Dogrun Read online

  The next exhausting day at work was slow. While sitting at my desk waiting for something to do, I fell into a deep and beautiful sleep. Another replacement, lower on the temping pole than I, called my name and said the supervisor wanted to see me. She was a swinish lady with a rusty tin can for a heart and a bulletproof perm. I figured that she must have seen me sleeping.

  “Mary, your work here has been getting shoddy,” she said, not even complimenting my snoring.

  “What work?” I asked sincerely.

  “The work we give you here.”

  “You mean Xeroxing and answering the telephone?” I asked and unintentionally yawned.

  “Don’t take that attitude,” she replied. What attitude? It would have been a lot smarter if she said the obvious; there was no work. Sleep at home.

  “So where’s this heading? Am I fired?” I asked, fitting my head into her guillotine.

  “I don’t like this,” she replied. “I hate having to let someone go. I mean, you’re a good person.” Her voice started breaking apart. “I’ve known you for a couple of months now.” I couldn’t believe it, the demon had a heart.

  “Look, don’t sweat it. I’ve been fired before,” I consoled.

  I saw tears trailing down her villainous nose. I couldn’t believe she was crying. “They suck,” she finally muttered.

  “Who?”

  “The executives here. The only reason they’re forcing me to fire you now is because if they wait another two weeks, they’ll be forced to give you unemployment insurance.”

  “That does suck.” I sided with her.

  “You should fight them tooth and nail,” she advised. “You know what, just come in tomorrow, make them call the police on you.”

  “It’s okay, really,” I comforted her. I would have preferred if she was her usual bitchy self; then at least I could hate her. I spent the remainder of the day stealing as much stationery as I could carry. When I called home for my messages, waiting for me was a shocker: the Gregor said he was getting married, and he wanted me to attend the wedding. As if he knew about this one, there was also a consoling message from Joey, asking if I was around tonight for dinner. I called him back to accept his invitation. When his machine picked up, I said, “Dinner is fine, tell me where and when.” Then I dialed Zoë and we small-talked. Several times I almost mentioned I was in a band, but I caught myself; it seemed important to our relationship to give the constant impression that I wasn’t doing anything with my life. She finally mentioned there was an office party after work.

  “It’s not office party season,” I noted. “Why is your office having a party?”

  “Not my office,” she shot back. “It’s Burnt Out.” That was the hot new downtown magazine with attitude. Its guiding concept was a weekly schedule of events and places for young people to get laid.

  “Is there an open bar?” I needed to know. Otherwise all I could hope for would be free back issues and that was not going to help keep me awake.

  “Free domestic homegrown ale till the wee hour of seven o’clock,” Seven was not a wee hour. She sounded like she was reading the description off a comp. “It’s at Gulliver’s. You know, the new Irish pub on Fourth.”

  “Let’s go.” At five o’clock the office door popped open like a mouth, and I was gulped down the esophagus of an elevator and dispelled out into the intestines of streets. A couple of blocks of zigging east, a couple more zagging south, a few clothing store detours, one stop at the Body Shop, and I was there.

  Zoë wasn’t. I considered waiting out front, but when I heard some guy say, “Hey you!” I was beguiled. It was the pierced, tattooed dog rights activist I met at Tompkins Square.

  “Numb better not be alone in the run,” he joshed.

  “No, she’s at home crapping on my floor.”

  “So do you work for Burnt Out?” he asked.

  “Yeah, I pieced together the fascinating movie schedule in their last issue,” I kidded.

  “Did you really?” He seemed intrigued.

  “I could have,” I replied. “All it involves is transcribing Movie Phone”

  “Listen, don’t knock basic competence,” he retorted. “Most people can’t even pull that off.”

  He was right, but I still had to nod in dismay over this awful truth. Some booming rock music started playing, which instantly obliterated the fine art of conversation, and we spent the next few minutes trying to communicate in charades. I was sure that living in New York had destroyed at least 20 percent of my hearing as I found myself repeatedly saying, Huh? and What? Finally, through silent consent, we elbowed our way up to the swarmed counter. Both of us drank the one free beer they had on tap.

