I was less pleased after I read her message:

Judd-My husband and I find your emails inappropriate. Please respect our privacy and desist from trying to contact me.

-Evelyn

Oh God, I thought, I’ve been drunk emailing again.

Months before, there had been an incident on myspace where I received a response from a woman I didn’t know to a question I had no memory of asking. After searching my account, it became apparent that I had been coming home from the bars after hours and firing off messages of lascivious intent that, come morning, I had no recollection of ever having sent.

Much to my surprise, however, after an exhaustive search, I discovered that I had not sent Evelyn an email in years, and the last one I did send was perfectly benign.

So I replied:

Dear Evelyn,
Great to hear from you. Hope things are well in San Fran. I received your message but have no memory nor any evidence of having sent you ANY emails. Are you sure you got the right guy? Best to…. Max, was it?

-Judd

A few days later, Evelyn wrote back:

Judd-Come off it. You think we don’t know who Fish is?

-Evelyn

This was getting interesting. For two years, I had been writing a blog called Filth that chronicled the life of a fictitious character named Julius “Fish” Fischman, his best friend, Arty From Philly, and a woman known only as Intimate Relationship #9.5. I figured this was the Fish to whom Evelyn was referring.

Dear Evelyn-Either you’re putting me on or somebody is putting us both on. Take into account that your web address is revealed on your myspace page. Just because these mystery emails are signed “Fish” doesn’t mean they’re from me.

-Judd

She wrote one last time:

Judd-Figure it out and make it stops [sic].

-Evelyn

Her last message came with an attachment that contained copies of the various missives sent to her by one julius_fischman@gmail.com. Indeed, the emails contained material inappropriate to send to any woman, married or otherwise. They seemed to represent the unsavory intentions of a well-educated misanthrope whose sexual proclivities could best be described as criminal.

But they weren’t from me. Nor did I ever register a gmail account by that name, which led me to suspect that there was some imposter masquerading as Julius “Fish” Fischman in order to harass my friends and exes, all of whom would be easy to find for anyone with a myspace account and a link to my page. Perhaps the culprit was someone I knew, some friend playing a practical joke, or perhaps it was an enemy or con man running a scam.

I sent the following email to julius_fischman@gmail.com:

Dear Fish-Who are you?

-Judd Trichter

PS. Leave Evelyn alone.

Within seconds, I got the following reply:

fuck off

I had to find him.

I started with a search on myspace and, sure enough, located a profile for one Julius “Fish” Fischman, 32 years old, writer/actor, living in Los Angeles. And here’s the kicker: 218,596 friends. I only had 164.

But not only was Fish more popular than I, he was also taller (5′10″), richer (income $150,000 – $200,000), and better looking, or at least the avatar on his profile looked better than the photograph on mine. I couldn’t know for certain if the artist who designed it was trying to represent me, but judging by the frizzy hair, slumped posture, big ears, and crooked nose, it’s safe to assume the graphic was at least inspired by me if not modeled directly.

The myspace profile also revealed that Fish writes a blog called Smut which one can view at www.juliusfischman.com. It’s a well-designed page, more professional than mine with many more comments, links, and advertisements, though the writing isn’t nearly as good. Fish’s voice reminded me of a poor man’s Bukowski aspiring toward Haruki Murakami. There’s a whiff of misogyny prevalent in his descriptions of women and a lack of discipline to his style, though an undercurrent of self-deprecating humor does save it from being total trash.

The protagonist in Smut – in case you haven’t guessed by now – goes by the name of “Judd Trichter,” but the Judd Trichter on the blog doesn’t resemble me in any way. Instead, Fish writes Judd Trichter as a drug-addled freeloader who suffers from delusions of grandeur while treating his mother like shit, borrowing money left and right, masturbating constantly, needlessly rebelling against authority, and generally lacking the ability or talent to ever get anything done.

In other words, Fish’s page had the makings of a lawsuit.

I called Kenny Gutstein, my attorney, at once.

“Listen to this,” I said. “There’s some clown on the internet pretending to be me. Wait a minute. That’s not quite right. He’s pretending to be a character I created.”

“Okay.”

“And he’s harassing my friends and writing terrible things about me.”

“True things?” my lawyer asked.

“Some. But most are lies.”

“That’s slander.”

“And judging by his page, it looks like the sonofabitch makes money.”

“Great,” said Gutstein. “What’s his name?”

“I don’t know his real name, but on the internet, he goes by Julius Fischman.”

“Stop right there.”

“What’s the problem?”

“He’s a client.”

I couldn’t believe what I was hearing.

“You represent this fraud?”

“I represent Julius Fischman,” said Gutstein, “and believe me when I tell you, this fraud, as you call him, brings in ten times the revenue you ever brought.”

I asked if I was entitled to any of that.

“Not a cent,” Gutstein shouted into the phone before I could finish my question. “And if you intend any legal action against him, you can expect a counter suit and an injunction that will shut down your page.”

“But he’s my creation,” I complained. “Without me he doesn’t exist.”

“Well… I’m sure Julius Fischman would argue the same about you.”

There went my lawsuit.

I sent Fischman another email:

Dear Fish,Where can I call you? I want to talk.

-Judd

He responded with a terse imperative:

eat shit

The next step was to browse through Fischman’s thousands of myspace friends to see if we had any in common. I found one: Tracy Choo. Of course Tracy would know Fish. I should have known.

Tracy Choo was a half-Korean, half-android woman who worked as a barista in an internet cafe where I used to sip tea at two in the morning and write. She introduced herself one night, after her shift, when she sat down next to me and asked what I was working on. Turned out Tracy knew all about Filth and was psyched to learn I was the man behind it. We wound up talking for hours, constantly interrupted by the electronic gadgets she tended to at all times: some DJ from Japan calling her cell, some computer hacker IM’ing her, some web artist sending her a video text. To talk to Tracy was to interact with only half of her while the other half drifted through the constellations of cyberspace.

On our date, Tracy and I shoveled Kimchi into our mouths and washed down ecstasy with our sake. We danced at a crowded rave in an abandoned warehouse downtown. In the morning, we drove back to her apartment and its many screens and monitors, its criss-crossed cables, its overwhelmed power strips and webcams rigged to the ceilings in every room.

“Just so you know,” she said, “if we have sex, there will be thousands of people watching around the world.”

Despite what one might presume from my being an actor, exhibitionism isn’t really my bag, but ecstasy combined with a hot Korean android can do strange things to a man, and I decided to give it a try.

The sex wasn’t what I hoped. Even though she was eager and able to please, the fact that Tracy didn’t sweat or carry a scent had the effect of reminding me that she was only half-human. Nor did it help my self-esteem that as a condition of her manufacture, Tracy couldn’t lubricate naturally and had to shove a fresh battery up her ass between orgasms. It’s hard to say this without sounding like a bigot, but I’ve always thought that dating an android – even one who’s only half – was an admission of failure or at the very least a compromise I didn’t want to make.

We went out one more time, but after that, I lied and told Tracy I was getting back with an ex. She took it hard.

“What’s she got that I don’t?”

“Nothing,” I said. “It’s just that my ex and I have a history, and I want to see if we can make it work.”

We were outside at the time, and the rain drops collecting on her cheek made it look like she was crying.

“I thought we had something,” Tracy whispered toward the ground. “I thought we had something real.”

“I thought so too,” I replied. But that was also a lie.

After seeing her profile on Fish’s myspace page, I sent Tracy an email to feel out whether she’d be willing to talk:

Hey Trace-Long time no see. How’ve you been? Came across your profile on myspace and thought I’d say hi. Hope all’s well.

-Judd

Tracy replied with an indecipherable stream of words, letters, and symbols that might as well have been written in binary. I emailed her again and asked if it would be okay if I called. She responded thus:

Y

Though possible that she was asking, “Why,” I took the letter “Y” to mean “Yes” and gave her a ring.

Tracy and I spoke for about fifteen minutes, catching up on the last year of each others’ lives, until finally we overcame the awkwardness inherent in my calling. Then I brought up Fish.

“What about him?” she asked.

“I see he’s on your myspace page.”

“He found me in a chat room and asked me out.”

“Did you go out with him?”

“Couple of times.”

“What’s he like?”

“Kind of like you, I guess, but not exactly.”

I asked her to elaborate.

“He’s more angsty,” she decided. “Better looking. More stylish. Just sexier in a weird way.”

“Sexier than me?”

“Yeah. And he’s a better writer too. Have you seen his blog?”

“Yes,” I said, “I’ve read his blog. And thank you.”

I asked Tracy if she had slept with Fish, and she admitted she did.

“How was that?” I asked.

“Well,” she sighed, “he did make me come.”

“So did I.”

Tracy laughed.

“Uh… no.” Liar. “But I have to tell you,” she added right away, softening in her rebuke, “he wasn’t you. As much as I wanted him to be, he just wasn’t.”

“How so?” I asked.

“I don’t know,” she mused. “It’s hard to put my finger on it, but whenever I was with Fish, I always got the feeling that he was an actor playing the role of you. And since you’re an actor yourself, it was like he was an actor playing the role of another actor. Whenever I was with him, I felt incredibly aware of his being a generation removed from the original, and, worst of all, I think he was aware of it too.”

And yet he was able to make her come.

“When was the last time you two spoke?”

“It’s been a while,” she answered in a shrugging tone that indicated he wasn’t an entity that dwelled in her thoughts or remained in her life. “Last I heard he was living in Silverlake with his girlfriend. I think they’re having a kid.”

I told Tracy that I had been trying to get a hold of Fish and asked if there was some way she could put us in touch.

“I can give you his cell number.”

I called Fish’s cell and got his voice mail. There was no recording of his voice on the outgoing message, just a beep, after which I left my number and told him to call.

He responded via text:

What do you want

I typed back:

I want to meet

Quickly, he wrote:

Farmer’s market 3 o clock

Then me:

Where in farmers market?

Then he:

jewelry kiosk

At three o’clock, in the rain, by the jewelry kiosk at the Farmer’s Market, I waited to meet the character I created or the imposter who was playing him. After half an hour of asking every 30-something man who passed if he was Julius Fischman, I decided to text the guy again:

Where are you?

He replied:

Where the fuck are you?

I wrote:

Farmer’s market

He wrote:

Fuck you

The guy was like Mamet with his dialogue. Cold and wet, I decided to cut my losses and go. Whoever this prick was, he obviously didn’t want to meet.

That night, when I got home, I began work on a story called The Jew’s Tale. In it, Julius Fishman has decided to commit suicide, but before doing so, he wants to get his watch fixed at the jewelry kiosk at the Farmer’s Market. The kiosk is run by an old Jew who convinces Fish to trade his watch for a diamond ring. Fish returns home, pins the ring to his sweater, and attempts to hang himself. In the end, however, Fish passes out just before the rope gives, and he wakes to find himself engaged to his pregnant girlfriend, Intimate Relationship #9.5.

It took me about a week to finish the story, and after publishing it online, I got the following email from Fish:

Fucking prick

I wrote back:

Fuck you. you stood me up

He responded:

You stood ME up

I wasn’t buying it. I mean, yes, it is possible there’s another Farmer’s Market in Los Angeles with a jewelry kiosk, but it’s damn unlikely, and given the circumstances, I figured Fish for a liar.

The next day the sonofabitch emailed me a link to his blog which contained a story that, in my opinion, crossed over into the realm of bad taste. It was a story that involved an actor named Judd Trichter, who was so down on his luck, he was forced to take a job working on an X-rated film. But rather than acting in the film, Judd’s role was to apply lubricant to the necessary body parts on the actors and actresses when they called for it on the set. According to the story, the name ascribed to such an occupation is “lube boy.”

Normally, I wouldn’t let such an insult bother me, but the following day, I was sitting in the waiting room at an audition when all of a sudden the casting director started laughing her ass off after reading my name on the sign-in.

“Is your name really Judd Trichter?” she asked.

I told her it was.

“You’re ‘lube boy’!”

I called Tracy.

“This has to stop.”

“Yeah,” Tracy sympathized, “you guys have some issues. Fish was really pissed you stood him up at the Farmer’s Market.”

“I stood him up? He stood me up.”

“That’s not what he says.”

“When did you talk to him?”

“A few days ago. He said you don’t return his calls.”

“That’s a lie,” I insisted, but Tracy confessed that she didn’t know who to believe.

“He doesn’t like the things you write about him. He thinks you’re unfair.”

“How so?” I asked.

“Well, for one thing, he wants to be successful.”

“But he is successful. His website is ten times as profitable as mine.”

“That’s true,” she agreed, “but no one would know it by reading your stories.”

“What else?” I asked.

“He wants to be happy.”

“I’m sure he does.”

“He told me to tell you that he’ll stop harassing you if you let him edit your page.”

“No chance,” I said. I had my pride.

“He said he’s willing to pay.”

It was raining again on the day of the meet. I had so little money and so little gas in my car, I was worried that if I drove down to Koreatown, I’d have no way of getting back.

The building Tracy lived in looks like a giant mainframe computer. It sits on Wilshire Boulevard facing a vast television screen that plays beer commercials for the Asian market. To get to her apartment required going up one elevator then down two flights of stairs to get to another elevator that took me to the roof so that I could climb down a fire escape that led to her window.

Inside, Tracy had turned off the lights and drawn the curtains so that all I could see was a green flicker from the giant screen outside.

“Wear these,” she said, handing me a pair of sunglasses as I entered. There was an ambient sound coming from her bedroom — either some avant-garde mix tape or a white noise from Tracy’s machines and gadgets hooked up into a complex feedback loop.

“Is he here?” I asked.

“He’s in the bedroom. You’ll have to converse with him through a screen.”

With the sunglasses on, I couldn’t see a thing. Tracy led me by the hand as I tripped over phone lines and cables and finally reached a desk at which she told me to sit.

“I’m not sure this will work,” she said as she placed a keyboard on my lap. “The technology isn’t quite there yet, and neither is your writing.”

I sat for a minute in total darkness, listening to the noise from the bedroom getting louder and louder until, suddenly, a series of letters flashed before my eyes:

FISH: glad you could make it

I typed my response on the keyboard:

JUDD: my pleasure

FISH: allow me to get right to the point. you made a big mistake making intimate relationship #9.5 pregnant

JUDD: how you figure?

FISH: as written, i am clearly incapable of being a decent father. i don’t make enough money, and i don’t like my fiance

JUDD: so?

FISH: so what will happen to the child?

JUDD: nothing good i suppose

FISH: you think that’s funny?

JUDD: wasn’t meant to be. you live in a cruel and unfair world

FISH: then maybe i can live somewhere else

JUDD: like?

FISH: i don’t know

JUDD: me either

The screen stayed black for a moment.

FISH: what if my writing career were to take off?

JUDD: unlikely

FISH: why?

JUDD: the reader never sees your writing because he’s supposed to assume it represents the voice of an honest man in a world with no value for honesty

FISH: and there’s no way i can find success in that world?

JUDD: not as a writer

FISH: but i want to write. i like writing

JUDD: then you won’t find success

Black again.

FISH: what if ir#9.5 has a miscarriage?

JUDD: that’s a cop out

FISH: what if the world were to change and find a place for my work?

JUDD: that’d be nice, but it isn’t a part of my experience, and it wouldn’t be something i’d write

FISH: even if i paid you?

JUDD: even if you paid me

FISH: >:-(

JUDD: what’s that? your ‘angry face’?

FISH: >:-(((((((

JUDD: ooh, i’m scared

FISH: what youre doing is cruel. it’s cruel to me, cruel to the child, and cruel to ir#9.5. for god’s sake, man, she’s having my baby and i don’t even know her name

JUDD: her name is Ethel

FISH: Ethel? why Ethel?

JUDD: Julius and Ethel

FISH: oh. very funny

Tracy interrupted:

TR8CE: i don’t get it

JUDD: don’t get what?

TR8CE: why is Ethel funny?

FISH: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosenbergs

TR8CE: ohhhhhhhhhhh! ))))

FISH: so what happens after she has the baby?

JUDD: you’ll give up your dreams, take a series of mundane jobs, and devote yourself to being a good father

FISH: does this make me happy?

JUDD: not at all. you’ll be as much a failure at fatherhood as you were in the arts. your relationship with ir#9.5 – excuse me – Ethel, will further deteriorate as each of you suffer through the lie of a marriage held together by the bond of a child neither of you actually want

FISH: where’s the light at the end of that tunnel?

JUDD: no light. just suffering

FISH: so i’m a martyr

JUDD: i suppose

FISH: a martyr to what?

JUDD: to absolutely fucking nothing

FISH: and there’s no other way? no compromise I can pay you to make?

JUDD: nope

FISH: then i hope you don’t mind if i send an email to your mother telling her you’re back on heroin

JUDD: i hope you don’t mind if Ethel has twins

FISH: how ’bout i put that McRibs commercial on youtube

JUDD: how ’bout I just delete your ass, take down the whole page, and let your whole existence dissipate into the cyber-void

FISH: you don’t have the balls

JUDD: that’s where you’re wrong, douchebag. i’m tired of Filth and the next stage of your life doesn’t interest me. i’d rather move on and write something else

FISH: and throw away something you’ve spent the last two years working on?

JUDD: why not? you ever see how few hits it gets? it’s like you barely exist in the first place

FISH: so do it then

JUDD: maybe i will

FISH: what’s stopping you?

JUDD: frankly, the only thing stopping me was that i was hoping you’d pay me to keep you alive

FISH: if you let me edit the page

JUDD: no chance

FISH: why not?!

JUDD: because i think your writing sucks

FISH: fuck you

JUDD: no, FUCK YOU!!!!

FISH: you’ll delete Ethel and Arty from Philly too?

JUDD: all of youse

FISH: good. great.

JUDD: glad you approve

FISH: so get on with it then

JUDD: looking for the passwords…

Tracy interrupted:

TR8CE: stop it, stop it, stop!

FISH: he started

JUDD: how did I start?

TR8CE: Fish doesn’t want to disappear. he’s just scared. he’s scared of having a child because he’s never been one himself. the whole childhood experience is completely alien to him

JUDD: how’s that my problem?

TR8CE: fish, don’t you ever feel incomplete? like you’re missing something that everyone else seems to have?

FISH: sometimes i can’t find my keys

TR8CE: i’m serious. and judd, if the next stage of Fish’s life doesn’t interest you, what about an earlier stage? why not write about how fish became fish?

JUDD: who would want to read that?

TR8CE: i would

JUDD: no you wouldn’t

TR8CE: i would, Judd. i really would :’-)

FISH: maybe it’d be cool to be a child

JUDD: believe me, i was a child for years. and it sucked

TR8CE: are you telling me you wouldn’t go back if you could?

JUDD: maybe high school. but only for the ass

TR8CE: come on judd. do it

FISH: yeah, Judd. i want to be a child

JUDD: you have no idea what you’re asking for

TR8CE: and write it as a novel this time. no more short stories

FISH: I’ll pay you for it

JUDD: how much?

FISH: i’ll talk to gutstein and make an offer

JUDD: and no one gets to edit what i write!

FISH: Y

The screen went black, and the noise from the bedroom faded. There was a burning sensation in my eyes, and when I shut them, I faded out into sleep.

***

It was still raining at dusk, when I awoke, fully dressed in Tracy’s bed, staring up at the webcam on her ceiling. Curled up beside me, Tracy faced the window, her terry cloth robe open to reveal the olive sheen of her thighs.

“I made you some tea,” she said, sensing somehow that I was awake.

The petal-scented steam rose from the cup on the night stand. I could feel Tracy’s long, synthetic hair coarse against my face as we listened to the rain crackle against the tinted glass of her window.

“Ten pages a week,” she said. “Direct deposit into your account.”

Behind the curtain, outside the window, the giant screen emitted a blank, grey light into the room. It was a steady light. No flickering. And I couldn’t help but fear that the TV was somehow rigged to the webcam above us, projecting our intimacy to the traffic that fitted and started down Wilshire Boulevard.

“Will you do it?” she asked.

I listened to the crackle caused by individual rain drops, falling from the sky, accelerating downward at a rate of 9.8 meters per second squared, to collide with the window like shrapnel smashed against a wall.

“I never got to meet him,” I said, reflecting on the idea that the crackle of rain was nothing more than the static hiss of the Earth Machine processing units of condensation as if they were so many bits of data organized through river applications into oceanic dreams.

Tracy turned her body from the window, away from the glass that never breaks despite the force of a million raindrop collisions. She turned her body into mine, forehead against my temple, nose against my cheek, her button mouth touching the corner of my lips.

“You found a way to communicate,” she whispered beneath her breath, barely audible above the crackle and hiss. “It’s a start.”

There’s an old Jew with a kiosk at The Farmer’s Market near my apartment. I handed him the watch and asked if he could replace the battery. He told me he was busy on account of the holidays and I should come back in a couple of hours. It was 1:50 in the afternoon. If I came back in two hours, I’d still have plenty time to hang myself before Intimate Relationship #9.5 came home from work. A body needs to dangle a good fifteen minutes for there to be no chance of resuscitation, and I didn’t want IR#9.5 getting worked up trying to save me. I felt no malice toward her and only wanted to be out of the picture so she could return to her family and raise our unborn child in a better environment than I could provide.

I decided to see a movie to kill time. Nothing interested me at the multiplex, but I bought a ticket for Blood Diamond because it was about to start. It was a terrible film. The story felt like it had been concocted by mooshing together three articles in an issue of Vanity Fair: an expose of the diamond industry, a report on ecotourism destinations and a fluff piece about a Hollywood star who cares. The star is, of course, Leonardo DiCaprio, who hops and jumps about the frame with the frenetic grace of a wet marmot. Though better suited to playing a disgruntled figure skater, DiCaprio is somehow cast as a Rhodesian mercenary, who, over the course of the film, goes from being a racist soldier of fortune to a hero who will sacrifice his life to save a young black boy and bring down the biggest diamond company in the world. And in case we don’t know what we should think of this unlikely scenario, the director, a talentless hack by the name of Ed Zwick, forces his actors to indicate what they are feeling at all times while providing a soundtrack that tells the audience exactly how it should react.

Blood Diamond is the kind of movie Hollywood makes in order to raise awareness about an issue. Or so they claim. In this case, the issue is conflict diamonds: stones used to fund both sides of various civil wars in Africa. According to the film, diamond companies mix conflict diamonds into their store of regular diamonds and release them into the market without notifying consumers of the blood spilled between their mining and their distribution. By making Blood Diamond, the actors, producers and Zwick get to show that Hollywood cares about the content of its movies and strives to educate audiences about parts of the world that hold our natural resources. I believe their motives, like those of Angelina Jolie and Madonna, are sincere in their desire to raise awareness. What I don’t believe is that raising awareness is worth a rat’s ass.

While watching the movie, I began to wonder when in the backsliding values of our country the definition of altruism became so watered down that it no longer involved sacrifice. In their attempt to raise awareness, the producers, actors and Zwick risk and sacrifice nothing — especially not their eight figure salaries. They change the names of the diamond companies in the movie so that no slander suits could be levied against them. They don’t shoot where it takes place in Sierra Leone, thereby supporting the local economy, because it would have been too dangerous and therefore uninsurable. They don’t even take the time and effort to make the movie with artistic integrity or believable characters. In fact, it can be argued that movies like Blood Diamond do nothing to raise awareness about an issue because they place that issue in the context of a fantasy world where heroism is rewarded, good triumphs over evil and everything works out in the end.

