Monday: Live, But With No Audience Participation
The booths are supposed to be sound-proofed but as soon as Dewitt slips into the makeshift lobby he can sense it all around him, all forms of it, its myriad notes and shades, highs and lows, guttural and spontaneous, gloriously natural and desperately false, the shared rapture of a group followed by the feigned ecstasy of the solitary.
Is this thrilling because it is enjoyable? Or because it is forbidden?
At the token machine Dewitt wants to project the appearance of someone who’s done this before, of someone who may in fact do this at least once every day. But he doesn’t know what that would look like, the actions of someone who’s been here and done that, because he has never been here or done anything remotely like this.
Until now, he’s only experimented at home and, once, in an unguarded moment late one night, behind the locked door of his office.
When he still had an office.
Dewitt watches his least wrinkled scrap of currency vanish into the black slot of the scratched stainless-steel dispenser and holds his breath until tokens rain into the trough with more noise than he would have liked. Doesn’t matter, though, no one’s going to look. No one ever looks in a place like this. He gathers the slugs and doesn’t bother counting. Fingering the cheap metal coins, allowing the thrill of anticipation to register, he wants to smile. But he suppresses it. Saves it for when he’ll be inside a booth of his own.
Something resembling carnival music bleeds through hidden speakers as Dewitt makes his way from the brightly lit lobby into the darkened alley of black-painted plywood booths to the left. He knows that he is being watched on a house camera somewhere, probably on multiple cameras from myriad angles, by some aspiring tough guy in a back room, giving him a scornful once-over on screen number six while shoveling take-out General Tso’s Chicken into his steroid-swollen face. He’s also convinced that, when he came in off the street, before he traversed the garbage-strewn alley and walked downstairs and gave the password that his now missing friend Swift had given him more than three weeks ago, some humorless suit in law enforcement was holed up in a van, watching him on a screen of his own, comparing Dewitt’s biometric scan with those featured on the Must Watch list of the day.
But he doesn’t care. Unless certain lines are crossed – trafficking in it, sharing it with minors, performing it in public — he is fairly sure that they can’t arrest him.
What they could do is alert his family, if he still had one. Or they could tell his friends, if they could find one. Also, they could bring it to the attention of his employer, if he hadn’t just been terminated.
Dewitt considers the options and they are dizzying. So many genres and sub-genres, each tantalizingly described on a five-by-eight LCD screen on the door of its respective booth.
Amateur. Couples. Groups. White. Asian. Black. Interracial. Gay. Animals. Seniors. Puppets. Humiliation. Kiddie stuff. Fat people stuff. Potty talk. Dangerous.
Even pregnant, if that’s your thing.
You can watch it pre-recorded on film, animated, live, or live with audience participation. Swift had told him of a much more sophisticated place hidden in the suburbs that allowed you to project a hologram of yourself into the middle of a performance, but Dewitt knows that this option would not be available here. As quickly as this operation sprung up in the night several months ago it would be broken down and moved somewhere else very soon. Swift had said two months tops before it becomes a risk, and that was almost a month ago. In fact, Dewitt was half expecting, half hoping it would be gone before he had the guts to finally approach the unmarked door.
The password was Knock-knock.
Dewitt has thought about this moment for some time now and he knows what he wants. He wants it live, but with no audience participation. He wants it with a woman. And he wants to keep it purely observational. Because this first time it’s important to watch, but not engage.
Walking sideways down the corridor of mostly closed doors he sees something on the screen outside an unoccupied booth, the image of a young woman, and he isn’t sure why but there is something about her — the unexpected appearance of innocence or wholesomeness juxtaposed with the sordid environment? The devilish smirk? — that intrigues him.
Inside all is dark but for a small red light near the token slot. As a fourth coin clinks into the machine, the hum of a small motor commences, the small black shade in front of him begins to rise and light glides before him like the end of an eclipse. She is well into her act as she is revealed. At first all that Dewitt can see is her disembodied hands moving rapidly with a hint of, not disinterest, he thinks, but anger. When the shade and the motor simultaneously stop he is able to see all of her and he is relieved that he isn’t a bait-and-switch victim and it is indeed her, the owner of the innocent, demure countenance that he’d seen on the screen outside the booth, the sarcastic sidelong curl of the lips performing expressly for him in this most forbidden of places but… where is the sound?
Now her mouth is moving even faster than her hands, but it is all meaningless, devoid of all satisfaction, if he cannot hear it.
He hastily leans forward and presses his ear against the smudged and scratched Plexiglas but, hearing nothing, he jerks back and squints at the mechanical apparatus beneath the token receptacle. He taps it three times it with an open hand while maintaining eye contact with the woman who is seemingly looking not just at him, but into him, and whom he wants, more than anything, to hear.