  “What are they celebrating anyway?” I shouted, still wondering where Zoë was.

  “This,” he shouted back, holding up the ale in the colorful plastic. “It’s a promotion for the new line of beer.” It figured. Since no one ever did anything in this city of millions, there was nothing to really celebrate but celebration itself. If this city was truly drained of all these act-alike morons who never tried to do anything important with their lives, there would be no apartment crisis. In fact there wouldn’t be a city; there’d be about eight interesting, hardworking people who probably would be all jealous of and mean to each other. Since I wasn’t one of those chosen eight, I wouldn’t be here either. This compelled me to scream to the tattooed freak, “Are you some kind of artist type?”

  “Sure,” he replied over the ridiculously loud music. “There’s a lot of artist hype!”

  I was beginning to suffer the claustrophobic pang that comes with speaking to a stranger for too long. I feared that he might believe in some way I was beholden to him for the remainder of the party. Before I could find any graceful way of departing, he managed to extract two more plastic cups of beer out of the fray. I chugged mine down quickly.

  “You know,” I said, feeling the reckless effects of the dark brown ale, “if you take all those ridiculous pins out of your ears, and have those tattoos zapped off with lasers, you wouldn’t look half bad.”

  He nodded yes, pretending to hear. I no longer felt bound to him, just the beers. This time I reached into the piranha tank and escaped with two more drinks. When I handed him a cup, he mouthed the word thanks. We knocked glasses and drank.

  “Forty years ago,” I piped up, “you’d be a beatnik. Thirty years ago, you’d be a hippie. Twenty years ago you’d be a John Travolta clone.” He nodded and reached into the throng of arms and hands and pulled out yet two more beers. We were really on a roll.

  Zoëlogy finally pulled up alongside. But it was just after seven, and the beer now cost ten bucks a cup.

  “I’m getting the hell out of here,” she declared, not aware that I was liquored up and linked to a tattooed man.

  “Hey, I know you,” Tattoo Man said to her with a big drunk smile.

  “Who the fuck are you?” she shot back.

  “He’s with me,” I hollered. The CD player stuck, hiccupping the same musical syllable over and over. Zoë growled, turned angrily, and pointed toward the door. I headed out, and Tattoo Man followed.

  “I didn’t want beer anyway,” she said grumpily once we were outside.

  “What happened?”

  “The bitch at work insisted that I stay late, she said I wasn’t working hard enough.”

  “The bitch set you up,” Tattoo Man responded thoughtfully.

  “I got canned, but I joined a band,” I rhymed accidentally, divulging my secret.

  “What brand?” Tattoo Man said, still suffering eardrum trauma.

  Drunkenly I realized that if I gave the whole tale of how I joined a band just to meet one of Primo’s exes, I’d sound insane, so I airbrushed my remark. “Delmonte is a brand, but I was canned from my job.”

  “I know about a job in publishing,” Tattoo injected. Both of us ignored him.

  “I’m starving,” Zoë moped.

  “Me too,” I said, drunkenly empathetic.

&nbs
p; “I have a friend who cooks at Veselka,” the drunken man said. “I can get us some retail food.”

  “Veselkbucks?” Zoë said. A movement of inveterate invertebrates had been calling it that since the old diner had morphed from the greasy old Eastern European dive into the greasy new overpriced dive.

  “I can always go for pierogis,” I heard myself drunkenly say.

  Like a toxic fog, we drifted east to Bowery, pausing briefly in front of Bowery Bar for any celebrity sightings, and then twisted north. While we walked, Zoë talked to me about how much she hated her boss, her work, and men in general. Occasionally when Tattoo Man would try to insert a remark, she would make insulting remarks and mimicking faces when he wasn’t looking.

  “You know what I like about you two?” Tattoo coughed up, when we reached the corner of Seventh Street. We listened, waiting to be praised. “You aren’t those aerobic-neurotic types that work out at the twenty-four-hour Crunch on Lafayette all night.”

  “Are you saying we’re fat?” I asked, always braced for an insult.

  “Not at all.”

  “What’s the matter with you anyway?” Zoë said, still angry about missing out on free booze. “Why are you so eager to fatten us up at Veselka?”