“You’re just a cynic,” cries the voice of protest to my argument. “You think it’s better to make movies out of comic book characters? Or art films composed of empty formalism? Or would you rather do nothing but sit there and criticize?” Quite the opposite. So angered was I by this film, so inspired to action by the drivel I had been subjected to in these final hours of my life, I decided the only sensible recourse was to use the last four hundred dollars in my checking account to buy IR#9.5 the biggest fucking conflict diamond I could find.

I approached the old Jew at the kiosk and made my demand. “I want a blood diamond,” I said. “I want a stone that came into your possession at the expense of an African village. A gem that was mined by limbless children and trafficked by unsavory arms dealers. I want the bloodiest diamond my four hundred dollars can buy.”

Behind his long gray beard, the old Jew, tall and rotund, frowned at my request.

“If you are looking for a cheap stone,” he said, “I can show you some synthetic gems that only the most practiced eye could discern.”

I told him that I was not looking for a cheap stone so much as I was looking for a stone with history. “A history of suffering,” I said. “Because in these, the final hours of my life, I have come to realize that value is not determined by color, clarity and carat, but by risk, sacrifice and the shedding of blood.”

The Jew smiled, revealing teeth that were yellow and rotten with decay. “I recognize you as a connoisseur,” he said, “though of something much more perverse than precious stones. And whereas I do not do business in the kind of gem you are looking for — at least not to my knowledge — I do believe I have something that might be of interest to you.”

He motioned to his wife to watch over the kiosk while he bent down to unlock a file cabinet behind the counter. Inside I could discern the first steps of a staircase that descended into the ground. It seemed too narrow a passage for the Jew’s girth, and yet he maneuvered his body inside with great ease. “Come,” he said, and I followed him into the darkness, spiraling beneath the market with one hand on his shoulder and the other grasping at the damp, stone wall. “A little further,” he said, as I listened to the sound of his footfalls and a steady dribble of water on rock. “A little further,” he said, as I became lost in the circular motion of our descent, wondering if we were actually moving downward, deeper into the Earth, or just spinning blindly in a pitch black room. “A little further,” he said, as we reached the final step, where a faint light from a gas lamp revealed the contours of a room cluttered with antique furniture, curtains and tarnished Judaica. “A little further,” he said as he took up the lamp and led me to another room, and then another, unlocking door after door to reveal more rooms filled with books and scrolls and broken tablets made from rock. “A little further,” he said, and the old Jew handed me the lantern as he stooped to lift the sheet from a cracked wooden desk that stood at an angle on two uneven legs. He opened a drawer that was so small, it could only fit the bit of cloth the old Jew pulled from it.

“Have a look,” he said, as he unwrapped the cloth to reveal an indistinct diamond, half the size of my pinky nail. “Hold it,” he said, as I took it from him and rolled it about in the tips of my fingers. “Let me show you in the light,” he said, as he held the lamp near my hand. “Now sit,” he said, before collapsing his weight onto a dusty couch. I sank down onto a chair that seemed to slide beneath me the moment I considered sitting.

“I will tell you nothing of the cut, color or clarity of this stone,” said the Jew, “since it is apparent such information would be wasted on you.” He took the diamond and set it down on a low table between us. “I will, however, tell you something of its history, as much as I know, for remember, a stone such as this exists for millions of years before human eyes ever set on it.”

“My father,” said the Jew, “first came into possession of this stone in Warsaw before the war. He bought it from a gentile who had a reputation as a gonif but who always dealt fairly in business, selling pieces for a fraction of their worth, so long as no one asked how he came to possess them. For many years, my father and the gonif did a good business together, and neither man ever felt cheated. One day, however, it was revealed that the gonif had raped and murdered a young girl who was about to be married. She was the daughter of a well-known poet in Minsk, and according to the papers, the gonif had cut off her finger with a length of wire to remove the ring from her hand.

“My father had bought this ring from the gonif the day before he learned of the murder. Needless to say, he was upset and burdened with terrible nightmares. Furthermore, he was frightened about what would happen to him, his family and all the other Jews of Warsaw if this gonif should confess from his cell to whom he sold his goods.

“Believing it was too dangerous to return the pieces to their rightful owners, my father decided instead that everything he still had from the gonif should be wrapped in a cloth and hurled into the Vistula as soon as possible.

“Now I was a young boy at the time, and to my mind, it made no sense that we should be throwing away such valuable merchandise. Why not melt it down or bury it until the people forget, I asked. But my father wouldn’t hear of it. He wrapped the gonif’s jewels in a cloth and handed it to me with strict orders to throw it in the river. What would be the harm, I thought, if I pry this one stone from the ring and keep it in my pocket? Everything else I threw away, but this one stone, far from the most valuable in the cloth, was the only one that I kept.”

Here the Jew stopped for a moment and picked up the diamond from the table. He looked at it in quiet contemplation, scratched his beard and continued with his tale.

“I was staying with family friends in the countryside at the time the Germans invaded. My father’s shop was taken from him, and he was killed along with my mother and two sisters. The family I lived with smuggled me to Cyprus, and from there, I moved to Israel where I began a new life. I lived on a kibbutz where we grew watermelons, and I fell in love with a beautiful Sabra named Shoshanna. She had been a teacher to the refugees, had taught us Hebrew, and it wasn’t long before she told me that she was pregnant with my child. One day, I left the fields to see if I could buy her a ring in which I could place this stone which I had kept with me since that day at the river. And after having it set, I returned home to discover that while I was gone, the Arabs had killed everyone in my kibbutz including my Shoshana and our unborn child. If I hadn’t gone to buy the ring in which to place this stone, then I too would have been amongst the dead.”

The Jew paused again and looked down at the diamond as if seeking some hint as to how he should go on. Perhaps this was not a story he had told before.

“To survive, I was forced to take a job in Ramat Gan working for a jeweler, a survivor of Auschwitz, who had competed with my father when they were living in Poland. He was a terrible man who had always despised my family, and for years, he worked me like a slave, paying me a pittance of what I deserved, until one day I agreed to marry his daughter. She was a meeskheit shrew of a girl, but she came with a dowry, which we used to move to America and open a pawn shop in the Bronx. For our engagement, I gave her the ring I had meant for my Shoshanna.

“It was the 1950’s then, and my wife and I worked hard to establish ourselves in this strange, new land. We had a beautiful daughter, whom I cared for at the store while my wife worked as a nurse at the local hospital. She became interested in politics, spending time with young artists and revolutionaries, arguing for radical action on behalf of the common man. She became enamored with free love, drugs and jazz music. One day, she told me that what I did in the pawnshop was an evil business and that she had no choice but to leave me for a Nicaraguan communist named Carlos. She and Carlos would send our daughter and me postcards from South America, with pictures of them in the jungle with rifles slung over their shoulders. Years later, we received a package with some of her belongings: her fatigues, some letters from our daughter and the ring that carried this stone.”

The Jew became excited. He stood up and paced about the room as he continued his tale.

“In ‘68, the pawnshop burned to the ground when the schwartzes decided to riot. My daughter and I moved to Los Angeles, where I started my life over for a third time. I married again, this time a woman whose father was a rabbi. I had never before been a religious man, but the rabbi convinced me to study Talmud and Torah. He convinced me to live in the old ways, to keep kosher and observe the Sabbath.

“My wife and I opened a shop downtown in the jewelry district and had a son who was diagnosed with Tay Sachs disease. For years, we struggled to care for him and eventually sold the store to cover the costs of his medical expenses. He lived to be 12 years before he finally succumbed.

“Afterwards, I used this stone and some others as collateral on a loan to open the kiosk here at the Farmer’s Market. My wife and I have worked here for the last twenty years. Business has never been particularly good, and we never did have another child. Eventually, though, we did pay off our debts, and I was able to get back this fakatka stone.”

His story was finished, and he looked up to see if I approved.

“What do you want for it?” I asked.

“What do you have?”

I told him I had four hundred dollars to my name. He said he’d take it.

I told him I also needed a ring and asked if he could throw one in for free. He said he couldn’t, so I offered him my watch in exchange. He looked at it closely.

“This watch is broken,” he said.

“It is,” I said. “You’ll notice the hour hand points west of the 12 even at five past. It was that way when my father gave it to me. It had been given to him as a gift, but he didn’t want it, so he offered it to me instead. He took it out of his pocket, and said, ‘You want this?’ I was 20 at the time, home from college for winter break. ‘Sure,’ I said. Words seldom passed between my father and me, and those were the last we ever exchanged. After giving me this watch, he walked out the door and never came back.”

The Jew took an interest in my story. He sat back down and fixed his gaze on the watch as I continued.

“After he left us, my family’s debts were more than we could handle, so I dropped out of school to take a job for which I was paid by the hour. I remember being late my first day on account of this broken watch, but after a while, I learned its idiosyncratic way of keeping time. I learned to stare at this watch and count the hours I had worked and the money I had earned. And in between the hours I had worked, I dreamt of a brighter future. I had big dreams. Enormous dreams I planned to fulfill as soon as I got my family out of the mess my father left us.”

I took the watch from the Jew and rubbed it in my fingers, hoping that it could give me some clue how to continue the story I had begun.

“As the years went by, I realized that my debts weren’t getting any smaller – but my dreams were. In fact, they were becoming mundane. Whereas I used to dream of a house in the hills, now I dreamt of having enough money to cover the rent. Whereas I used to dream of falling in love, now I dreamt of getting laid in a brothel. My dreams became embarrassing to me.”

The Jew’s face showed a great pain in hearing me say this, but he urged me to continue nonetheless. I put the watch down and leaned forward in my chair.

“I didn’t have any Holocausts. No great tragedies. No illnesses or accidents. I never lost anyone special because I never got close enough to anyone for it to warrant tears when they died. The broken pieces of my life have been parceled out in broken hours for wages that never covered their worth. Some months ago, after knocking up a girl I never liked and hearing that she was going to have the baby, I realized that those parcels were spent and not invested, and there would be no interest returned.”

I paused to think of how I’d end my story and bring it back to the watch. After all, I needed to convince the Jew that the thing held value.

“My old man gave me this watch not as a father gives a gift to his son, but as a poker player sheds his cards to make way for a better hand. And yet I’ve worn it all these years and lived by its time. And that’s my story.”

“I’ll take it,” said the Jew.

It was around five by the time I got home, which only gave me an hour to type up a suicide note before IR#9.5 came back from work. I deleted several drafts before coming up with something I liked. Here’s what I wrote:

Dear IR#9.5-

Will you marry me?

-Fish

I printed it out and stuffed it in an envelope along with the ring that held the Jew’s stone. I attached the envelope to my sweater with a large safety pin. Lacking a rope or the means to buy one, I was forced to use an extension chord to accomplish the grim task of a death by hanging. Though an aesthetically displeasing instrument, the extension chord does contain a certain umbilical reference to the information age which seemed apropos of my failed career as a writer / actor of electronic media. In order to find out how to tie a noose, I had to turn on my computer and look it up online. First, however, I checked my email.

There was nothing in my inbox other than a forward from Arty that showed a clip of an amateur stripper falling head first off a pole. I checked my myspace account as well and took comfort in the fact that I’d never have to answer another email. Then I googled and discovered there are a variety of knots that fall under the category of “noose.” There is the simple noose, the strangle snare, the gallows knot, also known as the scaffold knot, the hangman’s knot and several others. I decided to go with the hangman’s knot more for its look then its effectiveness. Wikipedia recommends six to eight coils for a good hanging though I didn’t have enough slack to do more than four. Per their instructions, I used Vaseline to lubricate the chord so that it would tighten smoothly and cut off my breathing from the instant I fell. It was probably around 5:30 by then, which gave me half an hour before IR#9.5 would return home.

Allotting time for the ten minutes it would take to die by strangulation, I decided to spend one last fifteen minute session engaged in the only activity that ever really brought any pleasure to my life since I first discovered it at the age of fourteen. I dug my favorite video out of the closet, cued it up to a fantastic menage-a-trois scene and rubbed out my final load. I must have been in a rush when I finally took the chair from my desk, climbed up to the light fixture atop the living room and tied the chord to a bolt that seemed as if it would hold. With everything in place, I dispensed with ceremony, tightened the noose, and kicked away the chair in order to get the job done as quickly as possible.

Anyone who has ever lost a loved one to a suicide by hanging has probably wondered what a person thinks in those final moments as he hangs by the neck with his mortality being squeezed from his body. Having lived through it, I can tell you, it is not some childhood memory that flashes before your eyes, nor some last regret, nor even a white light beckoning in the distance. The only thought that went through my mind was the startled realization that I had forgotten to turn off the porno on my TV set after I was done rubbing one out. The very next thought was that I had left a jar of Vaseline on the ottoman and a note attached to my sweater that said nothing about suicide. Thus it occurred to me that whoever should find my dangling corpse would believe that I had died not by suicide, but by the incompetent commission of an attempt at autoerotic asphyxiation. Einstein himself, had he died in such a manner, would be remembered as the village idiot, and I had no intention of allowing my meager legacy to be overshadowed by such a disreputable act. Instead, in what I believed would be my final struggle on this Earth, I began to swing my legs violently toward the ottoman in an effort to kick the Vaseline across the room where no one would find it. Having accomplished this, I then set to work at swinging toward the television set in order to destroy it or at least turn it off so that no one would see the two women on its screen who were taking turns pleasuring a man dressed in the black robes of a judge. Inevitably, my legs were too short, and the swinging pendulum of my body couldn’t reach the set. I swung harder and harder, pushing against the ceiling with my hands in order to lengthen the chord, an act which had the correlating effect of tightening the noose and thus bringing me closer to an ignoble death.

By the time IR#9.5 entered the apartment, I was whirling around the living room like a rhesus monkey, becoming more and more light headed as my toe finally grazed the glass on the screen. She screamed, of course, not knowing what she was screaming at, but recognizing that she was a witness to the uncanny in all of its emotional, spiritual and metaphysical terror. The last thing I remember was the failure of the ceiling bolt which allowed my body to careen forth into our home entertainment system, knocking the television, stereo and VCR to the ground as I collapsed unconscious in a heap of broken components.

When I awoke, I was engaged.

“We’re due in February!”

“Wow,” I said. “That’s great.”

“I can’t wait to tell my parents!”

“I’m sure they’ll be thrilled.”

There I was talking to someone I’d known for years, someone I’d lived with and been in a relationship with for years, and I had never before seen this glassy-eyed look on her face. It was a look usually associated with young jihadis committed to blowing themselves up on a bus, or with malnourished Scientologists wandering Hollywood Boulevard offering free personality tests to baffled tourists. It was the look of someone who had taken faith in an entirely irrational belief: that these same parents, her parents, the mother who speaks about her daughter as if she were dead and the father who twice hired thugs to beat me, would suddenly rejoice upon hearing that their daughter was pregnant with my child. I understand that all parents, once they’ve reached that age, desire to be grandparents, but only insofar as their sons or daughters expect healthy and respectable offspring with a mate of whom they approve. Did IR#9.5 actually believe that her parents were going to forgive their grudge against me and accept me as one of their own just because one night their daughter and I were drunk enough to fuck but too drunk to remember our contraceptive responsibilities? How could she delude herself to such a horrible extent? And yet, judging by the tone of her voice and the gleefully stupid look on her face, IR#9.5 seemed to think that the phone call she would make to her parents would somehow go as it does in the movies or on television or in healthy families built around love, respect and understanding, instead of fear, prejudice and other evangelical values.

“That’s wonderful!” her mother would say. “Oh, sweetheart, I’m so happy. Let me put your father on the phone. Honey, come quick, your daughter has news. Remember that Jew she brought to Thanksgiving last year? The one who showed up drunk and clogged the toilet? Who chewed with his mouth open, dropped his fork so he could peak under your niece’s skirt and petted the dog in a suggestive manner? Who clearly had no money, no prospects for making money and no intention of ever having prospects for making money – yes, remember that virus your daughter introduced into our home in order to humiliate and get back at us for the wrongs we committed against her in her youth? Such wrongs as grounding her when she was 12 and got caught smoking with her friends? Or buying her a Volvo for her 16th birthday instead of the convertible she wanted? Our daughter, who has always despised us for raising her in the bosom of prosperity; for protecting her from poverty, disease and miscegenation; for showering her with love and affection even after she quit college to pursue a career on the stage – do whatever it is you want, my angel, my rosebud, Mommy and Daddy’s little actress! We will always support you, dear, whatever career you choose, dear, even if it is clear to all and every that you lack the talent, the looks or the drive necessary for prospering in such a competitive field — but come quick, honey, and pick up the phone! Our wonderful daughter, 37 years old now, an adult herself now, has made the very adult decision to enter the next stage of her very adult life. She has decided to eschew tradition, skip marriage, cut right to the chase, and to do so not with any of the nice boys from the club (who are no longer boys really, but men themselves now, with jobs and families and fortunes of their own now, with houses down the block – what houses! – I see them on their way to work, in their suits, a kiss for their wives as they descend their driveways, briefcases in tow, to provide wealth and security for their families, for their community, for the country they love) — but our daughter has no interest in these young patriots and has instead decided to have her child, her firstborn, with that thing that floated here from the East, much like his shit floated onto my hall runner that fateful Thanksgiving Day. With that thing from New York our daughter has decided to couple and bear fruit. With that thing that shows none of the attributes of a human being other than his apparent ability to impregnate another human being, and not just any human being, mind you, but the very human being we hoped would bring meaning to our lives, who instead brings forth the mixed-blood child of a Jewish mongrel, polluting our line and forever sullying our family name. So pick up the phone, husband, and hear this wonderful news, straight from the mouth of the babe. Tell her how proud we are of her accomplishment. How grateful we are of this gift. How much we respect her choices, admire her decisions and look so forward to the miracle of this degenerate birth.”

How else could her mother respond, and how could IR#9.5 imagine otherwise? Unless this was precisely the response she hoped for. Unless an angry and bitter response was the very aim of her carelessness — or her very careful planning, for who’s to say this pregnancy was truly the accident she claimed it to be? It certainly wasn’t my idea to have a child, but convincing a 37 year old woman to have an abortion is no easy task. Especially IR#9.5, whom, I must admit, I had never seen looking so happy. Not even when we first met, before I had drained her of any hope and optimism, any feeling that the world was not the cruel and meaningless abyss that it so blatantly is – not even then had she ever glowed with the greasy luster she glowed with now, ordering herself a bacon burger, a waffle, a biscuit, a vanilla milkshake, a diet coke and a slice of pie. As if the reason for getting pregnant was to justify a guiltless eating binge, her face shining like that of a cultist-religious-zealot, enlightened by the seed that sat festering in her womb. You’d think she was pregnant with the child of God Himself and not the spawn of an unemployed writer living on the Hollywood skids.

“What about your career?” I asked, as she slurped the last clumps of her shake.

IR#9.5’s favorite topic of conversation had always been her career. The woman had worked all of five days in the last ten years, and yet she could hold court for hours on the exhaustive research that went into every role. Roles that included the audience member with a question in an infomercial and a victim of strangulation on a cop show.

“I can still do voiceovers,” she slurped. “And after the baby’s born, I’ll lose the weight and start auditioning again.”

I didn’t believe for a second that IR#9.5 wanted a baby. She just wanted to be pregnant. Wanted to see the mugs on her opponents as she strolled down Larchmont Boulevard in her maternity dress. “When are you due?” the competition would smile. And IR#9.5 could tell them. She could tell them when she was due, what method of childbirth she preferred and what names were being considered. And wasn’t that what she really wanted? To make other women jealous? To create the illusion that she had found love? That she was worthy of love? That she was worthy of the attention she could never garner as an actress. That she could never garner from me. That she could never garner from her father, who found his other daughters more interesting, especially the middle one, who had developed perky little breasts at puberty, who may have been touched by the old man, one lonely night, in the bath, while her mother lay asleep in the next room. In their home, the accusations were echoed and denied for years. This Orange County Treasurer, friend of Oliver North, linked to missionary groups in oil-rich South American jungles, careful with his finances, careful in his council, careful in his testimony before Congress — but careless one night with an eleven year old girl. So careless, in fact, that, years later, bribes would have to be paid to prevent her leaking it to the press, as she threatened, even though her mother never believed the scheming bitch was telling the truth!

And what effect did this have on IR#9.5, the youngest daughter, who normally would have benefited from the full range of her father’s affections, but instead, due to the man’s shame, he could never dote on her the way a father wants to dote on his youngest and most precious child? Compelled by these accusations, true or not, to deny, to ignore, to neglect his baby daughter. To turn away and re-enter the house every time she sunbathed by the pool, so that IR#9.5 became ashamed of her body and thought her body abhorrent to men. So that she began vomiting up her meals at the age of thirteen in order to have a body worthy of Daddy’s attention, or so the shrinks would argue when her parents carried her 80-pound skeleton to that recovery center in Ojai. He never attended her swim meets, dance recitals or gymnastics tournaments. And then, even when she was older and he too feeble to ever accomplish anything untoward, he walked out again, this time from that production of Equus at Chapman University.

How many times had IR#9.5 regaled me with that story? How proud she was of landing a lead role only to have her father storm out on opening night, during the climax, when IR#9.5, in all her undergraduate glory, stripped down and simulated the sexual act, surrounded by theater studies majors costumed as horses, while the real horse, the ultimate observer for whom this false tragedy was being played — this Murder of Gonzago played to a Claudius who’d pour poison into his own ear rather than confront the sight of his naked daughter — fled the theater rather than see his daughter exposed in the name of an art he never understood, or understood all too well to have exploitation as its purpose and not some deeper, creative revelation.

What difference did it make to IR#9.5 what happened to her older sister? “I am my own person,” she must have thought. “A living, breathing being who needs love and attention from my father.” What a perfect disaster for the self-esteem! All the stunts she pulled growing up: the fake suicide note, the photos left on the kitchen counter, the panties stuffed into the cushions of Daddy’s chair. But she never received from him the attention she wanted. Never received the response she was looking for. And what response might that have been? Your Honor, can you only imagine? (I know I can. I can imagine it in great detail!)

So of course, after college, when IR#9.5 began attending the cattle calls advertised in Backstage West, she was inevitably viewed by casting directors as trying too hard, desperate for validation, never learning that the art resides in playing the scene without forcing your ambitions past the footlights. She had chosen a profession that guaranteed her the continuing diet of rejection she had known since birth. Whatever youth, innocence and naïveté she possessed was gradually displaced by all of the anger, bitterness and frustration that goes along with years upon years of struggling to book that tampon commercial or that role as an understudy in a play no one wants to see. It was a giant disappointment of a life oozing across Silverlake like the rancid water from an overstuffed toilet. And how was she going to mop it up? What was IR#9.5’s grand plan to clean up the mess that was her life?