Finally, he steps back and kicks the token receptacle, and then the apparatus beneath it. This prompts the crackle of tenuously bound audio wire and then, the sound of her voice. The sound of the forbidden.
The first words that he hears are completely without context, an absolute non sequitur:
“Which is why you will never see a sheep and a member of the Ministry of Diligence in the same car pool.”
But it doesn’t matter. There is magic in her voice, her gestures, her…delivery. Dewitt isn’t sure why, but when she finishes these words, and drops her hands to her side and looks at him while giving an exaggerated, mock-innocent shrug, he can’t help but feel that the thrill of anticipation that had consumed him prior to entering the booth has been fulfilled, rewarded with a moment of bliss and pure satisfaction unlike anything he’s experienced in many years. He isn’t sure how this sensation is supposed to culminate but his body, quite involuntarily, provides an answer.
Dewitt smiles.
Then, as the faltering motor engages and the black shade begins to drop like a guillotine, he is fairly sure that the illegal underground comedienne who made him feel this way is smiling, too.
He’s still smiling as he fumbles inside his pocket for more tokens. Smiling still as he drops a coin onto the grimy linoleum floor and reaches into his pocket for yet more. And even still as the lights in his booth for some reason flash on and off as the freshly rising shade begins to reveal not the hands or legs or the devilish face of the provocateur, but an abandoned stage.
For a moment he stares at the vacant platform, the old-fashioned microphone discarded upon the elevated box of a floor, its pale wire a tangled mass of dead nerve, and wonders if what he’d just witnessed was nothing more than a fragment of a dream, the hallucination of a falling man. For a moment Dewitt wonders if this stage, like the stage of his dreams, has always been empty.
But the noises outside the booth make him think otherwise. A deep brutal concussion shakes the walls, followed by the report of a gun. As he teases open the door to the booth he sees other doors down his row slamming open. Panicked men and women lurch out, desperate eyes flashing Dewitt’s way, before running toward the only exit they know.
Another concussion is immediately followed by the sound of wood splintering under blunt force.
Dewitt turns to his right and, seeing only more distraught faces surging toward him, decides to go left with the others. But then, behind the others, he sees her. She is standing at the far end of the row of booths, up on a step, looking over the heads of the fleeing. She’s up on her toes, looking beyond him and Dewitt isn’t sure if she’s searching for someone or contemplating her predicament. As yet more panicked bodies race past to his left, he changes his mind and decides that he will go to the unknown right, toward the woman who had made him smile.
When she sees him approaching, her smile disappears. Another gun burst. Martial shouts from the front of the subterranean emporium. Dewitt glances back as the first policeman turns the corner at the far end of the alley. A short, chubby sergeant not in any apparent hurry.
“Police!”
Dewitt stops in front of the woman. “Where to?”
She stares at him and growls with contempt.
Now a young patrolman in a black riot helmet appears alongside the sergeant. Dewitt looks at the woman, then back at the cops. As they tug at their holsters a third policeman rounds the corner with her rifle already raised.
Dewitt turns to plea one last time for guidance but the woman is gone. Looking past the step upon which she’d been standing and through an opened side door, he spots her running across the black edge of the stage. A gun burst chases him up the two stairs and topples the stage door. Although he can’t see her, he jogs in her direction. Every four steps he sees an identical, black three-sided performance cube, three, five and now ten, each equipped with an antique microphone and stool. For a moment he feels as if he’s circumnavigated the stage and is back where he began. He stops to listen for her footsteps but can only hear the carnival music on house speakers, then more muffled shouts and gun bursts from the other side of the Plexiglas.
A bead of light on the black walls attracts his eye. Behind him he hears a door, presumably the one through which he’d just entered, smashing open. He leaps off the stage and stumbles toward the light. It’s another door, barely ajar. He claws it open, slips to the other side and pulls it shut.
Dewitt is running through a small tunnel lighted by a single bulb. Someone else’s footsteps sound on the concrete floor but he’s not sure if they are in front of or behind him. Soon he is running through total blackness, intermittently spreading his arms to gauge obstacles on either side of him until he smashes into a wall.
No, a door.
He rises, feels for a handle and shoves it open.
Sunlight blinds him, and he falls to the pavement.
“Not funny.”
He looks up and into the eyes of the young woman. The comedienne, and she is not smiling.
Tuesday: Dorothy Parker’s Ghost
When Dewitt looks up again she is already at the end of the alley, turning left into heavy pedestrian traffic. He jogs in pursuit. Once she is out on the street she stops running and is relatively easy to catch.