  “I’m not eager.” He threw up his skinny hands.

  “Then why d’ya say we aren’t thin when we are?” I slurred.

  “I just saw that girl pass, and—” His finger stabbed the air.

  “What girl?” Zoë demanded, her suspicion heightened to near paranoia. Both of us were craning about for this phantom rival.

  “What’s your name?” I asked, not meaning to sound menacing, but sounding it nonetheless.

  “Howard.”

  “What a jerky name!” Zoë fired back. “How old are you anyway?”

  “Twenty-ninish.”

  “What’s all the crap on your arm?” I asked callously, inspecting the tattoos. “Looks like gangrene—chop it off.”

  “We’re thirty, How-wa-a-ard!” Zoë ranted. She was averaging because I was still twenty-nine but she was thirty-one.

  “Do you like older women?” I slapped him on the arm.

  “Hey!” He rubbed his shoulder.

  “Hay is for horses,” I kidded as he stepped away from us nervously.

  “Where you going, Twenty-nine?” Zoë said, turning his age into his nomenclature. She advanced while he tripped backward. Since he was tall and lanky, the kind of person who did work out at Crunch at all hours, he twisted around like a snake and bounced back to his feet, prancing away like an upright horse down Seventh toward Second Avenue.

  “Hey!” I called out, confused by it all. “Where the hell does he think he’s going? Get him!”

  “You promised us a fucking meal!” Zoë galloped after him, giving her own rogue twist to corraling a man.

  “Get the hell back over here!” I screamed, and started laughing at the ridiculousness of it all. I was too drunk and filled with pee to press on. Zoë, however, was not amused. She continued after him. As he raced by McSorley’s, the asshole jock bar of all time, a fratty group of thugs spotted Zoë running after him, with her long mane of blond hair trailing. One of them grabbed Tattooed Howard and pinned him against a sports utility vehicle.

  “He stole your purse?” the lead date-rapist type asked.

  “Yeah!” she said, trying to catch her breath.

  “No, I didn’t!” Howard replied, holding his arms up.

  As one of the frat brothers pressed the poor Tattoo Man’s throat against the car door, a bigger one looked over to Zoë as if her blond feathery hairdo was God’s evidence that she could tell no lies.

  “He owes us a meal,” she explained earnestly, which was sort of true.

  “What’s this, dine and dash time?” one of the secondary jocks said to Tattoo Man.

  “I didn’t eat a thing,” he said, still waving his hands up.

  Another suburban dude reached into Howard’s pants, pulled out his wallet, and took out all his paper cash, handing it to Zoë.

  “That’s mine. You’re robbing me,” Howard clarified.

  “Just ten bucks should do it,” Zoë said, “Two plates of pierogis.” She took the ten dollars and instructed them to put the wallet back in his pocket and send him on his way.

  “Come on,” one of the frat boys called to Zoë from halfway up the block. “Come in here, we’ll buy you a drink.”

  “Thanks,” she yelled back without turning around. “But I don’t drink with assholes.”

  It was the first time I ever saw her refuse male attention.

  chapter 9

  “He was just so smug, wasn’t he,” Zoë said more than asked. Smugness and glibness were egregious sins to her, the uncrowned princess of insecurity.

  “You mugged him,” I said, still laughing but dismayed by the weird spectacle.

  “He’ll get it back.” She was mildly amused yet still pissed.

  “When? How?” I asked, staring across the street at Cooper Union.

  “Karma,” she replied, as though this Buddhist notion were some kind of vast ATM system that collects and dispenses money according to fairness without so much as a fee. I was still snickering at the event, drunkenly muttering about being arrested for robbery, when I looked over and realized that poor Zoë was crying.

  “What’s the matter, hon?”

  “I’m just pissed that I missed the bar.”

  “Really? You’re crying ’cause you missed free beer?”

  “No, the goddamned temp supervisor cow yelled at me in front of everyone and called me lazy.”

  “You’re supposed to be lazy. You’re a temp!”