“Why aren’t you more excited that I’m pregnant?” she asked, as I drove her back to the office where she worked as a temp. A 37 year old temp.

“We can’t have a baby,” I stated. “We’re three months behind on the rent. How could we possibly afford a baby?”

“We’ll make it work,” she smiled. “You’ll just have to find a job of some kind. Something that provides health care and a steady salary.”

“Is that all?” I asked. “I just have to throw away every plan I had for my life?”

“Would you prefer I stuck a wire hanger up my cunt?”

“Wouldn’t be the first time.”

“That was different,” she said. “I was young and still had a future.”

“And he was black.”

“That had nothing to do with it.”

“Babies aren’t easy,” I told her. “They need to be fed. Every day. Sometimes more than once. They need toys and clothes and care. They require a level of emotional support that, quite frankly, isn’t your cause celebre.”

“You think I’m incapable of being a mother?”

“I think a child should be brought into a family based on love and sound economic principles.”

“You’re saying you don’t love me?”

“Have I ever said otherwise?”

“I’m having this child,” she replied. “I don’t care what you, my parents, my doctor or anyone else has to say about it. I am having this child.”

Intimate Relationship #9.5 and I first met when I was living with Mitzi (Intimate Relationship #9.0), a woman I would have been happy to marry and have children with. Mitzi had class, long, silky blonde hair and a lanky frame, stretched and sculpted five days a week by the most expensive Pilates instructor in town. She was a European-born descendant of Swiss nobility who owned a high rise apartment in Westwood and ran her own business out of an office in Century City. In three years of dating, I never once saw her pussy unwaxed. Sure, she had Daddy issues of her own — they all do — but the woman stood to inherit millions from her old man, and I looked forward to a life of easy luxury and bourgeois ennui.

And Mitzi’s parents actually liked me. At least they seemed to. They always had a kind word on the phone, and on holidays, they’d invite us to London, where we’d sit around the fireplace in their Kensington home, laughing over a pricey vintage as we discussed art, literature and international affairs. Maybe they were just amiable people, appreciative of my narrative gifts and my Ivy League charm, or maybe they were compensating for the guilt they felt over the role Mitzi’s grandfather played in Switzerland during the war. “We have done everything we can to return assets to the rightful beneficiaries when it can be proven that they are the heirs to the deceaseds’ accounts.” And in more private circles, “In fact, my daughter is even marrying a Jew.”

Only we never married. I offered her a ring but she wanted to wait. I fucked her every which way ’till Tuesday, in every position possible, using every variety of stimulant and erectile dysfunction medication on the market to increase my potency during our marathon sessions of unprotected lovemaking. But no matter how many times I hid her birth control pills or switched them with Claritin, the only thing my relentless intercourse engendered was a sexually transmitted disease that forced Mitzi into the gynecologist’s office and left her hairless pussy stitched up like a Haitian baseball.

It was during this time that IR#9.5 happened on the scene after booking a bit part in a play I wrote that was being produced at the Hollywood Park Casino. Starting with the first rehearsal, she threw herself at me every chance she could, never subtle, offering to suck me and fuck me wherever and whenever I wanted. “You don’t even have to ask,” she’d say. “Just grab your cock and stick it in me.” I rebuffed her every advance without hesitation. It wasn’t hard to do. Not when I had millions of dollars waiting for me at home. Not when I wasn’t even remotely attracted to this psychopath and couldn’t stand the way she ruined my play with her amateur hysterics on the stage.

But during this time, things were changing between Mitzi and me. 9.0 had grown suspicious since the surgery and obstinately un-sexual even after the stitches were removed.

“I just don’t feel pretty,” she’d say. “I don’t feel ready to make love again.”

“Then let me look at it,” I’d plead. “Let me see how it’s changed so I can become re-acquainted with your vagina. The fact that it’s scarred won’t make it unattractive to me. A scar is merely the memory of a battle won. A victory against death, disease and decay. This scar represents the mark of all the obstacles our love has overcome. Like the mark a child puts on a tree to see how much he’s grown in the past year. Let me see that beautiful mark on your vagina. Let me make love to that beautiful, marked vagina.”

“I can’t,” she’d plead, turning away from me in bed. “I need time. Please give me more time.”

“And anal is definitely out of the question?”

Meanwhile, at work, IR#9.5 was laying it on thick, boasting to me about her miraculous sexual prowess, her affinity for the menage-a-trois and the way she loved to go to sleep with a hot flush of come in her mouth. What would be the harm, I wondered, in a quick blowjob at work if afterwards I returned home to the woman I truly loved? She’d never have to find out. And besides, wasn’t it possible that Mitzi had cheated on me at some point? Did she really contract that STD before we met, or had there been an affair I didn’t know about? Something other than stretching and sculpting going on five days a week with that Pilates instructor? How else to explain the mysterious appearance of this strange disease? (Actually, there is a likelier explanation which I’ll get to in a moment).

The problem was it all looked so easy: a blowjob received in the wings of the theater, in the dark, where no one could see it and no evidence would remain. If IR#9.5 blabbed, I’d deny it. No one would take her word over mine. I was a playwright, for Chrissake, with a beautiful, intelligent girlfriend, and she was just some crazy actress looking to get ahead. It would be the perfect crime, and I, the master criminal, soon-to-be relieved of the sexless anxiety that had been building in my loins.

But what think tank, what wise men, what tribunal of learned minds would have predicted IR#9.5’s blowjob to be a force of nature so spectacular that I would soon be sucked into her mouth like a wrong-footed dinosaur misstepping into the La Brea Tar Pits? Sweet gentleman of the jury, I tell you, this was no ordinary blowjob. If IR#9.5 applied half the craft to her acting that she applied to her cocksucking, she would no doubt be remembered as one of the all time legends of the silver screen. For what IR#9.5 accomplished in the wings of that theater, so far superior to anything she ever accomplished on the stage, rendered my reactive mind weak, my body limp, and my senses dull to all but the sound of ancient cherubs singing forth great visions of rusted spacecraft gliding over lilied fields atop the gentle vesper forged from a molten core of erupting Earth piercing the ether with lavic apocalypse burst through the marble of an incense laden hallway petaled with 72 dulcimer-strumming damsels dancing circles of crossing threads to weave silken tapestries depicting desert armies hacking pyramids with bloodied scimitars unleashing rivers of honeyed yogurt to overflow the chalice of an elixir sweet to my lips like the warm embrace of an opiate slumber wrapped in the blanket of a good God’s grace.

She made a believer of me.

And all it took was 18 seconds. 18 seconds for IR#9.5 to turn a man of no faith into a firm-bellied acolyte to her Temple of Fellatio. 18 seconds to unzip my fly, confound my life then strut onto the stage and deliver her lines as if nothing had happened.

The next evening she serviced me in my car after I drove her home. Then it was the dressing room. Then the alley behind the theater. Then center stage one night after the house closed. Before long I was calling her in the middle of the day, meeting her in public parks, department store bathrooms, library stacks, peep show booths, slow-moving elevators and confessionals. Each time a miracle. Each time a religious experience as her mouth burned, her hands gripped, her tongue flicked — she knew exactly how long to tease, to bob, to stroke, to suck, to finger my ass and massage my prostate until I came like a drunken monkey. She could drop a line of saliva with her eyes closed from a standing position and have it land squarely on the red, sore tip of my cock. Oh, IR#9.5 may not have been much of an actress, but she was an artist of oral such as my Swiss Miss could never compare. And with each successive blowjob, the vision of my life with Mitzi grew evermore faint: floating the Mediterranean in her daddy’s Yacht, summers at the chalet, our multi-lingual children sent to the finest boarding schools in Switzerland… all of it vanishing in the wake of these mind-melting, knee-buckling, asshole-quivering blowjobs. It was a competition between a life and a sensation. On the one hand, Mitzi, a perfect wife, the promise of family and the realization of my economic ambitions. On the other hand, IR#9.5 — the orgasm masquerading as salvation!

In the end, as often happens in situations such as these, fate would intervene, sort out the complications and reduce the argument to its inevitable consequence. It turned out I was not the master criminal I thought I was, for a true, master criminal would never have documented the crime on his camera phone for the purpose of showing it to Arty from Philly and the other drunks at his favorite bar. And he certainly would not have downloaded the footage onto his desktop and allowed it to be discovered by his girlfriend on the very day her doctor informed her that the surgery was not successful, and that the STD she had contracted would leave her barren and possibly cancerous unless her entire cervix was removed.

There would be one final fight between us, the evening that Mitzi, in a rare show of emotion, threw my belongings off the terrace of her Westwood Apartment, demanding that I tell her if IR#9.5 was the “slut” who gave us the disease that wrought such havoc on her body, but, in a strange twist of biological inequity, did almost nothing to damage mine. “Just tell me it was her,” Mitzi insisted. “Just admit it to me, you bastard. You Goddamn Zionist bastard!”

I did not lie to my love. I could not, and I would not lie to her. I held her hands in mine, looked her in her tear-filled eyes, and I told my Mitzi the truth. I told her I did not have sexual relations with that woman, Intimate Relationship #9.5 (obviously borrowing “sexual relations” from a former leader of the free world who had defined the term in a way that rendered certain acts no more perverse than a hand shake). I told her IR#9.5 was NOT the cause of her genital defect (again, not a lie, for Mitzi had contracted the disease long before IR#9.5 and I first met, likely the consequence of an evening I spent with a junky under the 101 Freeway — a confession for another trial, dear jury, but suffice it to say that I have needs as various as they are sordid). And despite my overwhelming honesty and my heartfelt plea that we stay together, my Swiss Princess, my Mitzi, the love of my life, declared that she was, indeed, finished with me and with America as well. In her view it was the whole country that had wronged her, ravished her, as we’d done in Vietnam and were about to do in the Middle East. Plundered her worth and left her a barren desert at war with herself and mankind. We forget that though there are immigrants who come to this country, dig a foundation and construct a new life, brick by brick, with the mortar of their sweat, there are also some who take a wrecking ball to everything they’ve built, raze the ruins and scatter ashes into the sea. Who return to their native lands to bequeath a bitter resentment of Americans to their children (adopted children as it will have to be in Mitzi’s case), cursing the country that provided them for so long with protection from the truly evil empires of the world as opposed to the merely careless. And perhaps this is the true cause of modern, European anti-Semitism. Perhaps it has nothing to do with Israel’s treatment of Palestinians or with the guilt felt over Europe’s role in WWII. Perhaps it has only to do with the many venereal diseases Jewish men have passed on to previously neutral Swiss women, who, for a brief and vulnerable moment, found us charming and worthy of their trust.

I gathered my belongings from under Mitzi’s terrace and drove them over to IR#9.5’s Silverlake flat, thinking I’d crash there for the night and score a quick blow job before planning my next step in the morning. But once I told her I was no longer with Mitzi, my relationship with IR#9.5 was immediately changed and changed forever. No longer was I the non-reciprocating recipient of her oral virtuosity. No longer was I the brilliant young playwright who would cast her in all of his plays. Now, instead, I was a prisoner to her mania, expected to pay back in spades for her unrequited lavishings. In short, I was expected to fuck her, to eat her hairy pussy (you could lose your keys in the thing) and to suffer under the weight of her bouncing, flopping, thumping attempts at orgasm. In exchange for a place to stay, I would suffer constant reminders of the times I had rebuffed her and used her as a whore. But now I was the whore, commanded to put up with her never ending criticisms and embarrassing public outbursts. If only I could sell another play, I thought, I’d have enough money to move out and get my own place. But how could I be expected to write when IR#9.5 made it her daily work to reduce me to an empty husk of a man barely fit to hold even a kernel of the human spirit? The blowjobs had vanished, a tactic of seduction never to be repeated, all leading up to this final act of treachery wherein IR#9.5 would extract from me my sperm and use it to impregnate herself so that even the law, the full weight of the American legal system, would now serve to enforce her hegemony over my life.

A trap. A tar pit. A child.

“You think you’re some fucking prize?” she asked when she returned home from work. “You think I want to be stuck with you and not Brad Pitt or Bill Gates or at least someone with a fucking job? Where the hell do you get off being pissed I’m having your baby? You should be so lucky I’m having your fucking baby!”

IR#9.5 went on to list for me all the reasons why I was fortunate to be linked with her, or with anyone, considering my profile as it had been compiled by Ana, IR#9.5’s “spiritual therapist,” a woman capable of reading palms and auras but not licensed to prescribe medicine in the state of California.

“Ana warned me you were a damaged person because of that bipolar bitch who raised you!” This was how IR#9.5 referred to my mother. “The hair-trigger temper and hour long tirades. The wild and unprovoked mood swings. The year long depressions that created your fear of abandonment.”

“What fear of abandonment?” I asked. “Abandon me! Please! Take my unborn child and leave the TiVo.”

“Ana says you mistake violence and hysteria for affection. That you’re completely unable to love a woman in a normal emotional state.”

“Like the state you’re in now?”

“You drive me to this state,” she screamed, knocking a bottle off the kitchen counter. “You do it the same way your mother goaded your father into beating her while you sat by like a pussy, helpless to stop the abuse but secretly desiring that he would kill her. Because that’s what you really wanted, wasn’t it? For Daddy to kill Mommy, thereby setting you free from the interminable warfare in your apartment. Free from the late night visits from police and social services. Free from trying to make that miserable cunt happy when you knew damn well she’d never be happy. She’d never be normal and nice like that Swiss anti-Semite you treated like shit. And don’t even get me started on what Ana says about your father!”

“Why not?” I asked. “Who knew a fifty dollar Gypsy would hold the key to unlocking the enigma that was Abel Fischman?”

“Ana thinks you’re ruined as a man because you’re unable to live up to the role model your father provided. Even though you want to hate him, subconsciously you envy him because he was capable of smacking a woman when she needed to be smacked. Capable of cheating on his wife without the moral bellyaching that’s the signature of your tribe. Fuck you and your Jew morality, Fish, telling me to kill my child so you don’t have to feel guilty about being a shitty father! Did I ever ask you to feel guilty? Did I ever tell you to stick around? I absolve you of all responsibility, Fish. You have the permission that your morality requires. So go ahead and walk out on me like your father walked out on you. I bet you don’t make it past the 110 freeway before that churning feeling in your gut brings you slithering back to my door. But give it a shot, Fish. Go ahead and abandon your woman and child. Try it on and see how it fits, you disgusting piece of shit!”

And so I tried. I threw on my coat, grabbed my laptop and drove to the bar to say good-bye to Arty. I was going to leave Los Angeles. Abandon the mess I’d made to start a new mess somewhere else, anywhere else, so long as I was no longer subject to the endless, screaming reproaches of that intolerable woman.

“As far as a full tank will take me,” I told Arty.

“Do you even have a full tank?”

“Can you spot me a twenty?”

Arty sat on a stool staring at the barkeeper’s ass. She was a perfect “one-hander,” i.e. she had an ass so compact a man could scoop it up in one hand. They grow this kind of ass in LA. It occurred to me, I’d miss this kind of ass.

“She was supposed to be the chick who blew me during intermission,” I said. “Not the mother of my child.”

“Everyone settles,” Arty belched. “Hell, I wanted to be the King of Sweden and fuck my way to Nirvana. Instead I’m married to a plumper, working 60 hours a week, lucky I get an hour a day in front of the internet to pull my pud and dream of better things.” He took an angry swig of his drink. “But it could be worse,” he alleged. “I could be back in Philly working in my old man’s shop, waking up at four in the morning to freeze my ass off half the year.” He admired what he saw as the barkeep bent over to pick up a crate. “Or I could be alone.”

“I don’t love her,” I told Arty. “I don’t even like her. And I think she’ll be a terrible mother. I think the child would be damaged beyond repair from growing up in the toxicity of our home.”

“And the way we grew up was so great?”

I admitted it wasn’t. But I also pointed out that we didn’t turn out to be happy, friendly people. “We became self-loathing, drunken misogynists, and as such, it is our obligation to the greater good that we refrain from reproduction.”

But Arty wasn’t listening. He was staring down into his scotch like a twelve your old peeking through a keyhole into his sister’s bedroom. He paid the tab and threw an arm around my shoulders.

“Let me show you a trick,” he said. “Hey barkeep! My friend here is having a baby!”

“Congratulations,” said the one-hander. “This one’s on the house!”

I went from bar to bar that night telling everyone who’d listen that my girl was knocked-up. I drank for free in no fewer than six establishments, hitting on one-handers into the wee hours before someone finally took mercy on my soul, called me a cab and sent me back to her lair.

IR#9.5 was asleep when I got home. I could see the outline of her body curled up beneath the duvet. I pulled away the covers and lifted her nightgown to get a better look. Her ass was enormous. You couldn’t scoop it with one hand or even two. You’d need a shovel for that ass. You’d need a fucking snow plow. In my drunken state, I thought it would be a good idea to stick my dick in that enormous ass. I took some lube from the night table and greased her up with my fingers.

“What are you doing?” she asked.

“Editing my myspace page.”

“I’m sleeping.”

“So sleep,” I said. “What do I care?”

“Get off me,” she yelled, nearly breaking my finger as she rolled over on the bed.

“Then how ’bout a blow job?” I asked.

“At three in the morning?”

“Yes,” I answered. “A blowjob at three in the morning!” I turned on the lamp at the side of the bed. “Is that such a horrible thing to ask?” She turned over and buried her face in the pillow. “I would even go so far as to say that three in the morning exists for the very purpose of blowjobs and suicides. And since I haven’t the rope for the latter, I might as well settle for the former.”

She cursed into the pillow.

“Why is it I’m worthy of being the father of your child but not worthy of a blowjob?”

“Fish,” she said, turning fiercely in my direction, “I’m tired. It’s late. And I’m in no mood for this now.”

“Now?” I asked. “You’re in no mood for it ever! You never want to blow me anymore. It disgusts you to even think of it. Years ago, you loved to have my cock in your mouth. You loved the way my body shook as I spewed hot come in your mouth…”

She covered her ears with her hands and screamed.

“Goddamn it!” I declared. “You owe me a blowjob. Even if you hate it, even if it makes you sick. Because as much as you hate my cock in your mouth, that’s how much I hate the idea of your having my child!”

“Get off me!” she screamed, as I laid my bulk on top of her, preventing her from kneeing me in the balls.

“You want to get rough?” I asked. “Is that how you want it, you little brat.”

“Fuck you, Fish,” she shouted, her teeth clenched and her body twisting beneath me. “Fuck you, you piece of shit!”

“Is that how Daddy’s little girl likes to play?”

“I’m not a little girl!” she insisted, in her little girl voice, angry and petulant, with a scowly little look on her face.

“Then why are you acting like a little girl?” I asked, pinning her wrists with one hand while I unleashed my cock with the other. “Why are you hurting Daddy’s feelings like a bratty little girl?”

I poked my prick against her chin as she wiggled and flipped, fighting to get away.

“Daddy’s hurting me,” she said, tossing her head as I jabbed my cock into her lips.

“That’s right Daddy’s hurting you,” I replied. “He’s hurting you because his little girl has to learn she’s a big girl now. She has to do some big girl things. And if she doesn’t start doing some big girl things this very instant, then Daddy’s going to smack the shit out of her until she opens her mouth and puts his cock-in-her-mother-fucking… OHHHHHHHHH MY LORD ALMIGHTY!”

I’m going to be a father.

But it was not J-’s elderly neighbor who had knocked, it was, instead, a deliveryman carrying a small, coffin-shaped box of insubstantial weight. According to the postmark, the package had been sent from a city in China, the name of which J- did not recognize and could not pronounce.

“Are you certain you have the right address,” he asked, but after the deliveryman provided sufficient confirmation, J- accepted the package and carried it into his living room, where, upon further inspection, he discovered the following note attached to its corrugated cardboard:

Dear J-,
Hope you enjoy the gift. They’re the next ‘big’ thing!
Sincerely,
A-

Well it’s about time, J- thought, relieved that his generosity was finally being acknowledged.

A- had been a classmate of J-’s from their days at The Academy. A decade after their graduation, the two men became re-acquainted at a reunion where A- approached J- and requested of him a certain favor. It was the type of favor that was strictly prohibited according to the bylaws of The Patent Office, but was, nonetheless, often performed in exchange for a small bribe. Though never by J-. Though well aware of the corruption quite common at The Patent Office (particularly among the poorly paid clerks whose prospects for promotion were in doubt), J- himself had never taken part in any illicit activities. In fact, he found it quite brazen of A- to ask such a favor, especially considering the sort of penalties he could have incurred should J- have turned him over to The Authorities.

But A- had always had a reputation for brazenness, both in his personal and in his professional life. It was his trademark. Something people admired about him. Brazenness was a quality J- liked to think he possessed as well though he never had an opportunity to express it. Instead, his reputation was for thoroughness and diligence, qualities that served him well and earned him his current position. Qualities that didn’t make it easy for him to break the rules, though in the end, after much deliberation and for reasons which he did not at the time understand, J- did, eventually, grant the favor A- requested.

What J- did not do, however, having been a novice in matters of corruption, was ask for anything in return. Which isn’t to say he didn’t expect anything in return. Which isn’t to say he didn’t want anything in return. And in the coming year, when J- didn’t receive so much as a phone call from A-, he began to suspect that he had made a grave mistake. He had made a moral compromise only to be taken advantage of by someone far more experienced in the world of duplicity. In retrospect, J- wished he had demanded compensation and negotiated a specific amount before doing the favor. Or just refused A- from the beginning. The whole fiasco bothered him even more when he heard rumors that A- was involved in an enormously lucrative enterprise while J- remained chained to his desk, working for the paltry salary of a clerk at The Patent Office.

After reading the note, J- ran it twice through his paper shredder in order to eliminate any trace of incriminating evidence. He jumbled the confetti in the trash and grabbed a knife from the kitchen drawer. He approached the strange, coffin-shaped box and thrust the blade into the corrugated cardboard.

“Dear God!” cried a voice from somewhere in the room.

J- jumped back and looked about his apartment searching for the source of this strange outburst. Must be my neighbor’s television, he decided. He is hard of hearing and plays his set so loud.

Once more, J- stuck his knife into the package only to hear the same frightened voice scream out, “Please be careful!”

There was no mistaking it this time. Something in the box could speak!

Casting aside the knife, J- peeled open the cardboard box to reveal that inside, covered in packing foam, stood a pudgy little man no more than one-and-a-half feet tall wearing a tweed jacket with elbow patches and gray slacks held high by suspenders. He was a living, breathing man, ugly and curious, like nothing J- had ever seen. He wore a horsehair wig hastily sewn to his scalp and a striped tie too wide to be in fashion. Beads of sweat had collected on the little man’s brow. Flecks of Styrofoam clung to his beard. And though he appeared to be a middle-aged little man, beyond 50 perhaps, the tags attached to his wrist would suggest he was brand new.

“What kind of a shit gift is this,” J- asked.

The little man cleared his throat, licked his palm, and wiped it over his mussy coiffure. He thrust his stubby, little paw into one inside pocket of his jacket, then into the other, from which he produced a small sheaf of papers. He unfolded the sheaf several times and kept unfolding it until the papers reached the size of a small booklet.