“Thank you.” Dewitt is breathing heavily, trying not to sneeze again.
She stops. “Please. Get a life.”
“My name is Dewitt. Ambrose Dewitt. You saved me. I loved your…”
She waves him off and resumes walking. Amongst the sea of people in business attire, her outfit of baggy black chinos, black canvas Chuck Taylor sneakers and a black t-shirt with the words, Could you repeat the question? written in pink script across the front is something of an oddity. “Please, at least let me buy you a cup of coffee.”
She turns right off the avenue and onto a side street heading toward the pulse and buzz of the swarming lunchtime crowds of midtown. Men in crisp suits and fedoras, women in sleek pantsuits, seemingly traveling in formation, fingering the keys of Unicom devices, zip past without noticing the world around them. Only when an overflowing hydro tram hums by in the center of the street do they look up — and that is to consider the digital market reports flashing on the side of the vehicle. The numbers and the arrows alongside them are, as usual, up. Their color, as usual, is the bright green of profit. The words Leading Economic Indicators flash in gold light above the numbers. At work a few weeks ago, after happening upon some calculations that led him to a different conclusion, Dewitt had called them Bleeding Economic Indicators. It wasn’t the primary reason he’d been fired, but saying something like this within earshot of others surely helped seal his fate.
“Listen, Mister Dimwit,” she begins, refusing to look at him.
“Dewitt.”
“Right. We will not be having a cup of half-caf caramel latte or a shot of whiskey or a spontaneous bout of semi-anonymous sex and we will certainly not ever look back on this day and laugh. In fact, this day never happened. I suggest you wipe that insipid grin off your face and fix your tie and go back to whatever misery factory you snuck out of and forget you ever laid eyes on me.”
They come to a stop at the corner of Seventh and both know enough not to speak while standing in the building crowd waiting for another tram to pass. In twenty minutes lunch hour will be over, the streets will be considerably less populated and those who remain will appear considerably more conspicuous.
Walking south on Seventh, he tries to resume the conversation. “Will you return there again? Where we just came from?”
“My goodness, Dimwit, you are a fool.”
“Then where? I’m…smitten.”
“You should know, Dimwit, that I am laughing. On the inside I am hysterical.”
“What is your name?”
She stops and pretends that she is searching in her pockets for something. “I have to go. I’m getting on the next tram at the corner and I do not want you following me.”
“What is your name?”
“Dawn Powell.”
Dewitt nods. “That’s a nice name.”
“No. Dorothy Parker. I’m Dorothy Parker’s Ghost.”
“I don’t follow.”
“Which is precisely why you should not be allowed to. The reason that incident happened earlier is because other dimwits like you found your way there. The fact that you chose to see my act — my goodness, Observational? Of all the choices, with everything that was at stake you went with vanilla, safe Observational — that tells me everything I need to know about you. That you know nothing. Have zero taste and need to go back to your appointed row in the cubicle farm ASAP.”
“I can’t go back. Plus, I don’t want to.”
She considers him again. “You know, whoever told you about that place ought to be shot.”
A tram stops at the corner. Dorothy Parker’s Ghost looks at Dewitt. “Show’s over for good this time, Dimwit. You’ve been a wonderful audience. I’m outta here.”
The tram door slides open. “Wait.”
She steps up and inside, then turns. Arms folded. Unsmiling. What?
“Swift told me. My friend Swift told me about the location of today’s um, meeting.”
Dorothy Parker’s Ghost lets her arms drop to her sides and tilts her head. She steps one foot down onto the street, half in, half out of the tram and reaches in her pocket. A tone rings and the door begins to close but sensing her body, it jerks back open.
“In or out,” someone complains behind her. “People have to work.”
She extends her hand. Their fingers barely touch before she pulls away and jumps back onto the tram.
“If not Observational,” he calls after her as the doors begin to shut. “Then what?”
Through the closed glass door of the departing tram he reads her lips: Dangerous.
But Seriously
He’s not used to being alone in his apartment in the afternoon. Even in college, if he had time off between classes he was expected to and wanted to go to work, or to the library.
Prospective employers kept track of such things.
But today, right now, he likes it.
He turns on the front burner of his gas stove and slides a kettle over the jittery flame.
This is his third day away from work. Three days since his computer monitor flashed off and two women with clip screens from Proficiency Resources appeared at the invisible door to his cube to take him to de-processing. Immediately after he was taken away someone from building services gathered all of his personal belongings, his projects, his completed and in-progress digital and three-dimensional blueprints, placed them in the wire basket of a mail cart and rolled them away.
By law they were required to recite his offenses: declining productivity, disruptive behavior and a thoroughly unacceptable attitude.
