Finally, when I was full, I asked him what was going on.
“Well,” he replied, “it’s a little hard for me to say.”
“Is it concerning that special friend that you mentioned earlier?”
“Yes, in fact.” He smiled a bit. “I’m trying to give you an idea of what to expect.”
I could easily imagine her, a fair-skinned cutie who had probably graduated from an Ivy League and developed a shapely resume. “I’ve been in love, Helmsley. I know, you want to tell me that she’s different from any other girl you’ve ever met…”
“Yes, but there’s more…”
“There’s always more. You’re nervous, that’s all, just calm yourself.”
Helmsley, as far as love went, was just entering puberty. In this area I felt
a bit like an older brother and was about to mention how beguiling love is and the disappointment that inevitably follows, but I caught myself. I wiped the oil and sauces off my face, he paid the bill, and we left.
We went to the nearby bar where the fateful rendezvous was set to occur. A sign outside said it was an American Legion Post. Once inside, I noticed a cool tension that I learned was due to the two types of patrons: the recently arrived yuppies, who’d found that quaint Cobble Hill was only minutes away from their beloved Wall Street, and the third generation Italians who resented the young professionals, probably for jacking up the neighborhood’s cost of living. Helmsley quickly brought two bottles and mugs over to a booth by the door. Once seated, I could feel poor Helmsley’s anxiety multiply.
“Calm down.”
“It’s just that, well, you know, I don’t have many women friends and I feel very different about this one …” He then launched into a poetic preamble about man’s profound and incurable loneliness and how the soul itself is a piston-shaped apparatus that creates a series of vast obliterating implosions which are the true motivations of all man’s actions. Nothing was simple. After the earlier session with Miguel, I couldn’t stomach any more.
I grabbed the beer mug, shoved it to his lips, and turned it bottoms up. He started guzzling as he struggled for the handle. When he finished it, he put the mug down and apologized.
The door suddenly whipped open with such a bang that Helmsley’s empty bottle fell over. A gang of young locals stormed in. The last of them broke from the rest and shoved into our booth. Pushing up against Helmsley was an older lady. She took Helmsley’s hair in her hands and gave him a hard unexpurgated kiss on the mouth. I couldn’t believe it.
Angela was a small, butchy mama who couldn’t have been any younger
than forty-five. Her dark wrinkled skin sagged loosely away from all bones, and as she banded her arms around Helmsley, I battled a grin.
“So whatchu boys talkin’ ’bout?” All I could do was hold back that grin and look at him—so this was his salvation from ruin, the melter of his stalagmite.
“We were just waiting for you, dear,” Helmsley replied tenderly.
“Ain’t talkin’ dutty, eh?” The she-wolf grinned.
“No, hon, I was just mentioning you, in fact.”
“You tease,” she replied while yanking Helmsley downward so that his head was resting across her lap the same way Sarahs head had laid across that chunky punk’s lap in the teen-bar a couple of weeks before. As he struggled to rise, she splat her lips on his and the two of them tumbled underneath the table.
In time a hand reached up from under the table, and feeling around the table top it snatched my half-finished bottle of beer and disappeared with it back under the table. In a gulp’s time, an empty bottle was replaced on the table top. I looked around the bar uncomfortably. The table started rumbling and up popped her head. Extending her hand over the table, she hollered, “Heimslock told me a lot aboucha.”
“Dat’s swell,” I replied. When we shook hands, she squeezed my knuckles into a painful bundle. She laughed when I retrieved my injured hand and asked, “What’s a matter, not man enough?”
Helmsley slowly reappeared from under the table. His hair was tousled and he blushed as he straightened it with his fingers. Silently he rebuttoned his shirt.
“So yer friend ’ere ain’t man enough for a little handshake.”
“No,” I retorted. “I gots ta idmit it, Helmslock, the little lady’s gots da man’s grip.”
Helmsley replied with a swift kick from under the table. Out of respect
for my friend, I took the back seat and watched as Angela ruled the evening with filthy remarks and vulgar jokes. He was almost as attractive as she was ugly. When Helmsley’s glasses were off, if his old pants and hair-style were updated, he could resemble a manly Mel Gibson. He was muscular and had dark, deep-set eyes. His appearance was as remarkable and singular as his character. Unfortunately one fork in this road to gorgeous was that while his intellect was unremitting, he usually froze when dealing with people whom he hadn’t known for a while. Subsequently he had no luck with small talk and usually came off as a nerd.