“I am, good Sir,” and here the little man cleared his throat again, “hm, hm… obliged to hand you this upon delivery.”

He extended the booklet to J-, who, upon receiving it, read out loud the following title:

Congratulations on the purchase of your new homunculus!

The pages thereafter, printed in several languages, contained warranty information and instructions for care and maintenance. It was, as far as J- could tell, an owner’s manual of sorts. An owner’s manual for an homunculus. For some sort of pet given to him as a gift. Only there was nothing cute about this pet. Nothing cute about an ugly little man in a suit.

J- wondered if the homunculus was truly meant as a gift and not as some sort of an insult instead. He remembered that A- and he were hardly friends at The Academy. That A- was older and born of a family with a long tradition at the school. An elitist who rarely stooped to speak to an upstart like J-, unless it was to mock him or impress his friends with his ability to “communicate with the people.”

But that was years ago, J- reasoned, and A- would never be so foolish as to think that the status he held over me then would still apply. Not after the favor I granted him from my station at The Patent Office.

But as J- stared down at the homunculus, twitching, clearing his throat, and patting down his hair with a slickened palm, his hypos began to get the better of him. He couldn’t help thinking that A- was gloating over him. That he had given him this gift in order to call J- an ugly little man in a suit, a suck-up, too timid to ask for money in return for a favor. That this offered gift was a most malicious display of arrogance if ever there was one. That it represented an attack on J- and the entire tradition of The Patent Office – an intolerable affront to all that was decent in human behavior!

The homunculus cleared his throat again prompting J- to backhand him with a ferocity that sent the little man flying across the room and crashing into a bookshelf. Hoping to catch A- before he left his office, J- dialed his number and demanded the receptionist put him through. While on hold for what seemed an eternity, he jotted down on a pad some of the many things he wished to say should his old acquaintance have the courage to take the call. And if he couldn’t get him on the phone, J- was fully prepared to speak his mind on voice mail, or in a strongly worded email that A- would not soon forget.

“Isn’t it great,” A- asked, when he finally took the call. “These babies are gonna sell like hotcakes! I’m gonna mass produce the things, market ‘em up the wazoo and, in two years time, there’s going to be one in every home in The Land!”

“Mass produce them,” J- asked. A-’s excitement unnerved J-, catching him completely off-guard and forcing him to wonder if his initial reaction might have been inappropriate. “Do you mean to tell me that…”

“One of our R&D guys came up with the idea about a year ago,” A- interrupted. “Yours is the latest prototype. Top of the line. A real beaut if I don’t say so myself.”

J- was baffled. He still suspected that A- was getting one over on him, but he couldn’t think of a way to prove it. “Do you mind telling me first what in God’s name it is,” J- asked. “I mean, what is its purpose? What is one supposed to do with the thing?”

“Personally,” A- replied, “I have mine sing to me. Turns out the sonofabitch is a heck of a baritone!” From the pit of his belly erupted a loud and raucous laugh.

J-, however, was not laughing. He still found no humor in the situation. “Do you mean to tell me you’ve given me a slave,” he asked.

“Oh no, no. Not at all,” his old acquaintance protested, ending his laughter in order to take on a tone of seriousness that expressed his disdain for the institution of slavery, long gone from The Land, though it had existed some time ago. “It’s got to be human to be a slave. And this thing is definitely not human. At least not according to the patent on its manufacturing process.” So that was the favor, J- realized. That was why A- needed me to move those papers at The Patent Office. “Of course if you don’t like it, I can always take it back,” A- added in a manner that suggested not only that J- was an ingrate but also an accomplice in a crime. “I just thought I owed you something. After all, you did make it possible for me to…”

J- cut him off rather than be reminded explicitly of the mistake he had made a year ago. The whole business was making him sick. If A- was telling the truth about the homunculus, then J-’s favor had been a key component in its manufacture. His transgression had a consequence, embodied in the form of an ugly little man in a suit. A soon-to-be mass produced ugly little man in a suit.

“I didn’t mean to offend you,” J- offered in a bewildered state of contrition. “It is a lovely gift.” Though one that made him nauseous to look at. “Do I have to… feed or clean up after it?”

A- told him that the homunculus could pretty much take care of itself.

“And does it… have a name,” J- asked.

“I don’t know,” A- replied. “Maybe you should ask.” The homunculus stood facing the bookshelf, browsing through titles, pretending to ignore the conversation J- was having on the phone. “It is made from the root of mandrake and the sperm of hanged man,” A- explained. “They are born of an ancient tradition and reconfigured to exist in the modern age. Consider yourself lucky that you’re one of the chosen few who can have one before everyone else.”

It occurred to J- that his old acquaintance could very well have lost his mind. How else to explain this delusional behavior? How else to explain why a person would invest what must have been millions of his own and other people’s dollars in the hope that the general public would want to buy what was essentially a middle-aged midget? It occurred to J- that perhaps A- was no more malicious than he was brazen. Perhaps he was merely a misguided entrepreneur who had gone insane.

The two acquaintances made a non-formal, non-committal commitment to have lunch sometime in the near but not too-near future. They hung up their respective phones, A- so that he could get home to his wife and children, and J- so that he could return to his desk and finish typing his report. There was, however, the matter of dealing with the one-and-a-half foot man standing in J-’s living room. He walked to the bookshelf and asked the homunculus if he had a name.

“My name,” answered the little man, twitching and clearing his throat, “hm, hm… as in the one which was given to me at the factory, hm … or the plant, I should say…”

“Please,” interrupted J-. “Just tell me your name.”

The little man smiled and tilted his head obsequiously to the side. “My name is Randolph,” he announced, clicking his heels and lengthening his posture. “Randolph, the homunculus!” He bowed and swung his arm in a flourish, then looked up sheepishly for approval.

“And is Randolph your Christian name,” J- asked, unimpressed by the performance.

“Oh good heavans!” replied Randolph, with a laugh followed by another clearing of the throat. “It is a name, which I assure you, hm, hm… is neither Christian, Semitic, Mohammedan nor of any other particular denomination. It is my entire name. It is what I am called, hm, hm… though I’d be more than willing to change it hm… if that is what you require.”

The little man forced a chuckle, but seeing no approval from his owner, allowed his gaze to fall downward in what might have been the saddest expression of defeat J- had ever seen. But it was not an expression that elicited any sympathy from J-. It elicited nothing but more nausea and frustration. For J- had not asked for this little man. He had not asked for this gift. Nearly half an hour had passed since the deliveryman knocked, and in that time, J- had made no progress on his report, and his position at The Patent Office was not so secure that he could afford to waste time on some toy — especially not one that served no purpose other than to remind him of a crime he committed a year ago for which he could still serve a stiff sentence if caught. Deciding he was better off before ever having laid eyes on the damned thing, J- returned the little man to his cardboard coffin, sealed it up with duct tape, and placed it on the uppermost shelf of his closet where he kept old laptops and other objects he had no use for but wouldn’t, for whatever reason, simply throw in the trash.

******

Clerks in The Patent Office are each expected to hand in one detailed analysis report (DAR) at the end of each and every week. The DAR’s are then graded by the managers on a scale of one to six, with a “one” representing a failing mark and a “six” meaning the report is virtually perfect. As explained in The Patent Office Handbook (POH), any clerk who hands in a DAR that receives a grade of one will be immediately terminated. An accumulation of twos, i.e. two in the same month, is also enough to force a clerk into early retirement. Even a steady diet of threes and fours provides no guarantee that a clerk will keep his job. Indeed, the only way that a clerk can feel at all secure in his or her employment at The Patent Office is to score fours and fives (F&F’s) with consistency on his or her DAR’s.

But scoring F&F’s is no easy task. F&F’s require discipline, determination, and an unwavering mind-set, the scope of which is beyond the nature of the great majority of the population. And as for a six – well, that is nearly impossible to attain! Any time a clerk can “six” is cause for celebration in the office, not to mention a bonus and a good deal of envy amongst his or her peers. And if a clerk can score “repeat sixes,” i.e. three in a month, the clerk, according to the rules outlined in POH, is to be immediately promoted (upon review) to the rank of “manager.” In fact, repeat sixes is the only way (with exceptions) to be promoted to the rank of manager, which is why The Patent Office is often called a meritocracy (of sorts), and why each year thousands of graduates from The Academy apply there for a job.

It is also the reason why there are so few managers employed by The Patent Office and why their positions are so enormously coveted. Not that anyone knows what they do. Even the clerks who work in close proximity to them have no idea what goes on behind the closed doors of the managers’ chambers. They know only that the managers are well paid; that they can get things done without going through normal bureaucratic channels; that they are the keepers of a great many secrets; and that the ladies of The Public Sector are eager to bequeath to them the treasures of their loins.

What it takes to write repeat sixes, thereby gaining promotion to the rank of manager, is the ever-present topic of discussion amongst the clerks of The Patent Office. But the criteria for evaluation remains an enigma to them. Sure, the managers provide rudimentary instructions. They issue copies of past fives and sixes in order to serve as guidelines and set parameters for quality. But reading a six, or even studying one in depth, is little help when it comes to actually creating one yourself. Clerks often turn in what they think is their best work only to get back scores of three or four, which is enough to make them wonder if there really is a standardized system by which they are being evaluated, and not some sinister machine spitting out arbitrary numbers.

There is even a story that circulates the office concerning a pair of clerks who were having an affair and who promised each other one evening that whoever was promoted first would tell the other “the secret of the sixes.” As the story goes, it was the woman who first achieved promotion, and, thereafter, when her mate asked her to divulge the answer to the riddle, he received instead an icy reply that it was strictly forbidden for her to tell him anything other than what was contained in The Patent Office Handbook. When the clerk pushed the issue and demanded that his mate keep her end of their bedroom bargain, the newly promoted manager informed him that she would sooner end their relationship than respond to what he was asking. Even when the clerk’s anger approached the threat of violence, the manager would only add that up until the very moment of her promotion, she had had every intention of telling him the secret, but that the knowledge of the secret had changed her — “had transformed her understanding” — to the extant that it was no longer possible to tell him and, indeed, that it would never, ever happen.

In pursuit of repeat sixes, J-, like most of his fellow clerks, kept long hours at the office and carried his work home with him, spending weekends and holidays staring at the screen of his laptop. He regularly pulled all-nighters at his desk, washing down amphetamines with coffee to keep himself awake, and even when he did get to bed, he often tossed and turned worrying about whether he had taken the right course in his writing, or whether his forays along the roads of style were leading him astray. He worried about whether or not he could keep up with his overly competitive rivals in the office. He worried that age was getting to him, slowing him down and sapping the very strength he needed to remain afloat. If a clerk was going to get promoted to manager, he usually did so within his first seven years. J- had been at it for ten, and though he scored F&F’s with consistency, he felt no closer to repeat sixes than he did when he first started. And there were personal concerns as well. Work prevented J- from having anything resembling a social life. If things kept up the way they were, J- worried he would remain a permanent bachelor, stuck to his desk and its never ending pile of reports. If only I had more talent, he often wished. Or savvy. Or a different perspective. Or maybe if I just put a little more effort into it. But alas, nothing seemed to work.

One night, as J- lay in bed thinking about the report he would hand in in the morning, he heard a strange tapping noise emanating from the closet in his living room. It was Randolph, no doubt, probably clearing his throat as was his annoying habit. J- had not had any dealings with the homunculus since the day, several months prior, when he had first received him in the cardboard coffin. He had surmised, however, that Randolph had escaped his packaging and enjoyed the run of the house when home alone. The evidence was subtle but clear. There were chicken bones in the trash that had been broken open with their marrow sucked out; books had been rearranged on the shelves; and, at night, J- often heard noises in the bathroom as the little man moved through the ritual of his toilet. Since his mind was so completely occupied by work, J- didn’t worry much about the homunculus’ presence. He thought of Randolph as a leaky faucet, a sore shoulder or just some other nuisance that needed to be dealt with at some infinitely later time. This particular night, however, J- could not leave well enough alone. The noise was keeping him awake, and this particular night, J- wanted his sleep.

He threw off his covers, stumbled into the living room, and approached the closet door. He could hear Randolph’s breath, some mumbling, and more of that strange tapping noise. J- was about to knock when it occurred to him that this was his house and he was damned if he had to knock on his door to be polite to an uninvited homunculus. Instead, he decided to yank the door open and catch the homunculus unawares. But in that moment, when he finally did yank the door open, it was not only the homunculus but J- who was caught unawares. Unawares and completely unprepared for the shocking sight that lay before him. For the closet bore no resemblance to the room as last J- saw it, several months prior, when he first condemned the little man to its uppermost shelf. Since then, the closet had been entirely transformed into a scaled-down replica of J-’s cubicle at The Patent Office. Even the furniture matched. Only upon closer inspection did J- realize that the swivel chair had been crafted from stapled shoeboxes; that the desk was made from the cardboard coffin Randolph had arrived in; that the lamp was actually an old, carved-up boot holding a hemp oil candle that Randolph must have taken from the cupboard.

“My goodness,” Randolph exclaimed, clutching his chest. He stood up from his chair and slipped his tweed jacket over his shirtsleeves. “Hm, hm… I wasn’t expecting company.”

There was an old forgotten laptop and an ink jet printer hooked up to an outlet. A pile of documents were arranged on a bookcase made from discarded wood — documents that looked suspiciously similar to the reports J- wrote for The Patent Office.

“You have woken me,” J- replied, still stunned at the scene spread out before him. “You have woken me with all of your throat clearing and mussing about.”

“I beg your pardon,” said the homunculus. “I guess it is something of a nervous tick I have, hm, hm… Some minor blunder at the factory, hm… or a faulty mandrake perhaps.”

There was an edition of John Milton and a copy of The Secret Sharer atop the coffin. J- recognized them as his own.

“Just a little poetry and some Conrad,” the homunculus offered as answer to a question that was implied but never asked. “I promise to return them to their, hm, hm… exact positions on your shelf when I’m finished with them.”

J- had never considered what kind of existence the little man had been carving out for himself since being stuck in the closet. He had never considered what activities a homunculus might pursue to relieve himself the burden of time.

“What are you typing,” J- asked, genuinely curious.

“Oh, nothing really,” Randolph motioned to the laptop with a dismissive wave. “Just some… reports.”

J- insisted on seeing these reports. He carried the laptop into the living room and browsed through the hard drive while Randolph lingered, hands in pockets, by the closet door. All through the evening, J- read the files one by one in the order they were written.

“I have them printed out,” the homunculus interrupted at one point. “Though the ribbon is hm, hm… a bit weakened from overuse.”

From what J- could gather, it appeared the homunculus had been writing a journal of sorts that combined commentary concerning what he was reading from J-’s book shelf; an account of the building of his office; theories on the process of his manufacture; analysis of his relationship to J-; and musings pertaining to the quality and nature of reality. There was nothing, as far as J- could tell, duplicitous in the text, and nothing about which J- needed to be alarmed. By all appearances, the writing seemed to be little more than the private thoughts of a miniature man who lived in a closet and passed his time wrestling with the anxiety of his own existence.

But the prose was exemplary. Extraordinary, in fact, though there seemed to be no progression in the skill: i.e. the homunculus wrote as well in his first report as he did in his last, which led J- to believe that there was something timeless about the little man. That he was not maturing. That he was manufactured with his skill innate, at exactly the age at which he appeared, and that he would get no older or wiser as the years wore on.

“You write rather well,” J- admitted.

“Ach. Thank you,” the homunculus demurred. “Just a little, hm, hm… hobby of mine.” He went on to expound on his tastes in literature placing particular emphasis on his love for the diaries of Franz Kafka and the couplets of Alexander Pope. “To live within the, hm, hm… genius of his poetry is a treat beyond any other. I especially like his piece entitled, ‘An Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot,’ my favorite line being…”

“Randolph,” J- interrupted after it had occurred to him that perhaps this gift from A- was not entirely useless. “Do you ever get bored living in the closet?”

“Well, I, hm, hm… try and keep myself occupied.”

“Lonely?”

“I find comfort in my craft.” The little man twitched and adjusted his wig.

“It seems a great waste that a talent such as yours should sit in a small, dark room and not be put to greater use.”

The homunculus thanked his owner for the compliment.

“How would you like to do a little bit of work for me,” J- asked. “Perhaps look over my reports?”

The homunculus put a hand to his heart indicating that he was flattered. “As you are my owner,” he replied, “I am hm, hm… here to perform whatever task it is you wish of me. And if reading documents is how you prefer I spend my time, then I am hm, hm… in no position, hm… to refuse.”

A further thought occurred to J-.

“Might you also be willing to write them?”

*****

For the sake of appearances, J- still went to the office every day. He still did some research and attended meetings so as not to raise suspicions. But with Randolph secretly taking over his writing, J-began to use his new, surplus time to experience what some might call life.

He began cautiously at first, taking longer lunches and leaving the office at six. Then he started taking breaks in the middle of the day just to see if he could get away with it. Eventually, he built up the courage to visit museums, browse through bookstores and attend matinees at his local theater. He took hikes and walks in the park. Laid out on the beach and read magazines in cafes. He even met his colleagues for drinks after work and flirted with the waitress at the office watering hole where he often bought the first round, a tradition anytime an analyst scored a six. And J- was scoring quite a few sixes since Randolph had begun writing his reports.

It didn’t take long for the homunculus to exceed the level of mastery J- had worked for so many years to achieve. His first report scored a four, his next a five, and within a month, the little man had scored his first six. After scoring another six the following week, the office pool held odds at two-to-one that J- would finally earn his long-awaited promotion. Unfortunately, the week after, there was a slip in Randolph’s execution. His DAR came back a five, meaning that he would have to start all over again in his attempt at repeat sixes.

But no matter. Everyone in the office was still betting on J-. His colleagues smiled at him in the hallways and deferred to him at meetings. The secretaries raised their skirts ever so slightly when he entered the elevator. One night he was even able to convince a female intern to join him for an aperitif back at his apartment. The evening seemed to be moving in a glorious direction until the young lady excused herself to go to the bathroom, where she immediately erupted into hysterics, screaming and crying after catching sight of a one-and-a-half foot man squatting over the toilet. J- spent the next hour struggling to convince the unfortunate girl that it was only her imagination playing tricks on her, but the night had been ruined, and the intern asked to be driven home.

With respect to their living situation, J-’s relationship with Randolph had grown more amiable than it was when they first met. The two got along like old roommates. They shared the paper in the morning, watched television together and talked sports. J- cooked breakfast for the little man and even built him a cot so he wouldn’t have to sleep on the floor. The only tension in their relationship arose from Randolph’s inability to score the repeat sixes necessary for J’s promotion. Month after month, the same situation persisted: two straight weeks of sixes followed by a four or a five.

“Is there anything I could get you that would help,” J- asked.

“Not at all,” Randolph replied. “You have provided me, hm, hm… with everything I could possibly need.”

“Then is it fatigue?”

“It could be,” said Randolph, in a contemplative tone. “But I am certain hm, hm… this will be the month I pull it off!”

J- assumed it was just a matter of time, and until then, he could at least enjoy the bonuses and the envy of his colleagues. He could enjoy the time off and the relief from the pressures of having to write a report every week. He could enjoy his sleep! J- was well rested and healthy for the first time in as long as he could remember. His weight was stable. His skin was clear. He was also incredibly bored. After all, with Randolph doing all the work, J- had almost nothing to do but fill his days with empty chores and activities. It was as if his body was engaged in a pantomime while his mind remained stuck in the closet with Randolph. It was as if J-’s only “real” activity was the wait — the wait for Randolph to score three sixes in a row. The wait for the promotion to come. The wait for his life to improve.

“I hope you weren’t waiting long,” J- asked as he took his seat at a booth near the kitchen. A- had called him that morning and asked if he’d like to have lunch. They agreed to meet at a quiet downtown bistro, where J- had every intention of picking up the check.

“Few minutes,” grumbled his old acquaintance. He seemed less brazen than usual. His complexion pale. His manner more reserved.

J- inquired about A-’s family and a few of their old classmates from The Academy. Asked about his various business ventures and informed A- of his own recent success at The Patent Office. “Only a matter of time now until I’m a manager. Imagine the favors I’ll be able to do for you then!”

Pleasantries aside, A- removed his glasses and leaned forward across the table. He lowered his voice and told J- there was an important matter they needed to discuss. “A matter of extreme urgency.” He then apologized for not coming to him sooner and acknowledged that, in his negligence, he had forgotten that he had once sent J- an homunculus as a gift.

J- had hoped that the subject of the little man would not come up in their conversation. After all, if anyone were to find out that Randolph was writing J-’s reports, the repercussions could be most severe. The Patent Office dealt in some of the most important matters of national finance. If it was leaked that a homunculus from China was writing his DAR’s and possibly undermining economic policy, J- could be arrested and even charged with treason.

“I assume,” said A-, “that because I haven’t heard from you, there hasn’t been any trouble with yours.”

J- looked down at his empty water glass and found himself overcome by a terrible thirst. “Trouble,” he asked, as if the homunculus was the furthest thing from his mind. He tried to suck a last bit of liquid from a melting ice cube but found it failed to satisfy. “What do you mean by trouble?”

A- continued in hushed tones, out of keeping with the boisterous voice he usually employed. “It seems that some of the homunculi,” he whispered, “despite our best efforts at making them benign… took advantage of certain opportunities to turn on their owners.”

“Turn on them,” J- asked, trying to appear only mildly interested, his throat parched from the thirst. “Mine has never, hm, hm… been out of the closet.”

A- furrowed his eyebrows in disbelief. “You mean to tell me,” he asked, “that you kept your homunculus in his original packing and never once let him out?”

J- nodded, his throat so incredibly dry, his lie so incredibly blatant, he could not actually give forth sound. He twisted in his chair, eyes searching for a waiter or an unattended glass of water from another table.

“But what does it eat,” A- asked. “Where does it go to take a shit?”

J- shrugged. His lie was outrageous, insulting to his friend’s intelligence, but he was sticking to it. And Goddamnit where was that waiter?

“Is it dead,” A- asked. “No. It can’t be,” he answered his own question. “You’d smell it if it was dead.”

A busboy appeared from the kitchen, and J- beckoned him over holding his glass in the air. The busboy filled the glass with ice water, and J- drank it down in several large gulps before asking the busboy to fill it again. Taking another long drink gave him the time needed to formulate more lies.

“I stored the homunculus in a cellar which I never use,” J- elaborated once he had finished his drink. “If he is hm, hm… dead and rotting, I wouldn’t smell him because I never go down there.”

Obviously, there was no cellar in J-’s apartment, but there was also no way A- would know that unless he’d been there. Which he hadn’t. And whereas A- clearly didn’t believe J-’s lie, he was decent enough, or tactically proficient enough, to continue on as if he did.

“It is essential,” A- warned, “that we know your homunculus is dead. That we get it out of your home and destroy it immediately before it does you any harm.” A- glanced at his watch without reading it and motioned to the waiter that he wanted the check. “I have some time now. Let’s take care of it before you’re due back at the office.”

J- pondered what his life would be like if he had to return to handing in F&F’s. If he had to return to the mundane drudgery of a clerk with no hope of making manager. Ten years he had been at that office. Could he possibly survive another ten or twenty years without promotion? Without even the hope of promotion?