Two months prior to this he had been given a warning, but protocol mandated that such warnings remain general, leaving the warned to contemplate every aspect of his performance. Studies indicated that not singling out specific infractions led to a more complete rehabilitation of the employee. He was told at the time to go home to do some soul searching and come back to work the next morning rededicated to the pillars of diligence, productivity and prosperity.
Instead he came back less inspired and more disillusioned then ever.
Instead he came back and gave them Bleeding Economic Indicators.
Instead he came back and stole a document whose contents incriminated the system he was raised to worship. To serve. To trust.
All while repeatedly listening to a banned artifact seemingly from another universe that validated everything that, for as long as he can remember, had been grating the thin skin of conscience that protects his soul. Swift had given it to him a month ago. A small audio disc. A week later, at the end of a long night of drinking, Swift asked if he’d had a chance to listen to it.
“I did. I’m wearing it out.”
“And?”
“The quality sucked and a lot of what he was talking about… I had no context for. But other parts were, my God.”
“That was recorded in Carnegie Hall, New York City, in 1961.”
“Amazing.”
“During a blizzard. Started at midnight, yet there wasn’t an empty seat in the house.”
“So many parts of it weren’t, you know,” Dewitt looked around and whispered, “funny in the way that I’d imagined funny to be.”
“Yes,” said Swift.
“I don’t know what to call that kind of…”
Swift finished the thought for him. “Dangerous.”
The lights flashed. Five minutes till closing. Work day tomorrow.
Dewitt finished his drink. “Do you, you know have any more?”
“There is more. Much more. But for now everything you need you can find in the concert at Carnegie Hall.”
On the sidewalk, waiting for a cab, Dewitt tried again: “You have to give me something. It’s all I can think about.”
Swift put down his drink and spoke to Dewitt for the last time before he disappeared: “Okay, he’s in Sydney, Australia, in 1962. The authorities — police, politicians, religious leaders — are up in arms. They are aware of his legal troubles in the States. They do not want him to perform and they make it clear to him that if he utters one obscenity they will shut his performance down and throw him in jail. So, guess what’s the first thing he says when he walks out on stage and grabs the microphone?”
“What a wonderful fucking wonderful audience.” This is what Swift told him that Lenny had said that night so long ago in Sydney. It’s also the last thing he’d said during his exit interview, when the women from Proficiency Resources had asked if he had anything else to say in his defense.
Looking at the two women, he stood up, shrugged and answered in the voice of another, circa 1961.
“What a fucking wonderful audience,” he said, and was promptly escorted from the premises by security.
Dangerous.
Wednesday: Kid Gelo
He figures he can inhabit this apartment for another two, maybe three months. He looks out his picture window across the East River at the factories turned artist lofts turned factories again during the last phase of Max Max — Maximum Maximization. There had been some holdouts, creative squatters, artists, poets and writers without an audience or sustainable means of employment, which made it easy for the people of the city to overwhelmingly vote for their fair and democratically mandated eviction.
Dewitt lowers the blinds and twists the small guide stick that shuts out the afternoon light. Yesterday he had thought he would miss the view. Today he’s not so sure.
In the living room, next to the antique cherry wood armoire, is a wall-mounted gun cabinet. Inside the cabinet’s glass door is a custom made hunting rifle that he has never used. A Remington over/under given to him by his brother. It’s very expensive, a limited edition, he’s been told. He’s never fired it and even though it is perfectly legal he never especially cared to have it in his house. But during the divorce proceedings, an oxymoron if there ever was one because nothing seemed to be proceeding at that point in his life, for some reason his wife had said that she wanted the gun, which is precisely when he decided that it was a beloved, if not irreplaceable object.
The key to the gun cabinet is on a coffee table next to a bottle of Polish vodka. It is inside a small orange pharmaceutical bottle surrounded by doses of a tranquilizer he’d been prescribed but had never taken after the divorce.
He lifts the drugs away from the alcohol and holds them in front of the gun. The glass door opens with a gentle twist of the lock. Dewitt runs his finger along the edge of the meticulously etched walnut gunstock, ducks alighting, inlaid with his initials, and wonders if he would know how to load and shoot it if he had to. His older brother, the head of a pharmaceutical company, said that every home needs the security of at least one weapon and the peace of mind that comes with two. The twist of a second lock opens a drawer underneath the gun that is filled with enough ammunition, also a gift from his brother, to kill many things.
Carefully he removes the boxes of ammunition, and an unopened gun cleaning kit, until he reaches the last box of 12-gauge shotgun slugs in the bottom of the drawer.