  “It’s more than that. It’s everything. Bullshit life. No boyfriend. Past thirty. Nothing.” She recomposed herself, and we both decided we weren’t hungry after all. We walked around the flat, overly-hyped East Village and agreed that they should just turn it into a big boardwalk and amusement park. We made another right down Third Avenue, passed the cruddy peeling tenements, made a right on Fourth Street, passed pods of business school graduates thrilled to be dining like artists in the Bohemian Village. As we walked down Fourth we passed the last enclave of street Latinos, holdouts from the old East Village days. Ultimately we wound up at the same corner we started from, on Fourth and Bowery, walking in a large pointless rectangle.

  “You know,” I finally got around to saying what was on my mind, “what you did to that guy was … well, I see him at the dogrun all the time.”

  “I know,” she replied.

  “How do you know?” I asked.

  “I don’t know, I just know,” she replied, taking out her compact and fixing her makeup to cover her tearful microburst. “I see him around too.”

  “Well, he really isn’t a bad guy. So the next time I take Numb for a walk, I’m going to give him the ten bucks back.” She understood what I was getting at. Opening her purse, she took the ten dollar bill out and shoved it in my palm.

  We didn’t talk about anything for a while as we floated like barges down the car-streaked streets. I intuited we were pondering variations of the same question: If we lived our standard seventy-seven years, we would be dead by about 2050, and what difference would it make?

  “Oh! You want to see the Captain Kangaroos?” she said excitedly.

  Maybe we weren’t wondering the same thing after all. She remembered that this hot new local band was playing at Coney Island High that night, so we headed over there. But it turned out the Captain Kangaroos were playing at Mercury Lounge, so we headed over there. When we arrived, through the small group of people orbiting outside, I spotted Bobby Sox, the tall, sexy black man who worked the door. We exchanged hellos, and Zoë gave him a kiss. In his deep, bellowing tone, he said he had heard the unfortunate news of Primo’s premature passing and expressed his condolences. I thanked him and ventured inside. Zoë stood around and flirted with him awhile. The price of all the free beer was stoically waiting on the bathroom line for about ten minutes. When
I finally relieved myself and exited, I found Zoë returning from the tiny auditorium in the rear. She explained that the band had already played, and they were now putting away their instruments.

  We broke apart for a while, and each of us greeted our own small clique. For me that involved two girls, Lizzy, one of the few genuine female waitresses among the gang of transsexuals at either Stingy Lulu’s or Lucky Chang’s, and a righteous black mama, Vivica, whom I recurrently met on the party circuit. Each of them was one spoke of a separate wheel of people who had come to see the band du jour—the Captain Kangaroos. Now all were clearing out. I also spotted my bandmate Marilyn and dodged her, lest Zoë come over and discover my bandification.

  In a few minutes I was sitting alone, sucking an overpriced, watered-down gin and tonic through a tiny red straw as some underage MBA hit on Zoë. I watched her in the distance talking, nodding, smiling, nodding, smiling, slowly reeling this guy in like a two-hundred-pound fish on a hundred-pound line. The guy was wearing a formal suit; other than its artificial claim to power, it hid the fact that he looked about thirteen years old. This manboy was Zoë’s ideal of masculinity, some adolescent sadist to dominate her. I could see what was going on in that hormonally imbalanced head of hers. Despite the fact that she was the most cynical of all East Village’s jaded and alabastered creatures, she secretly went bonkers when the film Titanic came out. She looked like a bloated, peroxided Kate Winslet, and this freaky kid was her asymmetrical, problem-skinned Leonardo DiCaprio.

  As the beer from the Burnt Out party finally wore down in my system, but before the G&Ts could kick in, I began to feel pissed off at Zoë for all the venom she’d shot at Tattoo Man. I was just starting to feel attracted to him. Despite all the dye in his skin, I liked the way he looked, the way he got me beer without my asking, and the fact that he let me recreationally attack him, which was my principal source of amusement with most people these days. Now that Zoë was free of all her sourpuss anger, she was receptive to this cardboard cutout in a suit. In the back room, after the Captain Kangaroos left, there were three other bands playing that night. The first two bands had electric banjos, and they sucked. The last one, which featured a moaning sound track, sucked even worse.