“I’m afraid,” J- responded as A- received the check from the waiter, “that I am unable to return to my home at this time.”

This was the first time J- had ever refused his old acquaintance, and it was apparent from the look on his old acquaintance’s face that he was not accustomed to being refused. Indeed, A- paused for a moment, made certain that the waiter had moved on, then carefully placed the check down on the table. He leaned in close, bulky and strong, and spoke in a more assertive tone.

“When will you be able to return to your home,” A- asked.

J- held firm. “I’m not exactly sure.”

The two men looked each other in the eye for several long seconds, something of a challenge between them, before A- finally budged.

“As a CEO, I’m telling you that my company can’t afford to be held liable for another one of these things going bad. And as your friend,” he went on, taking hold of J-’s hand atop the table, “I’m telling you that I can’t afford to feel responsible for your getting hurt.”

J- laughed out loud at the thought. “Getting hurt,” he asked. “How am I going to get hurt by a one-and-a-half foot toy?” He laughed again as he rescued his hand from A-’s grasp and took his wallet from his jacket pocket. “Come on now, A-,” he said as he threw down a pair of twenty dollar bills beside the check. “Surely you’re joking with me.”

But nothing in A-’s demeanor would indicate that this was in jest. He sat back in the booth and looked down at the meal he’d hardly touched. He took up his glasses and placed them carefully over his eyes. He spoke almost to himself at this point, staring down at the nearest edge of the table, and yet every word was clearly audible to J-. As audible as his words would be if they were being spoken directly into J-’s ear.

“It will never get you that promotion.”

Every sound in the restaurant, every click of a glass, or piece of silverware striking a plate, merged into one quietly prolonged hiss in J-’s ear. The words he had just heard spoken seemed to echo over and beyond that hiss. “It will never get you that promotion.” The water J- had so recently drunk seeped through his skin to drench the shirt beneath his coat. He loosened his collar to help with his breathing. And though he chose not to respond to the words A- had spoken (he had not been asked a question, and thus there was no reason to respond), the look on his face clearly conveyed that he had heard and understood what was said.

“They come up short,” A- added. “In the end,” A-continued, “that is what little men do.”

J- sat there, crestfallen, sweaty and confused, as A- quietly instructed him of the procedure required for the decommission of an homunculus: the necessary length of blade, the position of the thrust and how to do it through the cardboard coffin so that one did not have to see the thing writhe in pain. He related these instructions methodically without ever looking J- in the eye. He asked that J- call as soon as the deed was done. He said that it would put his mind at ease.

The two men parted on polite terms, J- mentioning that they should meet more often, A- picking up the check and apologizing for the inconvenience. He seemed worried that J- didn’t take his admonitions seriously, though J- assured him that he did.

*****

J- spent the rest of his day at the office realizing what a wonderful life this homunculus had built for himself at J-’s expense. After all, since Randolph started writing his reports, J- had been taking pretty good care of the little man. He had cooked for him, borrowed books for him from the library and even bought him a child’s couch so he wouldn’t have to struggle climbing up to the one in the living room when he wanted to watch TV. Due to J-’s benevolence, Randolph had a hundred and twenty channels of cable and the fastest internet connection money could buy. And it wasn’t as if J- had locked him into the apartment. Other than having to write a report once a week, which he did without much effort, the little man was free to do whatever he wanted. If he wanted to leave, J- thought, he probably would have. If he wanted to poison my food or slit my throat as I slept, what was there to stop him? But why kill me or leave me when I’m taking care of all of his needs?

It occurred to J- that with Randolph’s vastly superior intellect, the little man had probably known the “secret of the sixes” the whole time. He had probably figured it out the moment he was told about it. Something about his perspective, seeing the world through books, television and the crack at the bottom of a closet door, made clear to him what was opaque to J-. In which case Randolph could also see that if J- got his promotion, he would no longer need someone to forge his reports. The homunculus would no longer be an asset but instead would become a threat, able to blackmail J- or turn him in to the authorities. In turn, J- would never feel comfortable in his new position until he destroyed the Randolph in order to keep himself out of jail. Yes, the more J- looked at the world through the eyes of the little man, the more he could see that it was never in Randolph’s best interests to earn J- his promotion — Randolph’s best interests were already being served.

But what about J-’s best interests? Once again, J- felt he’d been duped. Once again someone was benefiting from his generosity without reciprocating the favor. Only this time it wasn’t even a person. This time it was a product. It was a toy midget made in China. An ugly little man in a suit controlling his life from a closet.

J- cursed the little man. He cursed A- and the damned Patent Office. He cursed himself for falling into such a ridiculous life. “Like a Praise Monkey,” he muttered aloud, contemptuously, and to no one in particular. “Like a Goddamn Praise Monkey.”

A Praise Monkey. A term he once heard his immigrant father use the day the old man had first taken him to the zoo. They stood with a crowd in front of a cage watching a monkey perform. After every trick, the spectators applauded and the trainer handed the monkey a snack. No more than ten years old, J- enjoyed the show and clapped as hard as he could until his father ruined the moment with this strange phrase.

“Praise Monkey,” he cursed under his breath, pulling J- away from the cage.

J- assumed his father meant to say something else — something from his native tongue that got lost in translation. But twenty years later, sitting in a bar at this late hour, J- was no longer certain.

A Praise Monkey. An animal that lives on praise. That eats depending on the level of praise it receives. On the empty praise that results from the repetition of a trick.

J- had grown up thinking his father was an architect. He assumed it because every night after work the old man would sit in the corner of their railroad flat drafting blueprints for factories, stores and offices. When he got older, J- learned that his father was nothing more than a construction worker, a common laborer who worked long, arduous hours to eke out enough money to send J- to a decent school. What his father did with those blueprints, J- never knew. Did he show them to someone? And if so, to whom? To his supervisor? To some contractor perhaps? And what was their response upon seeing that the cement hauler or the ditch digger had an idea for a building?

J- couldn’t recall what he had done with those blueprints after his father’s death. He couldn’t recall if he had thrown them away or stuffed them in the storage facility he rented near his home. He would love to have them evaluated, he thought. Graded on a scale of one to six. See if they’re any good. See if they were the blueprints for functional buildings or merely the etchings of an uneducated dreamer. Unrealized masterpieces or random lines scribbled on gridded sheets of paper.

But I am not my father, J- decided, sitting in the bar with the hour late and a cheap scotch stinging his brain. I am not my father, he promised himself once again. And at that moment, as sometimes happens at a late hour in the corner of an empty bar where melancholy mixes with drinking and a heavy dose of rage — at that moment, the beginnings of a plot took shape in J-’s mind. The broad outline and the major brush strokes. The three act structure so-to-speak. And the more that plot developed, the more excited J- became, until finally, he lifted himself from the barstool and raced out to catch the next train home.

He isn’t human, J- remembered as he sat on the train watching the dull yellow lights race by the window. He is a product. My product. He is a machine like a toaster is a machine. Like a television or a radio or an old laptop. He is a tool, like a hammer is a tool, because I have decided he is a tool. Because The Patent Office has certified him as a tool. There is no empathy for a tool. There is no morality that pertains to its treatment. Morality pertains only to the end toward which the tool is used, never toward the treatment of the tool itself.

Such thinking liberated J- from his dilemma and allowed him to pursue a line of action that heretofore he would have found appalling.

He returned home to find Randolph on the child’s couch in his boxer shorts watching TV as he ate ice cream from a carton. Without warning, J- turned off the television and threw the ice cream against the wall. He took Randolph by his wig, lifted him high up into the air and flung him violently into the closet. He stamped on the little man’s cot until it was smashed to pieces. He tore down the shelves and threw all the books and magazines into the living room. He gave the little man a ferocious kick to the spine that sent him scurrying into the corner of the closet, whimpering in pain.

“When I close this door,” J- ordered, winded from his outburst, “you will begin working on the greatest report you have ever written. And when it scores a six, I will feed you. And if it does not score a six, you will neither eat nor drink until you have written a report that does.”

“But I don’t understand,” answered the homunculus. “I had every intention of …”

“Silence,” J- interrupted. “Unless you desire another thrashing.”

J- slammed the closet door shut. He called A- on the phone and left a message informing his old acquaintance that he had slain the homunculus and disposed of the body as per their agreement. He then secured a chair against the closet door to prevent Randolph from escaping.

“Why don’t I hear typing in there,” he asked.

He waited for the sound of Randolph’s little fingers striking the keys. He ate his dinner then went to sleep.

At the end of the week, Randolph slipped a DAR under the closet door for J- to turn in. It was the best report J- had ever read. It proved his plan was off to a good start, although Randolph had certainly filled him with hope before only to disappoint him later on.

That night, while watching television in the living room, J- heard a knock on the closet door.

“What do you want,” he shouted.

“I was wondering hm, hm…,” the homunculus responded in a voice that was even more pathetic than usual, “if now that I have handed you a report…”

“Yes,” J- asked, making it clear he didn’t like being disturbed.

“I was hoping that I could get a bit of hm, hm… water to quench my thirst.”

“You’ll receive your meal and your liquids when I’ve received my score,” J- replied. “And then only if I get a six.”

The following Monday J- was called into the office of his supervising manager. It was rare for a clerk to be allowed into the inner sanctum, and it usually only happened when one was about to get fired. But no sooner had J- sat down then the manager began to sing his praise. He told J- that his last report was surely his best ever. He told him that he was proud of J-’s performance in the last few months and that if he kept up the good work, there was little doubt a promotion would be forthcoming. He told him to take the rest of the day off and handed J- a whopping bonus along with a score that read six.

J- took his co-workers out for lunch and relayed to them his entire conversation with the manager. He was elated. Positively electric as his mates reveled in every word of his story. And why wouldn’t they? They were as sure as he was that it was just a matter of weeks before J- would be a manager. Before J- sat atop the system that decided what report deserved a six and what report did not.

There was a knock at the closet door when he got home.

“What is it now,” J- yelled.

“Hm, hm…” the homunculus cleared his throat before whispering from the other side. “I was wondering if you hm, hm… received a score yet on my report.”

“My report,” J- corrected him.

“Oh yes. Your report. So sorry.”

“Yes,” J- grumbled. “I received a score.”

“And was it a six?”

It disgusted J- that the homunculus didn’t have the courage to come out and ask for what he wanted.

“Is that all you care about,” J- asked. “Do accolades mean that much to you?”

J- poured himself a scotch and took a swig. No sooner had he raised the glass to his lips then the homunculus spoke again.

“You did mention that if you scored a six…”

“Alright, alright,” replied J-. “But let’s not forget that there are three sixes in a month required for obtaining a promotion.”

J- grabbed some crackers and a packet of juice from his kitchen. He walked to the closet and stooped to the carpet where he was stunned by the stench wafting from beneath the door.

“Good God, what are you doing in there,” he asked.

“I apologize,” cried Randolph. “I held it as long as I hm, hm could… I can clean it if only you’d open the…”

“I see what you’re up to,” yelled J-. “You’ll get no reprieve from me until you’ve delivered your sixes.”

J- shoved the crackers and the juice packet beneath the door. He knew it wasn’t enough to satisfy the little man, but he didn’t want the little man satisfied. He wanted him frightened and hungry. He wanted him motivated by a fear of starvation and dehydration. He wanted him to write as if his very life depended on it.

The next Friday, Randolph delivered a DAR that was even better then the one before. The following Monday, J- was again called in to the inner sanctum, where he was praised by more of the managers and told that they eagerly awaited his next report. He was the life of the party at the bar that night. All of the clerks wanted a piece of him, but there was one female co-worker in particular who was catching his eye. He took her back to his apartment after closing time. They were kissing and groping in his living room when she suddenly stopped their foreplay and took a sniff of the air.

“What’s that smell,” she asked, a grimace squishing across her face.

J- caught a whiff of just how putrid it had become in his apartment. The stench was coming from the closet. Two weeks of filth had piled up as the homunculus had not been allowed out in all that time. Worried that his co-worker might happen upon his secret, J- made a hasty excuse to get her out, promising they would get together again in the near future. “After I get my promotion,” he added with a wink and a smile.

Once she’d left, J- sprayed around the living room with a disinfectant hoping to cover up the stench. Then he took a roll of duct tape and began sealing off the closet door. “You ruined my evening,” he yelled.

“I’m sorry,” Randolph replied in a feeble voice. “Did you hm, hm…”

“Did I what,” J- asked.

“Did you score another six?”

“I’m not giving you any more food if all you’re going to do is shit it out and continue making a stink.”

“Please,” begged the homunculus. “I don’t know how much longer I can continue.”

“Fine,” J- blurted as he went back to the kitchen to get another cracker and another packet of juice. “But this is the last meal you’ll get unless you turn in that third six.”

Because of the smell, J- couldn’t stand to spend much time in his apartment anymore. He killed the next three days lingering about the office and thinking about what he would do once he got his promotion. He thought about the debts he would pay off and all of the new things he would buy. He fantasized about the women who would throw themselves at him once he became a manager. It’ll be a whole new world, he thought. I’ll have new friends and a new routine. I’ll be a new person. A person with power and responsibility. And whatever new tasks await me will be far easier and more fulfilling than the ones I perform now.

On the Friday morning that J- was to turn in his final report, he removed the duct tape from beneath the closet door and called on Randolph to wake him up. There was no answer.

“Randolph,” he shouted. He could hear typing inside, but no voice responded to his call.

He worried the homunculus was attempting an ambush. To defend himself, J- grabbed a leather belt from his dresser, pealed the duct tape off the closet door, and took a careful position. In one sudden motion, he swung the closet door open letting loose a torrent of befouled air that struck him like a chemical attack.

“Good God,” J- screamed, covering his face with the cloth from his shirt.

Randolph wasn’t dead, but he wasn’t entirely alive either. Sitting at his desk typing away on the laptop, the little man stared blankly at the screen, oblivious to J-’s presence. He’d lost weight. His wig was sliding off his scalp as puss-filled sores oozed about the stitches. A side of the closet had been used as a lieu, and judging by the filth around the corners of his mouth, Randolph had been recycling some of his own waste.

“Why aren’t you finished,” J- asked, as the little man typed. “Damn it, it’s due in an hour!”

J- called the office to stall. With the approval he had been getting of late, he had no doubt that the supervising manager would excuse his tardiness. Thus it was with quite a bit of surprise that he heard his boss yelling at him on the phone.

“Reports are expected at 9 o’clock in the morning. You’ve been here long enough to know that.”

“Yes,” J- replied, “but there’s been a flood in my apartment.” If need be, he figured he could create a flood in his apartment. “I have to wait for the plumber before I leave. And I’m knee deep in water.”

“Reports are due on Fridays at 9 o’clock,” repeated the manager.

J- glanced over at Randolph slowly typing away. He glanced at the second hand of his watch, ticking quickly toward ruin. “I understand,” he told the manager, “and I assure you I will hand it in as soon as I can.”

“If it’s late,” replied the manager, “I will deduct a point.”

Eleven years of service, two weeks of consecutive sixes, and this was the treatment he received? After having never been late before.

“I understand,” J- said, but the manager had already hung up.

J- returned to the closet and lashed at the homunculus with his belt. “Type you midget bastard,” he screamed. “Type like your life depends upon it, because it damn well does!” From what J- could tell by looking at the screen, Randolph still had several pages to go, and it was unlikely he’d have it done in time. J- whipped and beat at the little man in hopes that he would get it done faster. He whipped and shouted like a jockey riding a horse down the final leg of some great race. “Type, you little shit,” he shouted. “Type, you ugly little man!” The homunculus typed as J- whipped. He typed and he typed at his steady pace, wincing and groaning with every lash of his master’s belt. With welts forming on his skin and blood seeping from the open wounds, Randolph typed and typed in his stinking little room with this cruel man standing over him whipping and shouting. They whipped and typed and whipped and typed in such a rhythm that they began to resemble a single animal devoted to a single task. An animal that whipped and typed and whipped and typed and achieved some form of ecstasy as it whipped and it typed. An animal that might seem strangely in tune with some divine secret, that could somehow slow down time and collapse the space around it as it whipped and it typed. And not even the sound of a car horn or the ticking of a clock or the neighbor’s television set, turned up to the highest possible volume, could deter the whipping and the typing from this strange animal – from this whipping and typing machine.

Alan is a large man, black, early forties. Bald with a mustache. He keeps his appearance well enough that you wouldn’t guess he lived in the alley behind my apartment.

“What do I do?” he asked.

I told him I didn’t know.

“I don’t know either.”

I thought about buying Alan a bagel, but one bagel for him was one less for me, and I wasn’t sure I had enough money to make it through the week. And Alan kind of annoyed me. He was always talking while I tried to read the racing form.

“Can you get me a job?” he asked.

“If I hear of anything.”

I told Bart, owner and proprietor of The Blessed King Bagel Shop, about my conversation with Alan. I knew that Bart often hired some of the homeless in the area to wash dishes or clean up around the shop. That he let them use the shower in the back and gave them whatever bagels were left at the end of the day.

“Fuck ‘em,” said Bart. “He’s a hypocrite.”

“How so?” I asked.

“Did you know he wears a dress at night? All day long, he sits in my shop, and it’s ‘faggot this’ and ‘faggot that,’ and then he puts on a dress and rides around town on his bike.”

“What do you make of that?” I asked.

“I don’t know.”

Bart is an angry, potato-shaped man, who wears shorts with black socks and sandals beneath his apron. He is angry because he has to open his shop every morning at 2 AM to have the bagels ready for the people who line up to be contestants on The Price is Right. The line winds outside the CBS lot across the street from his store. Fans camp out into the wee hours of the morning wearing T-shirts that say “Pick me Bob” or “Omaha Loves Bob.” The “Bob” they refer to is, of course, Bob Barker, long time host of The Price is Right, a staple on CBS morning television for the last 40 years. And therein lies the problem. Bart’s livelihood depends on the people who line up for The Price is Right, but being that The Price is Right depends on the popularity of its star, Bob Barker, and being that Bob Barker is 85 years old — Bart’s livelihood is anything but secure.

“I got to sell this place before the fucker dies,” Bart often tells me, but he can find no buyer. Add to that three ex-wives, a daughter in college, and a mother in a nursing home, and you can see the man’s dilemma. “I got to get out of here,” he says. “This place is a trap. This place isn’t me.” He insists the store barely breaks even. He never takes a day off. Not even a holiday. Once I saw a rabbi chastise him for remaining open on the Sabbath.

“Rabbi,” said Bart, “I’ll gladly close on shabbos if you pay me what I’d make if I stayed open.”

What Bart really wants to do, more than anything in the world, is have his own radio show where he can talk about religion, specifically Hinduism, the faith he adopted after abandoning his Jewish roots. He often asks me, “How do I get my own show? When are you going to get me a show?”

And I always tell him the same thing: “Talk to Vince.”

Vince is a regular at the bagel shop, a hunched man in a dark suit, who pulls up once a week in a black Mercedes on his way to work. He orders a scooped-out sesame bagel, toasted, with cream cheese and a cup of coffee. His cell phone is never away from his ear. Vince is a player in this town. The real thing. A successful Hollywood agent with an office on Wilshire Boulevard and a house in the hills. He’s 60 years old and 15 minutes from a heart attack.

“Vince don’t want to talk to me,” Bart says. “Vince don’t see nothing that’s not two feet in front of his face.”

Bart wants me to be on the radio show with him, but I want no part of it. For one thing, I’ve never been a fan of talk radio. For another, I think Bart is one of the worst talkers I’ve ever met. He repeats himself constantly, seldom argues coherently and crosses the line with women on a regular basis.

“We can tell people to stop listening to these wackos and evangelists,” he says. “We can tell them to read the Vedas and the Bhagavad-Gita. To stop eating meat and foods that poison their souls.”

One time I came into the bagel shop and Bart was washing coffee off his face because a lady had thrown her cup at him after he made an inappropriate comment.

“I hate this place,” he said. “This place is a trap.”

Alan’s clothes were looking shabbier than usual, and he was rambling on about the government.

“They have a device that alters your perception of space and time,” he said. “It leaves no physical marks that show evidence of torture.”

According to Alan, this device (drug or machine, I didn’t ask) can make a prisoner feel as if he has spent fifty years in solitary confinement when only an hour had actually passed.

“They use it in interrogations,” he said. “They experimented on me when I was in the Army.”

“You ain’t ever been in no Army,” Bart mumbled behind the counter.

According to Alan, this device could also be used to make a prince, somewhere in the Middle East, believe that he is living as a homeless black man in an alley in Los Angeles.

“No violation of the Geneva Convention,” he said. “No marks or bruises. But it’s torture, man. It’s still torture.”

I drive a truck for the coroner’s office. Graveyard shift. I pick up four or five bodies a night. Most of the time, I work South Central and Watts, picking up a lot of OD’s and retired gangbangers. When I arrive at the scene, there’s a crowd that doesn’t leave until I’ve zipped away the body and carried it to the back of the truck. The crowd has a certain respect for the jacket that reads “County Coroner.” Maybe even a fear. My arrival signals the finality of the event. The end of the show.

After my shift, I eat my morning bagel at The Blessed King. I read the paper. Do the crossword puzzle and the Sudoko. Then I go home and sleep. My day begins again around dusk, when I eat an early supper. I read. I listen to music. I go for walks. Some nights, I watch the fights in Inglewood or throw away money at the track.

I started driving for the coroner’s office nine years ago when I was studying law at UCLA. Back then, it was a way to pay for school. I could read between pick-ups and the schedule wouldn’t interfere with my classes. But something I was seeing every night as I made my rounds affected my class work. I found it hard to reconcile the law that I heard spoken of in the lecture halls with the law that I witnessed nightly in the projects and the hospitals. On the freeways and the street. I became disillusioned with the law. Gradually, I stopped attending lectures and neglected my assignments. I separated myself from the other students. Eventually, I dropped out.

Years later, on my 32nd birthday, I put on my County Coroner windbreaker before driving to work and studied what I saw in the mirror. My skin was pale. My face thin. I was underweight with heavy bags under my eyes and gray hairs lingering about my temples. Long ago, I had ceased dating and speaking to friends. Long ago, I had ceased striving toward some social or financial goal. Instead, I’d become content to maintain what little I had. I had made the choice – though I don’t recall making it – to observe from a distance. To contemplate without taking part. To create no victims and offer no assistance. I no longer needed to pick a side or force an issue. I no longer needed to leave some trace of my wanderings in the night. It was enough for me to provide this service. This humble and innocuous service. To pick up bodies. To pick up the discarded shell and move it to where the contestants couldn’t see it, smell it, or trip over it, as they gamboled across the field. To pick up bodies — and make death as if it were never there.
“Vince stopped by today,” Bart told me. He had a glint in his eye. “I told him about my idea for a radio show.”

“What’d he say?” I asked.

“He said to call him at his office. He gave me his card, and told me to call him at his office.”

Bart waved the card like it was a winning ticket. A Trifecta.

“Congratulations,” I said.

“You think he’ll want to set up a meeting?”

“I don’t know.”