But it’s not the drugs or alcohol, the shotgun or the abundance of ammunition that he’s interested in or afraid of the trouble it can cause. It’s the comedy he’s hidden amongst it.
There are four discs in the ammunition box but right now he’s only interested in Lenny.
The others he’s possessed, watched and similarly hidden for several years. One, the first that Dewitt acquired, covertly purchased from a sidewalk dealer in Alphabet City, is a low-grade video of something called “The Dean Martin Celebrity Roast of Frank Sinatra.” He had been slightly aware of Sinatra’s career as a singer from another time, but in this video he sat on the middle of a dais of people who took turns, in between consuming massive amounts of tobacco and alcohol, ridiculing him. Dewitt had no knowledge or cultural context of the other performers, or of the roast construct, but he was fascinated by their raucous behavior and their frequently uncontrollable group laughter. Watching the roast and the degree to which the performers would exploit each other’s idiosyncrasies had a narcotic effect on him.
The harder they laughed, the more comfortably sedate he felt.
The second disc, also procured in Alphabet City, was audio-only, a tour de force of wordplay performed by two men discussing the roster of a fictional baseball team. Within days Dewitt had memorized the entire six-minute bit by heart.
–When you pay off the first baseman every month, who gets the money?
–Every dollar of it. Why not, the man’s entitled to it.
–Who is?
–Yes!
In the kitchen he gets a tumbler of crushed ice and fills it with vodka in the living room. And why not? Three weekdays of goofing off in your entire adult life isn’t asking too much, is it?
The burn of the chilled midday vodka pleases him. Thrills him. Glass in hand, he slumps back on his couch and closes his eyes.
As a child his days revolved around academics. Science. Engineering. Algebra. Rote memorization. Quizzes before quizzes. An emphasis on rectifying failure rather than celebrating success. As a four-year-old he would occasionally forget the letter H while reciting the alphabet. His teacher pinned a foot-long cardboard version of the letter upon his chest for a week. At home, his father simply hit him every time he missed or stumbled upon it. Hit begins with H. Humiliation begins with H. Understand?
Alphabet city.
–The catcher’s name?
–Today.
–Today, and tomorrow’s pitching.
–Now you’ve got it.
In sixth grade, when he demonstrated a natural talent for drawing and illustration, he was placed in an advanced drafting class where he was charged with translating complex technical specifications into a detailed plan.
--So I pick up the ball and I throw it to naturally.
–No you don’t, you throw the ball to Who.
One evening after school his drafting teacher had visited his house to show his father a notebook of doodles he’d found open on the boy’s desk, the bulk of which revolved around the continuing saga of a boy superhero called Kid Gelo. After the teacher left, his father ushered him out to the garage and, once inside, smacked him across the face so hard he fell against a vice grip on the work bench and gashed his cheek. His father held up the notebook, tore it in half, then tore it into quarters. “You are lucky your teacher is a fool,” his father said. “Because words like that, pictures like that, they can undo your life.” Then his father put the scraps on the garage floor, pulled out a butane lighter and set the torn pages on fire. Imagine, he thought, if he’d known what Gelo stood for.
The third disc is for an ancient banned motion picture called “Modern Times.” How old Dewitt does not know. During his first clandestine viewings of the film he thought something was wrong with it because, despite hearing certain sound affects and a musical score, he couldn’t hear the voice of the lead character, an eccentric, lovable, mustachioed tramp who worked in a factory. But with each subsequent viewing he realized that there were no spoken words, perhaps because of technical limitations but presumably by choice, because there were those supplementary sounds. He became more intensely transfixed by this lack of language, by the way in which the tramp physically compensated for it, and by the way in which the complete absence of something can make it exponentially more powerful than an abundance of it.
He found “Modern Times” in a box while cleaning out the attic of his father’s house after he had died. It was in a paper sleeve stuck inside a book of science fiction stories that, according to the signature in front of the book, had belonged to his father’s father. Dewitt still has the book and often reads the short story the disc had been placed within. “Harrison Bergeron.” Whenever he read that story or watched the illicit film buried within it, Dewitt would wonder if his father had ever watched it, or if this was expressly the vice of his grandfather. He wondered if his father had known that such things existed within the walls of his strictly compliant house. Did his father secretly love what he professed to hate, but feared exposing his son to the inherent dangers that accompanied the pleasure? And what of his grandfather, a man Dewitt had never met and about whom, even when pressed, his father refused to speak? Did his father hate his father because of his weaknesses, his dangerous predilections? Or did he worship him for them, yet ultimately feared they would be replicated in his son?
Thinking back on his childhood and his pained relationship with his father, Dewitt concluded, this explained a lot.
