The Blessed King

I was talking to Alan at the bagel shop one day when he told me he was thinking of killing himself. He’d had enough, he said. He was tired of living on the street. “All around me I’m surrounded by wealth, and I have nothing. Not even a place to wash.”

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.

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Enter the Dragon!

There were neither doors nor windows in the room. How I’d entered, I could not recall. In fact, I could recall nothing. Not even my own name. I knew only what I could see before me. That I was seated on a cushion in front of a table full of raw fish. That I was unarmed. That someone had stolen my shoes. Keep your cool, I thought. Don’t say anything, and you won’t say anything stupid.

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.”

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Bernie Among the Nightingales

It was Arty from Philly who first told me about the project. A pilot. One hour. Written by a guy named Lonstein, a playwright I worked for back when I was a kid. Lonstein was as queer as a priest in Paris, but the sonofabitch could write. I asked Arty if there was a part for me.

“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.

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Cute Meat

She stared narcotic into space two stools to my left, an unlit Marlboro balanced between purple lips. Tattoos blanketed her pale, phthisic arms all the way down to the chipped black paint on her fingernails. I could not imagine her in the daylight.

“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.

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The Intervention

After a perfectly uneventful day at the office and a brief stop at the local video store, George Himmelman entered his apartment to find a large crowd gathered in his living room. He would have assumed it was a surprise party, planned by Caitlin, his fiancé, but the somber tone of the guests, along with the fact that George’s 31st birthday had come and gone, implied otherwise. And what was his mother doing there, weeping into her highball next to Mr. Himmelman? Surely something dire was afoot if his parents, who had communicated with each other only through attorneys since The Scandal, were now together in the same room in violation of numerous orders of restraint. Could it be that someone had passed? But who? Everyone George knew or cared about was present. There was Caitlin, her hair pulled back so tight it stretched the skin on her forehead and lifted the tip of her nose to expose her nostrils. There was Arthur from Philadelphia, George’s best friend, staring at the floor and fidgeting uncomfortably as was his habit. There were George’s secretary and colleagues from the firm; the minister from his church; the family lawyer; Roderick and Charla from the club. Even Maria, the family maid and owner of the only spare key to George’s apartment, sat in the corner of the room, muttering a prayer in Spanish as she fingered a set of rosary beads.

“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.

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