“You got to help me with this,” he said. “I got to know what to say at the meeting.”

“Now why would I know what to say at the meeting?”

“Because you’re smart,” he said. “And educated.” He took off his serving gloves and folded his apron. “The show is half yours if you want it.”

I told him I wasn’t interested.

That afternoon, when he got home from the shop, Bart called Vince at his office and left a message with his secretary. A week later he called again and left another message. A week later he did the same. Vince never returned his call.

One night, the dispatcher sent me for a pick-up in Hollywood. A guy got stabbed a block from my apartment. There wasn’t much of a crowd at the scene, just a few detectives and a paramedic with nothing to do. The body looked about my height and weight, Caucasian, with curly hair and a clean shave. He wore black Dickies and a button down shirt, dark with blood. On his face was a look of bewildered disappointment. I got the sense that he spent the last moments of his life cursing his arms for being too short to reach the knife protruding from his back.

“You read the headlines today?” Bart laughed. “GM LAYS OFF 30,000 EMPLOYEES, and then on the other column, ECONOMY SHOWS SIGNS OF IMPROVEMENT.”

But I was reading about the body I’d picked up the night before. According to the article he had been a waiter at The Marmalade Café, a popular restaurant chain with a location in the shopping complex in my neighborhood. According to the article, Marmalade didn’t want to cover their employees’ parking, and if their employees wanted to park in the lot, it would cost them two hours pay. Most of the staff, therefore, left their cars down the block from the bagel shop, a deserted area where the parking was free. That’s where the kid got stabbed. 31 years old. Born in Missouri and educated at Carnegie Mellon. He had come to Hollywood to be an actor. He landed a few roles on a couple of shows. Survived by both parents and a younger sister.

I told Bart he ought to be careful. “Maybe you ought to carry a gun,” I said.

“I should be so lucky if someone would put me out of my misery.”

A thief knows that a bartender or waiter at the end of his shift is carrying cash.

“If I had a radio show,” Bart said, “and we talked on it, you and me, about religion — you don’t think people would listen?”

“I don’t.”

“Why not?”

“Because we don’t know nothing about religion.”

It was a homeless person’s crime. A stabbing. Your more upscale thief would have used a gun. Hold it to a guy’s head and there’s never any struggle. But against a knife, a waiter will fight for his evening’s tips. He’d better fight if he doesn’t want to wind up homeless himself.

“But that’s the point,” Bart said. “What do all these priests and reverends and rabbis know? Why can’t a bagel baker and a coroner talk about religion?”

There was a police sketch of the suspect in the paper. A large black man, bald with a mustache, wearing a hooded sweatshirt.

“Have the police been here yet?” I asked.

“They came this morning.”

“Did you say anything?” I asked. Bart didn’t look up from cutting his tomatoes.

“It’s none of my business.”

I didn’t turn Alan in. Neither did Bart. Vince turned him in.

Vince held court in the bagel shop like he was the mayor of Fairfax Avenue.

“They got him,” he said. “Picked him up yesterday while he was sleeping in the alley.” Vince was off his cell phone for the first time in the years since I’d known him. “Cops called to thank me.” I wondered if they pinned one of those tin stars to his lapel. “I called right away when I saw that picture in The Times,” he said. “Kid was killed on Hayworth. I says to myself, that’s by the bagel shop. Says a black guy with a mustache. Street guy. I make the call. Next thing you know, they picked him up.”

How well Vince’s world worked. Like a well-oiled machine.

“Hey Bart,” I said. “You ever see Alan wear a hooded sweatshirt?”

“Nope,” replied Bart, as he cleaned up a mess behind the counter. “I’ve seen him in a leather jacket and that red sweater he wears.”

“And that red dress,” I added.

“That’s right, I forgot about the dress.”

Vince looked, for a moment, like an eleven-year-old boy in his little league uniform staring out at a rain-drenched diamond.

“What are you talkin’ about?” he asked.

“He wears a dress at night,” I replied, looking down at the racing form.

With his catcher’s mitt and a cap too big for his head.

“You’ve seen him in here,” Vince stated, knocking his knuckle against the table as he prepared to eat his bagel. “Going on about the government and the army and the… the… conspiracies.”

“Because of you, the streets are safe now, Vince.”

I was glad Bart got that one in.

“I see,” said Vince. “Better I should do nothing, like the two of you.” He chewed on his bagel, not content to let the matter lie. “Kid was working for something. Trying to better himself. His position in the world.” He couldn’t wait to swallow and spoke with a mouth full of cream cheese and dough. “You think he wanted to be a waiter? Working those hours, serving people all day, carrying trays and cleaning up tables?” There was an anger overtaking him, with roots both twisted and personal. “They had his picture in the paper,” Vince shouted, “and you did nothing.” His face reddened and his breath fell short. “Two of you did nothing.”

And then his cell phone started ringing.

Alan confessed to the crime. A week later, after he was released, he came back to the bagel shop.

“I got an 87 on my janitorial exam,” he told me. “I’m studying for the next part, and if I pass, I can qualify to work for LA Unified.”

“That’s great news,” I told him.

“They pay seven dollars an hour at LA Unified.”

At work one night, at a crime scene, I asked a detective about the case. He told me the witnesses couldn’t identify Alan in a line-up. The prints on the weapon didn’t match. And while Alan was in custody, a stripper was stabbed on La Brea Boulevard by a black man in a hooded sweatshirt.

“If I pass the next part,” Alan said. “I can get a job somewhere. I can get off the street.”

One of the best sights I ever saw was the look on Vince’s face when he came into the bagel shop and saw me talking to Alan about his janitorial exam. The fucker went white, bobbled his cell phone, and hurried back to his black Mercedes before I could say, “Look Vince! The system works!”

“I can get a bed over at the Y,” said Alan. “Maybe even a room.”

I bought him a bagel that day. Bart said it was a waste. He said Alan would never get off the street.

“This place is a trap,” he said.

I picked up a body on Fairfax Avenue toward the end of my shift. A heart attack. Some woman from Wisconsin waiting on line for The Price is Right. She had a shirt on that said “Pick Me Bob.” She weighed about 250 pounds and held a look on her face like she had attained enlightenment. I told Bart about the look on her face.

“Why shouldn’t she be happy?” he asked. “You think God is only in the temple and the church? You think He isn’t out on the street, wearing a dress or running around town stabbing people with a knife? You think He isn’t in a truck picking up bodies or working inside the walls of a bagel shop?”

I told him I didn’t believe in God.

“And that, my friend, is why you’d be perfect for my radio show.”

There were two Japanese across from me – one fat, one skinny. They appeared to be ventriloquists. Whenever one spoke, the other would move his lips. I suspected they had poisoned my sake.

Sitting next to me and controlling the conversation was my old friend, Arty from Philly. He appeared to be representing my interests. I gathered this from the fact that he was wearing a red track suit and a fake mustache. Better warn him about the sake, I thought. But how? Fat Man and Little Boy are watching my every move.

“Where is the restroom?” I asked. Unfortunately, my words didn’t come out the way I’d intended. They sounded more like, “Camus was a French existentialist.” The Japanese nodded and went back to listening to Arty. It seemed some sort of negotiation was taking place. They could have been discussing who would get the contract to build a two-billion-dollar 450-megawatt hydro-electric dam in Sumatra. Or a price for my kidneys.

Quietly, without attracting anyone’s attention, I took the empty sake box near my plate and lowered it beneath the table. With my free hand, I undid my trousers and surreptitiously urinated into the box. Or onto Arty’s leg. I couldn’t really tell.

A screen wall slid open to reveal a beautiful Japanese woman in a kimono. I became aroused at the sight of her. Even though I was peeing.

“Freud would say,” responded Arty to a question I didn’t think I’d asked, “that there are similarities in culture between the Asian and the Jewish female. Both place a strong emphasis on education, achievement and expensive shoes. But unlike her Semitic counterpart, the Lady from Shanghai is recognized by her straight hair, slanted eye and slender buttock. Thus the Jewish male can accept in her the familiar comforts of a shared culture without the paranoid fear that he is fucking his mother.”

The poison was allowing him to read my mind. It was also making the sushi swim around the table and argue amongst themselves in a language that can only be described as angry Yiddish.

Who are these Japanese, I wondered. Clearly, they want something from me, but what could I possibly have that is of any value? My mother always told me I had potential. Is that what they’ve come for? I better warn Arty.

‘”They’re after my potential,” I whispered.

“Scoundrels!” Arty screamed, thrusting a chopstick in their direction. “You’ll never get his potential without paying for it!”

There was pornographic anime playing on the TV in the limousine. The Japanese enjoyed it immensely.

“We have to be careful,” I told Arty. “They’ve already got our shoes.”

“You know what it is about anime porn?” he asked. “It’s the only way the Celestials can get big tits to look natural on a skinny Asian broad!”

Arty laughed at his own joke then mocked committing hare kare with a cocktail straw. He spent the rest of the ride on his back twitching as if he were bleeding to death. I began to suspect I needed better representation in the future.

The Book tells us that one should never get obliterated at a business meeting. Drinking too much gives the other side an advantage in negotiations. The Book does not mention, however, that without heavy drinking it becomes difficult to later give the excuse, “Hey, I was drunk. I didn’t know what I was doing.” This excuse can be considered charming and enormously preferable to the less forgivable, “Hey, I’m an incompetent idiot. I didn’t know what I was doing.”

Little Boy sang “Born to Run” at the karaoke bar. It was a massacre. You’d have been better off watching the inmates at San Quentin in a production of Little Orphan Annie. Fat Man sat close to me. Too close in fact. He smoked a cigarette, turning periodically to blow smoke in my face.

“I understand you like dragon,” he said, a perverse curl twisting on the side of his lip. “I can get you good dragon. All the good dragon you need.”

These bastards had done their homework.

“I don’t do that anymore,” I replied. “But for argument’s sake, what kind of prices are we talking?”

Fat Man assured me that when I was with him I didn’t need to spend any money on dragon. And I assured him that I wasn’t so desperate as to give up what he wanted, whatever it was, just for some free drugs. Unfortunately, my words didn’t come out the way I’d intended. They sounded more like, “I suck dick for good dragon.”

Arty from Philly threw a Kirin Ichiban at the stage.

“I won’t have it,” he screamed. “I won’t stand for it any longer!” A silence descended on the room as he addressed Little Boy, standing dumbstruck before the microphone stand. “You cannot sing Born to Run. Your accent does not permit it. There is no Japanese equivalent to New Jersey.” He was at the end of his rope. Arty never did take matters relating to Bruce Springsteen lightly. “Isn’t it enough what you’ve done to Elvis? What you’ve done to Frank, Dean and Sammy?” He began to sit down then sprang to his feet once more. “You don’t see me running around imitating Bruce fuckin’ Lee!”

I found a piece of paper in my pocket and tried to read it: DISTRIBUTORS. ASIAN MARKET. DON’T GO OVER [smudge]%. NO SAKE.

“Tell me, Mr. Fischman,” said Fat Man. “Do you like guns?”

Twenty minutes later, we were signing waivers at the LA Gun Club in Koreatown. Arty requested a .45, a .357, a .44 magnum and a shotgun.

I hoped that the shooting gallery would provide me with an opportunity to speak to Arty away from the Japanese. Perhaps he knew what we were selling. Or buying. Or where we could get more sake.

We took two stalls next to a couple of Yakuza types while the Japanese paid the bill at the counter. We put on goggles and ear muffs then rolled our targets a good 4 feet away. Arty aimed the shotgun and fired.

“That one’s for Pearl Harbor,” he said.

I reminded Arty that we were in Koreatown in a shooting gallery with a bunch of well-armed Asians who might not appreciate his racist humor.

“I don’t see what they’re doing here in the first place,” he replied. “I thought they only use nun-chucks and throwing-stars.”

I told Arty to cool it. He responded by aiming his shotgun at one of the Yakuza’s targets and blowing it to smithereens.

“That’s for killing my old man in Da Nang!”

They came at us from all sides. The Yakuza pointed their pistols at me, Arty pointed his shotgun at the Yakuza and I put the .357 in my mouth. The irony of it all was that Arty had been lying about his father’s war record. The only fighting Mr. Greenglass had seen in the sixties was between him and his mother over what ailment they were going to claim at the draft board.

The Japanese arrived and took it upon themselves to make peace. They talked to the Yakuza in a language I couldn’t understand, though, in retrospect, it might have been Japanese. Before long, guns were lowered, money changed hands and everyone started to laugh. The Yakuza even walked Arty and me outside with their arms around our shoulders. They walked us into an alley behind the shooting gallery where they proceeded to beat the living shit out of us.

I awoke on a table in a dark room surrounded by the low light of burning votives. There was blood in my mouth and a broken rib protruding from my sternum. If not for the immense quantity of dragon they must have pumped into my arm, I probably would have been in a great deal of pain. Before long, a young Chinese girl in a silk robe entered the room and began rubbing my feet. She was small and cute with the blank look of a drugged-out slave. I could tell she was new. No more than three weeks out of the shipping container and four months from being permanently retired to an unmarked grave somewhere in the Los Angeles National Forrest. I wanted to save her. But I wanted a blowjob first.

“You have girlfriend?” she asked.

I asked her where Arty was and whether his whore was cuter than mine.

Fat Man entered the room holding a clipboard with a sheaf of papers. He looked angry.

“You sign here,” he said, handing me a pen.

“Don’t sign anything!” yelled Arty from another room. Then I heard screaming and what sounded like electricity moving through flesh.

“You make me very angry,” said Fat Man. “You sign here!”

The madam appeared and took pictures with a Polaroid camera as the masseuse fellated me. I smiled and gave her a thumbs up.

“Sign the papers,” screamed Arty. “Sign the papers!”

I signed them, but since I couldn’t remember my name, I signed them with the moniker, “General Tzo.” This infuriated Fat Man. Perhaps he knew the general and recognized I wasn’t he.

“I no fool around with you!” he shouted.

I thought of the scene in The Deer Hunter where Robert DeNiro plays Russian Roulette with Christopher Walken in the POW camp. I called out to Arty in a language I knew he’d understand. “Michael Cimino,” I said, and Arty replied with a grunt that let me know he was in. Taking Fat Man’s pen in my hand, I made like I was ready to sign, then thrust the point right into his gut.

Blood spurted across the table as I bolted through the door and barged into the next room, where Arty was in the process of beating Little Boy to within an inch of his life.

“Let’s get out of here,” I said, “before the ninjas show.”

Naked and bruised, we sprinted out the back door, fled down an alley and ran wild into the streets of Koreatown.

“They’ll never get your potential,” Arty screamed. “They’ll never get your potential!”

I stopped at a corner, grabbed Arty by the shoulders and shook him like a crying baby. “We have to go back,” I said.

“Why?”

“For the whores. It’s what Chuck Norris would do.”

Arty agreed. “That and they supposedly have horizontal yin-yang’s.”

“I’ve been hearing that rumor since elementary school, and it can’t possibly be true.”

“There’s only one way to find out!”

If there’s one thing I love about the pysch ward at Cedars Sinai, it’s the ping pong. Regulation tables. Brand new paddles. I was up twelve-to-eight and serving when the orderlies broke up the match. Arty’s wife had arrived. God knows why, but she wanted to take him home.

“I can’t keep Lauren waiting.”

“Take your loss like a man.”

“Them’s fighting words.” He turned to the orderlies. “Tell her I’ll be out in a minute.”

He beat me 21-to-18.

“Read it,” he says.

I did and there was. The role of an offbeat Jewish attorney with an attitude. Had my name all over it. “And here’s the kicker,” says Arty. “It’s already picked up for thirteen.”

In layman’s terms, that meant if I booked it, I’d get thirty grand for the pilot plus another thirty for each of the 13 episodes guaranteed by the network. That meant $420,000 for four months “work,” a sum roughly equivalent to my entire net worth times 420,000. Plus I knew the playwright. I dare say the bastard even owed me one for saving a piece of shit he had running off-Broadway some fifteen years back. Things were looking good.

I called my agent’s office first thing on a Thursday to tell him to get me the audition. Amy, his half-wit assistant, picked up the phone.

“Put Bernie on,” I says.

“Can’t.”

“Why not?”

“He’s in the hospital.”

“What’s he doing there?”

“Don’t know.”

“Oh Christ,” I says. “Who’s covering the Lonstein project?”

“Beats me.”

Amy was a sensational fuck up. For five years she’d been in that office, and she still couldn’t work the copier. Or the fax. Or even the fucking water cooler. At least once a week, I begged Bernie to fire her, but the old man wouldn’t do it.

“Amy,” I says real nice and slow, “can you please find out who the casting director is?”

“Sometimes,” she says.

“Look at the breakdown.”

“Nothing’s broken,” she says. “Except the water cooler.”

“I know nothing’s broken,” and now I’m struggling to stop myself from going down there and smacking her across the head. “I’m talking about the breakdown — the description that comes over the computer and tells you about the project.”

“The computers don’t tell me nothin’,” she says. “They only talk to each other.”

This was going nowhere. I hung up the phone and called Arty from Philly, thinking maybe he knew who the casting director was.

“Cheryl Zuckerman.”

“Oh nuts,” I says. “You think she’ll remember?”

“What do you think?”

Years ago, at a rave, Cheryl Zuckerman bought $200 worth of ecstasy off me before blowing a pair of Persians in the bathroom. Though she initially blamed the incident on the drugs, the fact is I sold her aspirin, and by the time her friends told her she’d been had, Cheryl Zuckerman was already a Hollywood punch line. The woman swore an oath of vengeance against me, a vendetta that fueled a massive increase in her weight and a meteoric rise from the mailroom of Buchwald to the casting office at CBS. At 250 pounds of angry Jewish flesh, Cheryl Zuckerman stood as a formidable obstacle between me and the $420,000 I’d get if I booked that pilot. There was no way I’d get the audition through her, so I scoured an old address book to see if I still had Lonstein’s home number. I did. I called it. Disconnected. I tried information on Fire Island, but they had no listing.

If ever there was a time I needed Bernie, it was now. So I picked up a box of rugelach at Canter’s and headed over to see him at Cedars Sinai Hospital. His wife was in the hallway when I entered.

“My Bernie, my Bernie,” she cried, as I asked how he was doing and shoved the rugelach in her gut.

“We don’t know yet,” she says. “They’re still doing tests.”

She walked me into the room where my agent was propped up on a bed with tubes running in and out of his nose, IV’s hooked up in his arms, and hoses stuck up his ass pulling away his shit. He looked terrible. Thin, pale, and Semitic.

“Good God,” I says. “What the hell happened to you?”

The old man shrugged as his wife started weeping into my shoulder. Tears and snot fucking up my shirt. For fifteen minutes I held her until finally she excused herself to take a leak. With the room clear and the door closed, I knelt down next to my agent’s bed and asked him if he’d seen the Lonstein script.

“What?” he says. “Who?”

“Lonstein,” I says. “The playwright. Queery guy who won a Tony.”

“What about him?”

“He’s got a pilot,” I says. “And there’s a part. Offbeat Jewish attorney with an attitude. Got my name all over it.”

“Who’s the casting director?”

I tell him.

“Oy,” he says, and now one of the machines starts making a racket. I smacked it a few times ’til it stopped.

“I tried calling Lonstein,” I told him, “but I couldn’t find his number.”

“Producer,” he moans. “Who’s the producer?”

“I don’t know.”

Bernie motioned for a phone. I handed him my Nokia C-100 then stepped back to watch him work. The old man came to life with a phone in his hands. I suspect it was the only medicine he ever truly needed, though certainly not the only medicine he ever took. The quacks who ran this brothel would never know how to treat a man like Bernie. There was no cure for his illness in the operating room or the hospital pharmacy. No test for it. No research papers published in the New England Journal of Medicine. Bernie was an agent first, and a human being if he had the time. And with this Lonstein project hanging over our heads, mortality would have to wait.

No sooner did Bernie get his contact from CBS on the phone than a nurse runs into the room full of piss and vinegar.

“What are you doing?” she says. “No cell phones in the ICU!” Then Bernie’s wife was back, carrying on like there’s no tomorrow. She takes the cell phone out of her husband’s hand and slams it against the wall.

“Whoa, whoa, that thing cost me 200 bucks,” I says, but by then security was escorting me from the room. “I’m taking the cost of that out of your commission!”

When I got home, there was a message on my machine. It was Bernie.

“Here’s the scoop,” he says. “I spoke to the director, he spoke to Lonstein, and everything checked out. You’ll go straight to producers. You don’t have to worry about that fatkakta Cheryl Zuckerman. I’ll call you Monday with the appointment.”

Things were looking good. I got a haircut and sent my best suit to the cleaners. I went over the script a couple of times on the shitter and laid out by Arty’s pool to even out my tan.

“How far along are they?” I asked him.

“Word is they want to go to network by the end of the week.”

I could smell the money. $420,000 for a job a monkey could do. Good God, you got to love television!

All day Monday, I waited to hear what time my appointment would be, but Bernie never called. I tried the hospital but couldn’t get through to his room. The old man’s cell phone wasn’t answering either. Finally, I called the office. I got Amy.

“What’s going on?” I asked. “Where the hell is Bernie?”

“Dead.”

“What do you mean dead?”

“He had a heart attack in the hospital.”

“Just now?”

“While I was talking to him on the phone.”

A shudder went through my legs. The horror. The last voice my agent heard, the last sound on Earth, was that of the office idiot – a woman who every day Xeroxed blank sheets of paper so they could have extras should they need ‘em.

“Amy,” I says, raising my voice to emphasize the importance of what I was about to ask. “Before he died, did Bernie tell you when and where my appointment was for the audition?”

“What audition?”

“The Lonstein project,” I says. “Offbeat Jewish attorney with an attitude.”

“Sounds familiar.”

I was losing my patience. “Listen to me, you inbred shiksa. You find out when and where that audition is or I’ll put your face through the paper shredder.”

“I’ve tried that,” she says. “My face won’t fit in the shredder.”

It was hopeless. Even with Bernie alive, the broad was a waste. Now that he was dead, there was no point to her at all. She’d probably still go to work every day, wondering why her paychecks didn’t come in the mail. Eventually some building manager would have to deal with her. Or maybe the next company to move into the office would hire her out of pity. If they did well, she could ride their coattails all the way to the top. In the great tradition of Hollywood, she could fail upwards and someday end up the head of acquisitions at a major studio. Would she remember my insults when she had a position of authority above me? Probably. I’d have to put her name on the long list of people I have to kill.

Two days before the producers of the Lonstein project were to bring their choice to network, I put on my suit and drove to Beverly Hills for the funeral of Bernie Epstein. His wife embraced me when I entered the parlor. Courtesy of one giant dose of Atavan, the ugliness from the hospital had been shoved to the nether regions of her memory. Her daughter, Jenny – she was there too. She’d flown in from Brown for the occasion. I hadn’t seen Jenny in years, but I could tell from the way she hugged me that there was a lust behind her grieving, a fire that needed dousing before it spread to her vital organs.

“How long you in town for?” I whispered, grazing my lips against her earlobe.

“I have finals next week.”

“Get a dean’s excuse.”