The behavior of every father is a response to the behavior of his own father.
Did his father act out of rebellion or homage? Dewitt still isn’t sure. Just as he is still unable to quantify his own recent behavior in respect to the life of the man who created him.
Before he puts on the earphones to listen to the Lenny Bruce concert at Carnegie Hall for the hundredth time, he pours another drink. Why the hell not? Then he sits down, closes his eyes and wonders what Lenny father was like.
What behavior was his stuff a response to?
Thursday: The Monastery
The headphones are still in his ears, the day’s last light receding from the edges of the closed blinds, the vodka glass smudged and dry, when the phone rings.
“We need to talk about your friend.” He knows the voice. Dorothy Parker’s Ghost.
“Okay, where?”
“Jesus. I was afraid of this.”
“Wait.” He takes the paper scrap out of his left pocket and scans the text. Nothing.
“Turn it over. And refrain from blabbing.”
He does, and he sees, written in pencil in small print on the lower left corner of the back of the document, this address: 57 E 55.
“Okay, got it.”
“Nine o’clock, tonight.”
He walks to the window and opens the blinds. Brooklyn glows determinedly to the east and the office windows to the south are illuminated with the flame of midnight oil. Only in the hour just before dawn are enough lights out for the sky come close to full dark, and lately he has taken to waking up to savor those rare instances of watching the metropolis at rest. With the first glint of red to the east he’ll draw the blinds. There’s no comfort in the inevitable rush that comes with dawn. The frenzied swirl of commerce. By sunrise the city is already broiling with activity and Dewitt will do whatever he can not to notice.
* * *
While changing for his meeting the phone rings again. It is his vocation counselor from Labor Continuity.
“As early as tomorrow afternoon,” she tells him, “I should have several interviews set up.”
“So much for the extended period of self reflection.”
“It generally isn’t recommended.”
“The deliberate collecting of one’s thoughts. ”
“What would you do with all that time on your hands?”
“Oh, I don’t know. Watch old movies. Take a bubble bath. Investigate compelling aspects of the universe that I’ve been discouraged from exploring for the last twenty-nine years. What if I simply, you know, don’t want to work for a while? If I kind of want to take a few weeks or even months to, you know, sort things out. Because maybe vocation isn’t you know, about matchmaking, or a calling. What if it’s all about a finding?”
“Please. I’ll call in the morning to confirm.”
* * *
Beneath an English Renaissance iron lantern hanging from the vaulted ceiling of the marble-sheathed lobby of 55 E. 57th Street stands Dorothy Parker’s Ghost. Maybe it’s the impressive size of the space, or the fact that she’s not on stage, but Dewitt thinks she looks different, smaller. Human. Flawed. But still kind of sexy.
“What is this place?”
“I forgot. You don’t know anything. Let’s just say the physical location is significant. Plus, at night it’s empty.” She turns and waves for him to follow her onto the elevator.
“Any chance you’re going to tell me your real name?”
The elevator door closes. She pushes a button then looks at him. “
Any chance you wanna do it?”
“What?”
“Copulate. Fornicate. Make wild forbidden monkey love.”
“Here?”
She rolls her eyes. “Too late,” she says. “The moment passed.”
Neither speaks until the doors open on the second floor. As she leads him into a darkened lobby, he asks, “What can you tell me about Swift?”
She flips on a series of light switches. More marble on the floors, oak paneled walls, gilded balustrades and cornices. Velvet furniture.
“I can tell you that he may or may not be dead. That he has more guts than any supposed leader we have in Washington, more business acumen than any financial wizard starring in his or her own prime-time teleport show. And he is probably the funniest bastard I’ve ever known.”
“Swift?”
“The person you knew at work is only a fraction of the man in full. It would be stupid for someone of his abilities to bring unnecessary attention to himself at something as banal as a white-collar job. Drinking with the likes of you.”
“That’s nice. But what do you know about him right now?”
She holds up a finger. Wait. They pass a large ballroom, an oak-paneled bar, a dining room filled with dozens of round tables set for a formal meal.
“This place is gorgeous,” Dewitt says.
“A little too masculine for my taste but yeah, it has its charms. It was built in 1909 by, not surprisingly, an investment banker-slash-art collector. Everything in the place is original, created in the English Renaissance style. When he kicked the bucket a real estate tycoon snatched it up. No surprise there, either. After he bailed it was inhabited by the Institute of American Physics until the laws of gravity or at least supply and demand led to their departure in the 1950s. About forty years ago, it was taken over as a social club for an elite group of neo-magnates, people with so much new money they don’t know how to spend it. They liked the idea of having a sort of members only gathering place for the ridiculously wealthy on those occasions when they happened to all be in Manhattan. Only thing is, they never use it. The original six owners has grown to a group of fourteen now, but still, they’re never in town at the same time so they usually will stay instead at one of their private residences or super-luxe hotels.”
