazy and desperately wanted out.

  “All right,” I finally conceded. It was inhumane to ignore her. I tried leaving a message on Zoë’s home answering machine, but even that wasn’t picking up. I didn’t want to miss her. So in case she called me, I left a message for her on my outgoing message: “Zoë, I’m sorry about last night. I wa
s just depressed about being unemployed. I was wondering if you could help me by calling Jeff and seeing if I can still get that job at Kinko’s he mentioned. Thanks.” Beep.

  Numb was deliriously happy when I clipped her leash on, bouncing around the apartment as if she were having an epileptic attack. Once downstairs, Numb pulled immediately to the right, while I wanted to go left. I bought a cup of coffee at the Arab newsstand and headed toward Tompkins Square Park. Due to Numb’s fetishistic sniffings and pissing, I kept getting yanked by the leash, spilling hot coffee on my hand and wrist.

  “Goddamn it!” I finally screamed after a searing burn. I yanked the leash so hard, I unintentionally flipped the poor creature into a backward cartwheel. I rubbed her while profusely apologizing. I simply didn’t have the patience to handle a pet. Numb, however, looked up at me with such incredible forgiveness. Even though the dog was thoughtless and egotistical, she had the profound gift of being able to absolve sins, something most people couldn’t do. This compelled me to kneel down and give the beast a hug. We finally walked the remaining distance, and I let her loose in the run.

  From the benches inside, I spotted the unchained chain gang—at least, that’s what I called them. They were a dispirited collection of young men and women who marched out of the park’s sole administration building. All wore plastic red vests and dragged bags or brooms. They separated to clean the four corners of the park. When I first spotted this battalion of civic workers, I thought they were volunteers, but upon close inspection it was obvious that they lacked the prerequisite zeal, and I never saw the same worker twice. One member of this club, a girl who looked to be in her late teens, opened the dogrun gate with one of her canvas-gloved hands, while in the other she carried a black plastic bag. I watched her as she walked around collecting garbage that got blown behind the benches. I was seated in a section away from most of the other owners as she came by. When she looked at me, I gave her a friendly smile and said, “Mind if I ask you something?”