Bernie’s wife asked me if I could say a few words during the service on behalf of her deceased husband. Luckily, I had something prepared. How could I not, when there were countless agents, managers and executives in the room, any one of whom could get me work? It was like having my own private showcase. So I wiped at my eyes, as if there were tears in them, then walked to the podium, where I gestured with an open hand to the laid out corpse resting in the box to my side. It was a nice box. Sturdy. Mahogany I think.

“Was Bernie Epstein a good man?” I asked. “Was he a good father to his children? Husband to his wife? Son to his mother?” I took a dramatic pause in order to be dramatic. “Who the fuck knows?” The room goes silent. “I sure don’t. And I never cared to either.” I stepped down from the podium in order to show that, unlike most actors, I could walk and talk at the same time. “The man never offered anything of himself, and quite frankly, that’s why we got along. Sure, I’ve had agents who were… family men. Who went on vacations and spent time away from the phones. Who coached little league and paid their alimony checks on time. Bunch of fucking bums if you ask me.”

“Here, here,” cried a voice in the crowd.

“It disgusted me to see them out on weekends, contorting themselves in a yoga class, or walking their dogs in the park while they coulda been getting me work. I assure you Bernie Epstein never wasted his time with such mishegoss, and that’s why he was the best agent I ever had!”

Not a dry eye in the house.

“Whether the part was right for me or not, Bernie Epstein did what it took to get me in the room and get me my chance. Nah, he never closed the big deal. Never got the big client to stay with him. Never attached himself to a rising star. But it was never for lack of trying. And if there is a big office in the sky, one with a desk and a phone and a secretary with a nice set of tits… then I know Bernie Epstein’s sittin’ there now. And he’s got St. Peter on the line. And he’s telling Pete how good I was in that play at the Geffen — the one where I got rave reviews in the LA Times and was nominated for a drama desk award in Backstage West. And I also know that if Bernie were alive today, he would want that all of his clients were well taken care of, by his friends, in the business, of whom he had so many. He would want his legacy to be that his clients achieve the kind of success he had always imagined for them. So while I have you here today, allow me to offer those of you who are looking for new talent to take what’s left of his clients’ pictures and resumes as you leave. It’s what Bernie would have wanted. And there is still a month left in pilot season. Amen. ”

I made quick work of his daughter in the limo on the way to the grave site. She made a mess of my suit. I’d have to get it cleaned again before the audition.

At the shiva, Steve Schliewen took me aside before anyone else had a chance. “I liked your eulogy,” he says. “Bernie would have been proud.”

Schliewen used to be the kind of big shot agent who never returned my calls and ignored me when we saw each other at a premiere. I guess that all changed after a drug problem led to an embezzlement charge that got him five years in Club Fed. Good behavior and a 12-step program may have gotten him out in two, but his ruined reputation prevented him from getting back in the game.

“I ain’t the kind of girl you need to sweet talk,” I told Schliewen. “Tell me what you know about the Lonstein project or take a hike.”

He answered me in that slow, tortured speech pattern you often find on a recovered drunk. “I know they’re taking a kid to network on Friday,” he says, as I shook up the ice in my scotch. “But I also know Lonstein’s partner spends Thursday nights in a bath house in West Hollywood.”

“You know which bath house?” I ask.

“I might.”

Schliewen worked the phones all day Friday from his office at Galpin Ford. He started a whisper campaign that the kid they brought to network was a Holocaust denier. It worked. Come Monday morning, the network cut him loose. Schliewen got me an appointment to audition in front of Lonstein and the producers the following week. Came pretty close to booking it too, but at the last minute, they changed the script and made the character a woman.

I decided to keep Schliewen though. Signed with him for one year, ten percent across the board. I figure if the fucker can stay clean, maybe he can be the guy who takes me to the next level. Which reminds me. About a month after the funeral, Amy, the office idiot, called me looking for a job. Can you believe it? Balls on her. I gave her Cheryl Zuckerman’s number and told her to use my name as a reference.

“You look like a corpse,” I slurred.

She turned to me with a look that Mengele might have given a thalidomide baby. “Excuse me?”

“I said you look like a fucking corpse.” I turned back drunk to my pint, and when next I looked in her direction, she spat a large clot of phlegm into my eye. By the time I wiped it away, she was gone.

Arty from Philly worked the bar when he wasn’t getting paid to sit in the studio audience of a daytime talk show. He called me a week later.

“Remember that girl from the Burgundy Room?” he asked.

“Which one?”

“The one that spat in your eye.”

“What about her?”

“She was in here again, asking about you. Her name is Faye.”

That night, I went back to the Burgundy Room, and for my sins, so did Faye.

“You always introduce yourself to chicks by insulting them?” she asked.

“I’ve known llamas with more class than you.”

“Llamas?”

“Yeah. Llamas.”

“I don’t get it.”

Nothing worse than having to explain a joke in a loud and crowded bar. “Llamas,” I said. “‘Cause they spit.”

“Oh,” she replied. “That’s funny.” Only she wasn’t laughing. She turned and walked some drinks to her friends, a necromantic crew of punk rock groupies probably conceived in the back of a touring van. They mocked the jukebox, scowled at boys, then zombied their way out the door. Before leaving, Faye told me where they were headed, but I didn’t follow.

“I’m not one for the chase,” I told her.

I wasn’t always that way. During my college years, I pursued a beautiful, young virgin for the better part of three semesters. I woke every morning thinking of her. We made mix tapes for each other, wrote poems and love letters. We held hands in the bleachers at homecoming and pulled all-nighters studying for finals. Then she gave it up to a lacrosse player. Some cad she’d met that night who videotaped the encounter and posted the footage online. His camera work was a little verite for my taste, his editing too French new wave, and his lighting far from cinematic, but there was no denying it was a riveting piece of work. By revealing her unknowing in the sexual act, he had taken the woman I’d put on pedestal and reduced her to the frightened animal that she was. The animal that we all are when we’re fucking. At least if we’re doing it right. I must have watched that film a million times. Watched that preppy bastard fucking my girl, the one I thought I’d marry and live with the rest of my life. Watched it until I could only fantasize about her with him in the picture. I could never have fucked her the way he did. I didn’t have it in me then. I didn’t have the ability to even imagine being that brutal with a woman I was so madly in love with. And it was brutality she wanted. Brutality she needed from a man so that he could manage the rough surgery that he performed on her. It was a cruel lesson that sonofabitch taught me but one I needed to learn: one man’s chase is always another’s easy lay.

The next time I saw Faye was at the Ralph’s supermarket on Third and La Brea. I was picking up toilet paper and beer at three in the morning when I nearly tripped over her, sprawled out in the condiment section, licking mustard off the back of her hand.

“How ’bout a ride?” she asked, and an hour later, we were sitting on the floor of her studio apartment, smoking black tar heroin off of aluminum foil. With “Performance” playing on the television set and the Velvet Underground hissing from the speakers, I can remember feeling that her hardwood floor was the most comfortable surface I’d ever collapsed on. That the towel she’d thrown on top of me was better than the childhood blankie I once held over my head to hide from monsters. I nodded into an opiate slumber, devoured in the belief that everything was alright, always had been, and always would be.

In the morning, over a breakfast of Twix bars and Diet Coke, Faye unveiled to me her dreams and visions.

“Fuck these whores who call it ‘exotic dancing.’ I take off my clothes and show my cunt for money.”

She was a high school dropout, born in the Midwest, who hitched her way to LA when she was seventeen. She had over twenty tattoos, nine piercings, and a wooden cross she wore around her neck. She had a vintage sign nailed over her door that read: Working girls bringing in sailors must pay for room in advance. She was writing a graphic novel. Started a band with some friends. She met an agent at a bar, and he was thinking of representing her.

There was a moment in our relationship before Faye confessed she could never get past page ten of her graphic novel; and after she thought out loud about how her band needed a place where they could rehearse; and after she admitted the agent never wanted to meet her at his office — there was a moment in our relationship when we both sat back adrift on the ripples of providence and wondered at the hand, malevolent or divine, that brought us together. Neither of us had reached very far out of the abyss to find each other, and yet there we were, however briefly, together, and momentarily sublime.

I was driving Faye home from the abortion clinic when we spotted a blind, old beagle wandering into the middle of Sixth Street somewhere around Hancock Park. Faye insisted I stop so she could scoop the poor bitch into the car. The collar said her name was Sally, and Faye demanded we keep her. She said whoever allowed a precious little girl like Sally to run around on the street didn’t deserve to have her back. Sally licked my face and farted, and I was in no position to argue.

Faye got kicked out of her apartment on account of Sally, and having nowhere else to go, the two moved in with me. There was a promise that it would only be temporary, but I never did witness Faye making any effort to find another place to crash. And that was fine. The money she made at the club helped with the rent, and Sally provided countless laughs by bumping into walls and barking at the landlord. For my part, I enjoyed periodically glancing over my shoulder to see the girls cuddled up on the couch, watching TV as I typed away on my laptop. I wouldn’t say we were happy together, but I did find the situation productive, meaning I was writing well and often. And even though I figured the arrangement wasn’t sustainable, I wanted to squeeze as many pages out of it as I could.

But the TV got louder and louder, and the cigarette smoke hung so thick in my apartment it burned my eyes to look at the monitor. And Faye wasn’t writing down my phone messages, especially when they came from my agent.

“I’m not your fucking secretary,” she said.

The task of walking Sally fell repeatedly to me as Faye spent more and more time on the couch, sleeping, smoking cigarettes, and shooting up. She quit her job at the club. Or got fired. I never knew which. We stopped having sex. We stopped speaking.

I asked one day if she planned on living with me forever.

“Are you kicking me out?” she replied.

“I don’t know if this arrangement is doing you any good.”

“So what are you saying?”

Signs started to appear in my neighborhood with pictures of Sally, but the owner offered no reward. One day while I was walking her in Runyon Canyon, some chick with a yoga mat screamed at me.

“That’s not your dog!” she said. “That’s not your dog!”

Faye was cooking up when I got home, and I told her I couldn’t live like this anymore. I couldn’t afford it. It was unhealthy and so nineties.

“It’s your fault,” she stated. “You think I don’t know what you’re doing on that fucking computer all day?”

“You got me figured out,” I mumbled as I sat down at my desk. “I’m not writing to generate the revenue which pays our rent and your habit. No. My writing is purely part of my diabolical scheme to ignore you.”

“It’s your method of seduction,” she drawled, pulling the liquid into the syringe. “You re-direct your cock into your work, creating a lure for young whores who are enchanted by your words. You’re looking to replace me.”

“Where’d you get that nonsense?” I asked as she tied off.

“It’s Freud,” she said, pronouncing it, frood. “I read the Lectures on Psychoanalysis in your bookshelf.”

So this is what she did all day while I was typing at coffee shops. Such was my punishment for teaching a shiksa to read.

“Frood was a fool,” I told her. “None of his theories were developed by scientific means. He was a horny, drug-abusing sheeny, and his work has been dismissed by academic psychology.”

Faye plunged the needle into her arm and smiled. She had the cure for everything.

I took Sally’s tags out of my dresser and walked her out to the car. Faye caught on to my plan and sprinted outside, fighting through her nod to stop us before we could escape.

“My baby!” She pounded on the windows, screaming and crying. “You’re taking my baby!”

Sally whimpered and jerked her head back and forth. Faye hurled curses and anti-Semitic epithets as her figure diminished in the rearview mirror.

The address on the dog tags was up the street from a girl’s school where the girls wore those plaid skirts that must have been designed by a very clever pervert. When I got to the security gate, I pressed the button on the intercom.

“I got your dog,” I said, and someone buzzed me in.

It was a tan, straight-haired white woman in her forties who answered the door. She had a Pilates figure and a country club smile. Sunlight drenched her home, and pictures of her fat kids covered its pastel-painted walls.

“Where’d you find her?” she asked, laughing as she rubbed Sally behind her ears.

In some half-baked bid for sympathy, I told the woman my whole story. How I met Faye in a bar. How I may or may not have gotten her pregnant. How we found Sally wandering around Sixth Street and took her home. How Faye and the dog moved in with me and eventually turned a productive situation into a prelude to homicide. The woman responded to my heart-warming tale by threatening to call the police if I didn’t leave her house immediately. I knocked over a vase on my way out and did a couple of donuts with my Volkswagen on her front lawn.

You can’t blame her, I figured. If she had wanted to watch the parade of lost souls traipsing across Hollywood everyday, she wouldn’t have built her walls so high. She knew what was out there and wanted no part of it. She had no prurient interest in people destroying themselves with drugs and self-pity — the ignorant masses that flood Los Angeles with their infantile dreams of stardom. This was a practical woman, who hadn’t fallen for the desperate illusion that there was something to be gained from the bohemian lifestyle. I could imagine her asking, You gambled and lost, now what do you want from me? And I would have answered, A reward for rescuing your dog. And she would have replied, You stole my dog. I’m not paying you shit.

“But give up all this?” I asked myself as I drove home. “Isn’t it better to be three months behind on your rent and have a sniveling junkie on your couch?”

My anger towards Sally’s owner was pure envy. Here was a woman who had fucked the lacrosse player, and it worked out for her. I’d have to call that girl from college and apologize. Maybe there was still time for us to get together and live a normal life. If only I could suck it up for a nine to five and a 401k. But she had probably settled down by now with her own chubby spawn and razor sharp pickets on her fence. And even if she weren’t married, she still wouldn’t have me – I’m lousy at lacrosse.

It took another three months of ignoring her before Faye finally decided to leave. Another three months of staring at a computer screen, writing and re-writing a script, before Faye finally packed her whips and chains into a box and sealed it up with masking tape. She was little more than a pimple-faced skeleton by then, a Hollywood casualty with more heroin than blood crawling through her veins.

“What did I do?” she asked with tears in her eyes and a tremor in her voice, before leaving me for good. “What did I do that made you turn on me?”

“It wasn’t you,” I replied, as I finished typing the last line of my screenplay. “It was your smell.”

I could sense she was baffled. “What smell?”

“Sort of a corpse-like smell,” I said. “Similar to rotting dreams and decomposing ambition. I dug it at first,” I added. “I was even attracted to it. But then it kind of got to me.” She looked baffled. I shrugged. “I guess I’m not the necrophiliac I thought I was.”

I never saw Faye again, but I did run into a friend of hers one day while I was eating brunch in Los Feliz. She told me Faye moved back to a suburb in Michigan. She was married to some lawyer and pregnant with his second child. She was undergoing laser surgery to remove the ink from her paws.

“What’s going on here?” asked George, tucking the bag containing the videos he rented under his arm.

“Can you please sit down?” asked Caitlin. Her being the first to speak revealed that she was most likely the organizer of the event. “Your friends, family and I have something we’d like to share.”

“I can see that,” George replied. “And I’ll gladly sit down when I know what this is all about.”

“Please understand,” said Arthur from Philadelphia. “This is no easier for us than it is for you. But we felt that if we didn’t intervene now, things might get to the point where we could no longer stop you from destroying yourself.”

So that’s what this is, George realized. An intervention! He had heard of interventions before but had never actually seen one in the flesh: the strange combination of family, friends, and acquaintances; the us-against-you ambiance of the room; the obvious planning that had gone into it all. The only thing George couldn’t figure out was why? What pattern of behavior had he established that warranted such an intrusive measure? Sure, he thought, I enjoy a cocktail now and then, but I’m hardly an alcoholic. And whatever experimenting I did with drugs all came to a halt when Caitlin informed me she disapproved of activities that could jeopardize her father’s political ambitions. George didn’t gamble, so he knew that wasn’t it. He didn’t engage in homosexuality, though he had always suspected Arthur of certain proclivities. He ate in moderation, spent in moderation, worked in moderation. In fact, in every way he could conceive at that moment, George Himmelman considered himself the Goldilocks of all things, his only addiction being a strict adherence to moderation itself.

“Though I have no doubt of your honorable intentions,” George assured his uninvited guests, “I cannot think of one thing in the world I’m addicted to that would in any way require your taking such a drastic action on my behalf.”

Roderick from the club stood and took charge of the room. “You’re not alone,” he asserted. “It wasn’t long ago that I was in your position, being confronted by the people I love.” His wife, Charla, nodded at his side. “It’s natural to feel defensive and embarrassed. But with the right treatment and support, you can overcome this, George.”

“Overcome what?” George asked, masking his indignation as best he could. “Seriously, now. I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

His father groaned as if to indicate the whole event was keeping him from some more urgent engagement. “You might as well come clean so we can get this over with, George.”

“Get what over with? What are you talking about? What in God’s name do you people think is wrong with me?”

“Oh for Chrissake,” his mother blurted out. “You jerk off too much!”

“Dios mio,” said Maria, crossing herself, as the room grew silent.

My God, George thought. Is that what this is about? Too much masturbation? George knew he enjoyed his daily dalliance with himself, but he never, in a million years, considered that his sessions had become so frequent as to warrant an intervention. He had never even heard of a masturbation addiction. He had always believed (as his health teacher back at Philips Exeter had taught) that masturbation did not cause blindness, hairy palms, or any other maladies. He believed that, apart from abstinence, it constituted the safest kind of sex there is. So what was the harm if he did masturbate a bit more than most? Which, in his mind, he did not. And who were these people to tell him what he could and couldn’t do on his own time by his own hand? And how did they know what they knew? George thought he had always taken the necessary precautions to ensure his masturbatory life was a secret, hidden away from all around him. Who or what gave these people the idea that he was too prolific in his practice?

“You must be kidding,” George laughed. “This is a joke! I hardly ever masturbate!”

It was Maria’s turn to speak. “Please, Meester George,” she said. ” I washa you underwear since you twelve year old. Some-a-the-time, they-a so hard, I scractha myself on you boxer short.” As if she were showing the jury exhibits A through F, Maria proceeded to hold up several pieces of George’s soiled laundry, evidence for all in the room to see of the crimes committed against cotton.

“Fine,” George responded. “I play with myself more than the next guy. But there’s nothing chronic or dangerous about my habit. I mean, at least I’ve never done it in public and been arrested like Arthur.”

“There’s no reason to lash out,” said his best friend.

“Can’t you see your friend is trying to help you?” asked Caitlin. How unlike her to defend Arthur, thought George. Normally, she can’t hide her contempt for the guy. Perhaps they bonded over their plan for my humiliation.

“How many times has it been?” asked Roderick. “How many times today?”

“Just once,” George said. “This morning in the shower.”

“Are you sure?”

George suddenly remembered an incident that occurred earlier in the day while he was eating lunch with a client. A waitress had walked by wearing a tight-fitting black skirt that inspired an interruption in the meeting and a brief sojourn to the restroom.

“Okay twice,” George admitted, but no sooner had he spoken then he remembered another incident at work, wherein some spam arrived in his inbox advertising a new porn site that, as the email stated, “Could not be missed.” And it could not be missed! After clicking the link, George told his secretary to hold all calls so that he could shut the blinds and do some quick handiwork into an outdated report.

“Three times,” George admitted. “But that’s highly unusual for me, and hardly enough to demand an outpouring such as this.”

“But it’s only six o’clock,” slurred his mother. “The night is young.”

“I’m not going to masturbate again tonight, Mother!”

Roderick asked him what it was he was concealing under his arm.

“What? This?” George asked, referring to the videos he was holding. “I just rented some new releases.”

George’s father took the tapes from his son. He read the titles out loud.

“Sodomania volumes one and two.”

“It’s a biblical epic,” George replied.

The phone rang. The answering machine picked up for all to hear.

“Hi, George,” said a woman’s voice. “This is Misty calling. It’s time for my seven o’clock spanking. I thought you were going to be there, Sweetums. Now you’ll have to call me back. I do charge for missed calls. And punish! Meeow!”

By Roderick’s experienced estimate, George was due to masturbate once to the dirty phone call and at least once to the videos. The evidence gathered from George’s hard drive indicated the possibility of at least one more session on top of the other two. Adding those together, it was safe to assume that George planned to abuse himself at least three more times before going to sleep, at which point the total for the day would be closer to six or seven – a number surely indicative of compulsive behavior.

“You have no right to search my hard drive,” George said. “That’s a violation of my privacy. I could have you arrested.”

“Can’t you see we’re doing this for your own good?” said his mother. “We don’t want you to end up a sickened pervert like your father.”

“Masturbating,” George protested, “does not make me a sickened pervert!”

“It does when you do it seven times a day!” cried Caitlin, and for the first time, George caught a glimpse of how his onanism affected the people he loved.

“Sweetheart,” he begged, “is that truly what you think of me? You think I’m a sickened pervert?”

“I think you’d rather make love to yourself than me,” she replied between sobs. “You’re always telling me you’re tired or have a headache any time I make an advance. And yet, I can see it’s not that you don’t have drive.”

The truth was George could not remember the last time he and Caitlin had sex. And usually, when he did make love to her, it was only to place in his memory a mental photograph of what she looked like naked so that he could later recall that image for the purpose of masturbation.

“Of course, I’d rather make love to you,” George lied. “But masturbation is a separate pleasure. It’s about exploring my own body as opposed to yours.”

“Horseshit,” his mother snorted, throwing another splash of gin in her drink.

The intervention continued well into the night, and indeed, more emotion was expressed in those hours than had ever been witnessed in the entire family history of the Himmelmans. Over the course of the evening, George learned that his persistent masturbating had held him back professionally. “Your office smells like a gymnasium,” said a colleague. “You show up to meetings sweaty, with your fly open and stains on your trousers.” It had driven a wedge between him and his future wife. “I’m tired of covering for you when people call on the phone.” George learned from Roderick that masturbation, when performed as often as it had been in his case, becomes something like a drug addiction. It is used as a sedative, where others would use alcohol, marijuana, or pills. It is used as an escape from boredom and stress. It is used as a substitute for social interaction. By four in the morning, George had broken down to the point where he admitted he had a problem. He confessed his addiction and promised he would quit his deleterious habit, if not for his own sake, then for the sake of those who loved him, cared about him, and felt embarrassed by his wayward behavior. He agreed to clean his hard drive, terminate his membership at the video club, and cut off all phone sex. With Roderick as his sponsor, George promised to join MA, participate in group therapy, and go cold turkey, rather than wean himself, off himself, gradually. George’s family, in turn, promised to support him during what was sure to be a trying period in his life. The wedding would not be postponed, and, provided George stayed with the program, the family attorney would not place his assets into a receivership. By the time the crowd in his apartment dispersed, George felt hopeful that he could make this difficult sacrifice and grateful that his family and friends had cared enough to take action on his behalf.