“So it’s never used?”
“Once a year they have a gala in the main ballroom, and occasionally one of them will book one of the rooms for an off-site for one of their corporations. Last year, one of them spent a few weeks here after his third wife threw him out of their homes, and that really sucked. But I was able to persuade him to buy a local hotel instead. Otherwise, nearly 350 days a year, it’s empty.”
While Dewitt takes in his surroundings, he asks, “And what’s your association with this place again?”
“Head of events planning.” She continues talking as she walks ahead of him down the hall. “When something’s booked, I make it happen. When it’s not, other than making sure it stays clean and in good working order, I do next to nothing.” From her pocket she removes a key and stops outside a large mahogany door. After she swings open the door, she turns on the lights, revealing an oak-paneled billiard room.
Dewitt enters first and pirouettes for a 360 view. “Nice. You said that the physics people moved out in the 1950s. Any idea who used the place between then and when the bigwig cabal took over?”
Dorothy Parker’s Ghost smiles as she closes the door. “Nicely observed. You surprise me, Dimwit.” She walks to the billiard table, reaches into her jeans pocket, and removes a small plastic bag. As she spreads a line of cocaine on the table’s walnut bumper she continues, “In 1957 this building became home to a group of people known as the Friars Club. They called it The Monastery.” She, pushes back her unruly black locks, bends down and snorts two three inch lines of cocaine through a short straw. After the second line disappears she looks at Dewitt, points at the coke staging area and raises her chin in a gesture of offering.
“No,” he answers. “No thanks. But I would love a drink.”
She points at the bar near the back wall. “Fix your own. Fully stocked.” She finishes her sentences with nasal-clearing snorts and her body trembles as the drug makes its presence felt. As Dewitt pours a glass of single malt, in honor of Swift, he continues watching her and marvels at how the confident, pretty and somewhat wholesome woman he had seen on stage earlier had come to look so unhinged and reckless.
“You married, Ambrose?”
He replies on his way back to the billiard table. “I was. Now I’m not. Her new husband may well be a member of this place.”
She raps her knuckles on the green velvet covering the table’s slate field. “Do you know that Jackie Gleason practiced right on this very table for his role in ‘The Hustler’?”
“I didn’t know that.” Dewitt puts his drink on the bumper and turns his hands palms up. “I don’t know who Jackie Gleason is. Or ‘The Hustler.’ Shit, unless you’re talking about a bald man in a brown robe, I don’t even know what a Friar is.”
Dorothy Parker’s Ghost is on the billiard table now, crawling from one corner pocket to the other, where Dewitt stands over his drink. “That’s why you’re here,” she says. “But first,” she raises the single malt scotch to her lips and empties the glass. “Wanna do it?”
This time Dewitt doesn’t say, Here? or, Do what? or, We hardly know each other. He simply climbs up on the billiard table and spends the next thirty-seven minutes paying tribute to Jackie Gleason.
Friday: Exit Ghost
He drinks scotch and watches Dorothy Parker’s Naked Ghost snort lines of cocaine off half a dozen flat surfaces in what was once known as the William B. Williams Billiards Room.
“Do you know,” she says, “when the new Monastery for the Friars was opened in 1916 the president, or Abbot, a man named George M. Cohan, led the procession uptown from the old Monastery in the forties and after entering the new Monastery, this place, he threw the key to the front door out into the street to symbolize that the building would never be closed. Which, of course, it was.”
“How did you get this job?”
“I was placed here. Because of its importance.”
As she talks she slides herself off the edge of the billiard table and walks naked over to the bar upon which, to her pleasure she discovers that there is a small mound of un-snorted coke. She turns to Dewitt. “Are you sure?”
He smiles, but he knows there is something fatalistic in it. What am I smiling about? Is a smile real if it is a response to something that you know is wrong?
She bends and snorts.
“You still haven’t told me about Swift.”
She tilts back her head and for the first time he sees across the curve of her back a tattoo of a beautiful female smile.
Dewitt joins her at the bar and reaches for the single malt.
In lieu of an answer, she tosses out the beginning of a joke: “Two naked, post-coital, adults walk into a bar…”
He continues, “Drinking scotch and snorting coke….”
“Contemplating the end of the world.”
“All we need,” Dewitt says, “is a punch line.”
“You know,” she says, stepping behind him and putting her hands on his shoulders. “You’re sorta okay funny. Maybe you could do it too, you know.”