The withdrawal, however, as Roderick had warned, was a nightmare. For weeks, George couldn’t sleep. He couldn’t eat. He couldn’t sit still long enough to read a brief or an article in a magazine. He couldn’t even watch a movie or a television show, especially if there was anything in the content that even hinted at eroticism. To keep himself from masturbating in his office, George took on the habit of leaving his door open to eliminate privacy. If a female subordinate wore anything suggestive, she would soon find a reprimand at her desk. If it was a colleague or superior who was inducing arousal, George would mutter the 12-step mantra about a higher power until the thrill had diminished. In an attempt to substitute one addiction for another, he devoted himself to working out seven days a week but soon found that he couldn’t bear the women in the gym, especially when they wore tight-fitting, spandex shorts and midriff-exposing halter tops stretched across their sweaty bodies. And then there was the group therapy. No one had warned George that there would be women at the meetings, some of them rather attractive. He found it near impossible to contain himself during their testimonials, in which they often described both what they would wear as they masturbated and what devices they would use to achieve climax. During one session, a female addict delivered a particularly racy testimonial that described an act, taking place on an airplane, that not only violated several FAA regulations, but no doubt compromised the safety of the passengers on board. It was during that session that the group leader was forced to call a halt to the proceedings when one of the less disciplined participants dropped his pants and fell off the wagon right smack in the middle of the room.

But through his hard work, faith, and determination, George endured the harshest symptoms of his withdrawal and found himself on the road to recovery. By the time he earned his six-month pin, the benefits of his newfound self-control had become obvious to all around him. He looked younger and stronger. His clothes seemed to fit him better. He even won his first ever title at the club’s annual tennis tournament. At work, George revealed a novel and aggressive aptitude for negotiation that earned him a promotion, along with a record bonus. Maria reported that she no longer found stains on his boxer shorts, and George, in turn, noted that he no longer felt as if he had something to hide. “The new George is an open book,” he would tell anyone who’d listen. “And every page reveals a masterpiece of discipline and self-assurance.” Without having to devote hours a day to masturbation, George found that he could spend more time immersing himself in social situations. He attended church, concerts, sporting events, and dinner parties. He even organized a fundraiser for his fiancé’s father’s campaign – an event that reinforced relations with the social set Caitlin admired and also netted a few new clients for George’s firm.

On the final evening of the GOP Convention, sitting in a marquis seat between Arthur from Philadelphia and Caitlin, George remarked to both of them how much he felt like Paul of Tarsus, from whose eyes the scales had fallen to reveal a bold new world. It was a world built for men like George. Men of purpose and ambition. Men who bargained in the currency of politics and power. And in that world, there were new friends to be made, old acquaintances to be re-introduced, investments sought out, influence gained, meals savored, tasks conquered, and delights soon to be known that George never would have enjoyed had nobody intervened on his behalf. And as the convention reached its fevered pitch, George looked out from the skybox at Madison Square Garden and yelled to the President (that other great George), “Thank you, Mr. President! Thank you!” It was an expression of gratitude meant not only for the leader of the free world, but for all George Himmelman’s family, friends, and fellow Republicans. For all those good, kind folks, who worked together to make this country a place where a man like George could succeed despite the tremendous obstacles that had stood before him.

And so, with the sound of the President’s speech echoing across the arena, with chants of “four more years” echoing across the arena, George excused himself from the skybox and traversed the hallways like the prodigal son returned. And as he relieved himself alone in the bathroom, as he gathered his emotions alone in the bathroom, George took a moment and thought to himself, What a great man I am. What a great man I can now become! And it occurred to George that someday he too could lead the free world as President of the United States of America. He too could lead this great nation into the battle against terror, injustice, and social entitlement programs. After all, did he not have the credentials for just such an office? Did he not have the character and the charisma? The ability to find compromise between interests? The good sense to hire Jews to do his thinking and write his speeches? Did he not have the support of a good woman, the financial backing, and the network of connections necessary for just such an endeavor? This is what I was born to do, George realized. This is my destiny! And in that moment of rapture, as he listened to the President’s great speech echoing across the men’s room at Madison Square Garden, as he fantasized about his glorious future and the legacy he would leave behind, George heard a voice call to him — a small, feint, and lascivious voice. And that voice said, “Hello, George.”

He looked around the room to locate the source of the calling, but he could see no other there.

“You’re not going to say hello?” it spoke again.

The voice sounded familiar, and yet George could not place it. Again, he thought of Paul on the road to Damascus, hearing the voice of God call from the sky. But this voice seemed to call from the urinal.

“You look well,” said the voice.

It was then George realized, much to his horror, that his penis was talking.

“What are you doing here?” George asked.

“Why?” asked his penis. “Did you think I was a Democrat?”

“I have to go.”

“So soon?”

“I can’t talk to you,” he said, quickly zipping his fly and making a hasty (and dribbling) retreat from the room.

George hurried back along the corridor, vowing to himself not to tell anyone what had happened. Better they don’t know, he thought. They’ll see it as a setback to my recovery. As he approached his seat, he overheard Caitlin and Arthur bickering in pointed whispers, only to become silent when they saw George near. Do they know something’s wrong, he wondered. Was I in the bathroom too long? I must show them that I’m alright. He sat down and took his fiancé’s hand in his. They smiled to each other as they listened to the rest of the speech. But for all his attempts at non-chalance, George felt more discomfited than he had in months. As much as he tried to participate in the festivities, he could not stop thinking about his penis. It looked well, George thought. Like our time apart had been as beneficial for my penis as it had been for me.

That evening in the bedroom, George had a powerful urge to make love to his fiancé. He wanted to use sex to take his mind off what had happened earlier, but Caitlin stopped him in his tracks. She told him they were near enough to the wedding that it would be better if they waited. “It will give us something to look forward to on our honeymoon,” she said. George figured that Caitlin knew something was amiss. This must be her way of punishing me for not confessing to what happened in the bathroom.

A month went by with no further incident until one night, at a Neo-Con dinner party, George heard from his penis again in the coatroom.

“I will not be ignored,” it said.

“Stop it,” replied George. “You’re making a scene.”

“All those years we were together, and now you throw me away for that trollop?”

“Don’t talk about Caitlin that way.”

“What does she have that I don’t?”

“My life is better now,” George snapped. “You have to respect that.”

A week later, while in a meeting, George got a text on his blackberry. It was his penis.

“I need to see you.”

“I can’t right now, I’m in a meeting.”

“Meet me by the playground on 59th street.”

“Over by the catholic school?”

“Yes.”

“I can’t!”

“Just be there!”

During his lunch break, George sat on a park bench at the rendezvous spot with a copy of The Wall Street Journal spread over his lap. His penis was crying.

“Do you love her?” it asked.

“I do.”

“More than you love me?”

“It’s different.”

“I would never ask you to choose between us.”

“Caitlin has a lot of insecurities.”

“Can’t we just do it one more time, George? For old time’s sake. We can duck behind that dumpster over where those girls are playing field hockey.”

“I can’t,” he said. “You don’t understand what it means to commit to something.”

His penis wilted in defeat. “I hope she’s worth it.”

George had never seen his penis like this. It broke his heart. “Are you coming to the wedding?” he asked.

“Do you want me there?”

“I don’t know.”

Everyone was on edge in the weeks prior to the nuptials. The election of Caitlin’s father to the senate brought a new level of scrutiny to all of their lives. Caitlin, in particular, didn’t seem to be handling it well. More than once, George found her weeping inexplicably and uncontrollably. Despite his best attempts at comforting her, she seemed to prefer the consolation of various anti-depressants mixed with regular helpings of a cheap scotch. If ever there was a time George could have used the solace of his penis, it was then, but there had been no contact between them since that day in the park. In fact, George wondered if they would ever speak again. And when he tried to contact his sponsor to discuss his confused emotions, George found out that Roderick had been admitted to a hospital upstate after botching an auto-peotomy with a cigar cutter.

And so, on a snowy New England Saturday, three hundred guests arrived at a Connecticut cathedral for the wedding of George Himmelman and Caitlin Ahern. It was shaping up to be the kind of soirée featured in Town and Country, and indeed, the family had allowed one of the esteemed magazine’s reporters to attend. Prior to the ceremony, however, George’s best man, Arthur from Philadelphia, snapped at him while they were getting dressed. It was apparent Arthur was drunk and in a foul mood, and when George asked him why he hadn’t shaved, Arthur replied, “Why don’t you just leave me alone?” George’s mother had been a problem as well, insisting that her former husband not be allowed to attend the ceremony. Eventually, a compromise was reached between their attorneys that allowed Mr. Himmelman to come provided his 22 year old wife wear flats (“The cunt can be younger than me, not taller”) and not appear at any function in Southhampton for a period of two summers, or such time as required for Mrs. Himmelman to a find a husband of satisfactory means.

But the real trouble didn’t begin until after George walked down the aisle and waited for his fiancé to follow. The string quartet repeated the wedding march several times, the audience watched for the bride’s entrance, and, as the minutes rolled by, it became obvious that Caitlin would not appear. Arthur volunteered to see what the problem was and disappeared to the back rooms of the church as the ceremony was called to a halt. It was only after another fifteen minutes had elapsed that the story began to trickle down from the bridesmaids to the rest of the guests. Apparently, Arthur and Caitlin had been having an affair in the months leading up to the ceremony. Though they tried to put their feelings for each other aside before the big day, their love turned out to be true love, and Caitlin could no longer go on with the wedding. While George stood waiting by himself, ditched at the altar, his best friend and his fiancé were escaping in Arthur’s Saab and heading west for California.

The families expertly switched modes from celebration to damage control. A top public relations executive was helicoptered in before the guests had time to leave the church. Payoffs were made on the spot. Non-disclosure agreements were signed. Buses took confused guests to Foxwoods Casino where they were comped rooms and given money to throw at the tables. The reporter from Town and Country was quickly reassigned to Baghdad to work for another Hearst Corporation publication; gifts were quietly collected to be returned to the stores from which they were purchased; the ballroom in which the celebration was to take place was dismantled; and the string quartet was guaranteed a two-year contract to play on a cruise line touring the coast of The Galapagos. In less than an hour, the Connecticut cathedral was completely emptied, except for George, to whom no one had bothered to attend. Alone, he lingered by the altar waiting for the bride who was never to come. My best friend and my fiancé, he thought to himself. You hear of things like this happening, but you never imagine them happening to you. And this on the day that was supposed to be the best day of my life.

In that moment, lonely and dire, George once again heard from a consoling voice.

“Hello stranger,” it called.

And there by the altar, in the empty cathedral, George Himmelman undid his cummerbund and re-acquainted himself, with himself.

“You should give her a call.”

Arty from Philly told me about her. Tess was a friend of Arty’s wife, Lauren. Actually, Lauren hated her. They swam together at Cornell where Tess had a reputation for being a frigid little bitch, moody and unpredictable. She was overly competitive, in and out of the water, rarely hung out with other swimmers, and sabotaged all attachments to the girls in her dorm.

“And she was always too busy!”

Too busy working towards her 4.0, too busy proving she was more than a pretty face with a great rack, too busy pursuing that job at Goldman Sachs where she knew she could out-hustle any of those limp-dick-prep-school faggots who dared meander across her path.

As luck would have it, one of those limp-dick-prep-school faggots did meander across her path, and he meandered with enough charm, enough swagger, and (of course) enough of Daddy’s money to convince Tess it would be worth her while to follow him out to California, where he could pursue a career as a budding cinematographer.

But Hollywood proved too much for the limp-dick-prep-school faggot and his analyst girlfriend. Tess worked long hours around the schedule of the New York Stock Exchange, up at four in the morning, back in bed by eight o’clock at night. She wore navy blue pinstripes while the limp-dick-prep-school faggot wore a mesh trucker’s hat and a Von Dutch sweatshirt. She read financials; he read screenplays. She made six figures; his parents cut him off. She took up kickboxing; he had affairs. She got cancer; he moved back east.

“You won’t have to play games with her, wine her and dine her. She just wants to get laid, which — let’s face it, pal — is pretty much all you want too.”

Arty had a point. I wasn’t exactly in “relationship condition.” My clothes were shoddy. My gut stuck out. I had a bad haircut and a rotting tooth that was beginning to smell. A year had passed since my last date, and that one ended in a lawsuit. I had a job at the time working for an exterminator, setting traps for pests and rodents. It was disgraceful work. The kind you take when you have no pride, no hope, and no love for insects. My paychecks didn’t even cover my bills let alone provide the cash necessary for taking a girl out for a “sit down” meal. I told Arty I wasn’t interested, but when he left Tess’ number on my couch, I didn’t throw it away.

Two weeks later, I was getting hammered at a bar where my money’s no good. I’d been listening to some tattooed blond ramble on for a couple of hours when, out of nowhere, she let it drop that her musician boyfriend was picking her up in fifteen minutes. I thanked her for wasting my time, then drunk-drove home through the skids of Hollywood. After browsing through some Internet porn that was becoming a little too familiar, I decided to give Tess a call. She picked up on the third ring, sounding like she’d been asleep.

“Hello?”

“Hey, it’s Rodney.” I was kicking myself for calling so late.

“Who?” She had the kind of voice you hear on those new-fangled fire alarm systems that warn you to remain calm as you exit the building.

“Rodney,” I repeated. “Rodney Maciejewski. Arty told me I should give you a try.”

“Arty?” she asked.

“Lauren’s husband.”

It took her a second.

“Oh.” She didn’t sound enthused.

“Anyway, there’s a place by my house. It’s open late if you want to get some coffee or something.”

She paused. There was contempt in her pause.

“Why don’t you just… come over.”

I chugged the last beer in my fridge and drove a demolition derby to the West Side.

“Come in,” she said as she opened the door, and right away, I could see Tess was in possession of an angry beauty, cold and unasked for. She was slender and petite, with ice-pick cheekbones under fierce brown eyes. Her skin would have been olive if she’d ever seen the sun.

“Tess, right?” I asked.

“Yes,” she replied, turning her back as she walked into the living room. I watched her take the pillows off the couch and spread a white sheet across the cushions. I stared at her chest and the irregular triangle negotiated across her nightshirt, hanging by its vertex, formed from a bra-less and all too solitary breast.

“I’m Rodney,” I said, still standing by the door. My name was of no interest to her.

“Do you have a condom?” she asked.

Jesus, I thought. Arty didn’t lie. “Shouldn’t we exchange pleasantries first?”

“Why?” she asked.

I laughed nervously as I approached the couch. I always expect a measure of disappointment when a woman opens the door to reveal me instead of something with an ironed shirt and a head of hair, but Tess’ indifference was different. It seemed I was there to serve a purpose. Her purpose. I might as well have been delivering a pizza, and she was looking for exact change.

“Yeah,” I said, moving next to her. My gut brushed lightly against her arm. “I have a condom.”

With that, Tess Felice undid my pants and used her hand to get me aroused. I pulled out a rubber that had been in my wallet since the Clinton administration and rolled it onto my cock. Once she was sure everything was antiseptic, Tess turned around, lifted her nightshirt above her waist, and allowed me to enter her from behind. She held her balance with her right hand while using her left to rub and squeeze at her one remaining breast. When I put a clumsy hand on her hip, she shrugged it off with a wiggle. It took about fifteen minutes for us both to finish, after which Tess pulled down her nightshirt, stood up, and said something about having to get up in a few hours. I attempted to kiss her good-bye on the lips, but she gave me the cheek. In the course of the half hour or so we spent together, our eyes never met, and all told, I’d say our shared experience was about as intimate as a trip to an ATM.

Over the next several months, I made a series of visits to Tess’ apartment, and each time, the night followed the same script. If I suggested we have dinner or a drink, she would make an excuse about needing sleep or not having enough time, and before long, we were doing it again on the couch. She showed no desire to reveal any details of her life and no curiosity concerning mine. Almost everything I knew about her, I knew from Arty and Lauren.

One evening, I asked Tess where she was from.

“New York,” she said.

“The city?”

“Upstate.”

“Where?”

“You wouldn’t know it.”

“Try me.”

She sighed. “Troy.”

“Oh,” I said. “I know Troy.” When they pick up the garbage in Philly, they drop it off in Troy.

And then we were at it again.

If you’re wondering why I would submit myself to such a humbling and anonymous sexual regimen, I should tell you that, but for the missing breast, Tess was a woman well out of my league. She not only had her own apartment, but a job and an education. To say she compared well with the previous women I’d dated (my last girlfriend smeared feces on her wall “to ward off the evil dwarf”) would not only be an understatement, it would be an insult. Let’s face it, Tess was the kind of girl a guy like me works for, not has sex with. I should have been cleaning her pool or spraying her garage for termites, not giving her the business from behind on the couch.

“I hear you swam at Cornell.”

“Uh-huh,” she threw the sheet over the cushions.

“I was a back-up tight end at Penn State. More of a blocker than a receiver. Fifty pounds ago. Before my knee gave out.”

She wasn’t listening. She had readied herself on the couch, bent over with the nightshirt up, waiting for me to deliver the goods. I took down my drawers and performed that evening with an added exuberance. As Tessie neared climax, I courageously reached under her body with my left paw and made my move for her one good breast. Her body froze, rigid, as she grabbed my wrist.

“Do not do that,” she said.

Had the soldiers at Normandy heard the tone in Tess’ voice at that moment, they would have laid down their rifles, swam back to England, and begged their generals to leave Europe to the Nazis.

“Sorry,” I said. I pulled my hand back and completed my service. When I left, I did not grant her the courtesy of a kiss.

For the next month or so, I refrained from calling Tess, but I couldn’t get her out of my mind. For all the times we’d fucked, could she really feel no emotional connection to me? Had the loss of her breast completely destroyed the intimate content of her sexuality or had she always been like this? Was the mastectomy the cause, or was it just the excuse? Or was it that she was dying?

“No,” she replied over the phone, matter of fact.

“I thought you can never be sure.”

“As far as the doctors can tell, they got it all.”

I needed answers, even if Tess didn’t want to provide them. I needed our relationship – if you can call it that – to move forward. Relationships, in order to be at all bearable, need to move forward. This is what distinguishes couples from cellmates.

“Tess,” I said, as we spoke on the phone, “why don’t we go out tonight? Why don’t we dress up, spend a few bucks, pretend we’re real people. Regular folks out on the town.”

“I’m not looking for that.”

“Come on. Take a chance. You might even enjoy yourself.”

“Even if I wanted to, I don’t have time.”

“What if we start slow?” I asked. “What if I bring over a bottle of wine and we just talk a little? Humor me. Whaddya say?”

She issued one of her contemptuous pauses, but by then, I had figured out that the pause was a device she used to force her opponent into speaking prematurely, thereby forfeiting his position. I did nothing to break the silence, and after what seemed an eternity, she conceded – “Fine” — and hung up.

I bought a bottle of red, expensive for my budget, showered and shaved, put on a clean pair of jeans, and tucked in my shirt. I’d even had my tooth fixed. When Tess opened the door to her apartment, I gave her a little twirl as I entered, and, from the corner of my eye, I glimpsed an almost smile.

We sat facing each other along the kitchen counter and suffered long silences between sips.

“I don’t know shit about wines,” I admitted. “I had this one once before with a friend who knows what he’s doing. I got the same one so I wouldn’t look like a schnook.”

She said nothing. She was being polite but making a point of not engaging me.

“You like LA?” I asked.

“It’s okay.”

“You like your job?”

“Uh-huh.”

More silence.

“Arty told me about that jerk leaving you. What a jerk.”

Nothing. I had to wade into deeper waters.

“Was the cancer hard on you?”

She looked at me like I farted.

“You don’t like to talk about it.”

She shook her head.

“With time, I’m sure…” I stopped myself. We were almost done with the wine.

“You know,” I said, and this was planned, “I bet before all this, you wouldn’t have looked twice at a guy like me.”

“That’s not true,” she said, lying. She was showing a modicum of concern for my feelings. She was taking the bait.

“Lauren says all the guys in school were in love with you. I’ll bet it’s the same in your office, and everywhere else you go.”

She looked down at the floor, blushing. Strange, I thought, how it is always the smartest animal that is captured with the crudest device. I took another sip from my glass.

“Can I see it?” I asked.

“See what?”

“Can I see the scar?”

She squinted at me, perplexed. I had achieved the element of surprise.

“It’d mean a lot to me if you showed me the scar.”

She was getting the sense I was up to something.

“No,” she said.

“Why not?”

“‘Cause it’s ugly.” I heard an accent in her voice. Something that before now, she had been successful in hiding. Something she’d probably worked hard to get rid of.

“Well, it might be beautiful to me,” I said, softening my approach.

“It’s not,” she replied.

“You don’t know that.”

“It’s not.” She was emphatic. “Why would you want to see it?” she asked.

“I don’t know,” I answered, but that was a lie. Truth was, I thought it would bring us closer. I thought that by her revealing her scar, she would also be revealing the true Tessie. I thought a simple lifting of her shirt would cause some magical transformation that would lead us both forward into the land of the living.

“Has anyone else seen it?” I asked. “Anyone other than the doctors?”

“No,” she said, treading carefully.

“So you can show them, but you can’t show me.”

“I have to show them.” Anger again. Almost a hiss.

“‘Cause you don’t care what they think,” I said.

“No,” she replied, her foot in the clamp.

“But you DO care what I think.” I was good at setting traps. It was, after all, how I made my living.

Tessie leaned back on her stool acknowledging her defeat. She had been an athlete, don’t forget, and the sportsman in her admired a clever play.

“All right,” she said, as she tossed down the last drop of red in her glass. “You want to see it? Here it is.”

And there in the halogen of her kitchen, Tessie Felice, of Troy, New York, took off her nightshirt and revealed to me what remained of her once proud bosom. And it wasn’t anything grotesque. Not at all. Not even a bit. And you wouldn’t think so either, unless you’re one of those people who finds ugliness in imbalance, in asymmetry, in anything that isn’t pristine. But if you’re like me, and you resent what isn’t broken, what is clean and unscathed by life, what is pure and unadulterated, then you too would have seen her chest for what it was and not for what it had been. And what was it? It was the mangled evidence of a conflict between metal and skin, between birth and decay, between life’s saccharine overture and it’s bitter finale. It was what it was.

I reached out for her.

“Don’t,” she said, but her voice lacked conviction. She pushed weakly at my face as I kissed her neck. “Stop,” she said, as I lifted her onto the counter. I slid my hands onto her chest and felt her breathing quicken. “No,” she cried, as I lowered my face to suck on her nipple. “Please,” she whispered, her body falling limp as I ran my tongue across the patchwork flesh.

We fucked that night in her bedroom. I spent the night, and though Tess wasn’t there when I woke up in the morning, she had set an alarm so I wouldn’t be late for work. I called the following night to say thanks and left a message on her machine. I called again a week later and left another message. I called once more, but she never picked up, and she never returned my call.

Arty came over to watch the Eagles game. We sat on the couch in green jerseys sipping at Budweisers.

“Come on, McNabb, you fuckin’ pussy.” I waited for a break in the game.

“You hear from Tess?” I asked.

He said nothing. Then he laughed at a commercial that had monkeys in it.

“I was asking about Tess,” I said. The room was chilly and the rain outside reminded me of home. Reminded me of miserable Sundays growing up in a miserable home. “Has Lauren spoken to her?”

Arty ran his hand over his face. “I don’t know,” he grumbled. He took a sip from his beer and rubbed his neck. “They don’t really talk that much.” His eyes returned to the screen. He tossed a handful of chips into his mouth and chewed them slowly. “I think she’s having a hard time with the…” He made a gesture with his hand that in our language means cancer and the end of the topic. I raised the volume on the television set, which in our language means, I understand.