He shakes his head. On the bar is a notepad and a gold plated fountain pen. “However…”
As she peeks over his shoulder he uncaps the pen and begins to draw. His drawing, done in three different sized rectangular panels, takes place on the sidewalk outside the building they’re in, 57 E. 55th street. In it, Kid Gelo is standing in front of the front doors, keeping an angry mob of money waving businessmen at bay. On the street between him and the mob, sparkling and disproportionately large, is George M. Cohan’s key to the front door. He signs it and hands it to her.
“I love it.”
“Gelo,” he explains, “is Latin for laughter.”
* * *
This is what she tells him: “When the decree came down every comic book, film, magazine, ironic tee shirt, video disc, whoopee cushion had to be turned in, dumped in huge bins placed in train stations, libraries schools, everywhere. Emptied nightly and filled to overflowing daily for months. Of course there were protests. Some bravely tried to continue performing but when all was said and done, telling a vasectomy joke while the world was on fire didn’t exactly seem like an act of heroism, or at least not something worth destroying your life over. What was most funny, if it wasn’t so depressing, is that some schmuck was given the job of deciding what’s funny. What constituted humor. Imagine that, sitting in a room, watching tapes or reading a passage of Puddinhead Wilson, trying to figure out what or whom should be on The List. I heard some priceless stories about comedians upset over not being on The List. They were outraged because, in other words, they weren’t funny enough to be taken seriously. So to resurrect the careers they were about to abandon anyway, they made a big deal about turning in their material. To not be censored became something of an insult, and in underground circles, a basis for an entirely new brand of humor, about humor’s death. About, She’s so bad she could perform without censure on the Capitol steps. All of this, thankfully, bought some time that allowed an enlightened few to figure out ways to stash performances, to preserve some kind of record. Hidden within this place and several others, I’m learning, are hundreds of invaluable artifacts.”
Dewitt sits on the table alongside her. “Carnegie Hall.”
“Pardon?”
“Lenny Bruce’s concert at Carnegie Hall. Swift told me everything I need to know I’d find in the concert at Carnegie Hall.”
“I’m sure he’s right,” she answers. “I’m sure there is something there, too.”
“But what good will it do?” he asks. “To what end can finding this help
“I’m doing this, because someone has to keep it alive and,” she pushes him onto his back, “because it is really fucking dangerous.”
* * *
She never did tell him about Swift.
Laying in his own bed, hung over, he tries to remember the end of the night. He’d asked once more for her name and she shushed him, told him to get over it, to get over her. Told him she’s screwed more comedians than the right wing of the conservative party, including Swift. When he tried to ask when he could see her again she shook her head. They were downstairs outside another large, oak paneled room empty except for a single bed set up in front of a spectacular marble fireplace. She pointed inside the door: “This is where I sleep,” she told him. “Where I keep all of my things. Mostly hidden. It used to be called The Milton Berle room. Milton Berle was one of the first comedians to have a successful television show. When Uncle Miltie’s show came on Tuesdays at 8, they said the entire country stopped in its tracks to watch. Another fact that gives me great comfort as I lay in bed in his eponymous room is they also said that Uncle Miltie was the proud owner of the biggest schlong in Hollywood.”
In the hallway, before opening the front door and practically pushing him into the night she told him that he had passed the first test and he would be contacted soon if he still wanted to play.
* * *
After a night of excess and risk, the familiarity of the video monitor in his apartment gives him comfort.
Flipping through channels with the sound off and then, gradually, on. Hedge fund managers cooking osso buco. CEOs giving walking tours of their Polynesian Island Compounds. Tickers scrolling across the bottom of everything. He sits up when a beer commercial comes on featuring an overweight bald man in a tiny bathing suit on a unicycle. Recently the syndicate had begun to allow comedy to be broadcast at certain hours of the day, as long as the programs themselves could not be funny. The comedy could only be embedded into the advertisements. Ratings had gotten so low that no one wanted to sponsor programs. Sales were affected. Commerce. The results were stunning. Advertising revenues soared. Brands were the new Hollywood stars.
Millions more people had begun to watch the commercials, which were not especially humorous, than the programs themselves.
After the beer commercial, during a brief break from the business news there’s an eleven-second update on the war, followed by the appearance of a photograph of someone who looks a lot like a clean cut version of the Ghost of Dorothy Parker. Dewitt sits up and raises the volume in time to hear the anchorwoman say that she was found dead this morning just before dawn near the Reservoir in Central Park.
She wasn’t a ghost.
Livia Purcell was her name.
She was 26.
An hour later he reaches for the phone to call his vocation counselor to tell her that he thinks his true calling might be in the courtesy business sector, as an events planner.