While stuck there soaring to new heights of boredom, I speculated on possible motives for Helmsley’s interest in her. Lately he had been involved in the study of early man. Perhaps he was immersing himself in a Neanderthal woman. Or perhaps this was the first girl he had ever met who just reached down into his pants and plucked out what she wanted; fuck the small talk. I could see how this normally crass feature would appear charming to a guy who had always been too shy to present himself.
But still, she seemed hideous at the time. Could love bridge the intellectual and cultural abyss between them? Could love amputate the fifteen or so years that tossed her ahead of him? Could love repair so much? If so, then for the first time in my life, sitting there, I realized how love was truly great. It had always been easy for me to fall head over heels for some bouncing blonde from Texarkana, Texas, to sip her like a dry martini and smash the crystal in the fireplace of fate. But it was only Budweiser that my dear pal Helmsley was guzzling, as he nestled his head into the folds of her belly and looked into her cavernous nostrils.
For different reasons, we had all downed what would have measured out to at least a half-keg of beer. Angela, who had drunk twice as much as Helmsley, was no drunker. Suddenly Angela jumped to her feet and, yanking
Helmsley up, decided it was time to go. Before departing, though, she cut a profound fart. I was too drunk to mind, though; I knew I wouldn’t make it even as far as the door. I sat there and ordered another beer.
Alcohol corrodes one’s dexterity and sense of proportion, but it also heightens one’s emotions. Smelling that fart, I thought of Helmsley in love. Had I spent my whole life confusing love with a series of erections? Love to Helmsley must have been an utter necessity, whereas for me it was always just a luxurious distraction. I wished that I had the need to lust after some goiter-necked, tooth-decayed, leg-blistered old bag. If I could love like that it would be a pyramid of emotions, an Arc de Triomphe of affection.
When the time arrived for the bar to close, I had to be helped out. No sooner did I plop myself down on a neighboring stoop than my stomach reared up. Staring down at the pool of vomit that had fountained out of me, I made out the expensive Italian meal I had eaten earlier that evening. The regurgitated pasta and cheese were little islands in a vast sea of beer. I recall feeling through that drunken stupor a deep loss; it had been a magnificent meal.
If I could love it enough, I would be able to eat it up all over again. It probably would taste just as good, once I got over the disgusting appearance. I knelt in the slop and gazed into it with as much devotion as I could muster. Dogs eat their regurgitation, I prompted myself. Slowly stretching my fingers out, I stroked along the meaty lumps and cheesy threads, and then brought my fingertips to my lips. I tried, but for some reason I just couldn’t get beyond the bilious stench.
“Hey,” someone yelled, following it with a prodding kick to my ribs. A large guy with mountainous shoulders loomed above me.
“What da fuck you doin?”
A gang of teenagers behind him were looking down at me grimly. They
knew when a good beating would be therapeutic As I scrambled to unsteady feet, I realized there was no chance of running away.
“Well, I was just eating, you know, a meatball hero, and I look at my hand here, and my high school graduation ring is gone, so I … uh, upchuck here, and I was just looking for it, you know, it had a diamond stone.”
“Diamond?” the most brilliant of them queried. “What public school has a diamond for a graduation stone?”
“Who said public?” I countered. “It was parochial.”
“Which one?” asked the guy with the twin tower shoulders.
“Maternal Lamentations. Over in Sheepshead Bay.”
“We just beat them in basketball,” one of the morons said, to my relief.
“Fuck it,” I said, looking wistfully at the vomit. I slowly walked away. After I had staggered away half a block, I looked back and saw the bastards kicking through my poor puddle of barf. As I turned away, I heard one of them yell to another, “Gypsies steal gems that way.”
Late afternoon the next day, I awoke with a punishing hangover. I arose slowly and remembered the previous night with disbelief. I peeked into the slightly opened door of Helmsley’s bedroom to see if he was sleeping alone. The room was empty and nothing had been altered since yesterday. He had been out all night. I went back to my couch and retreated back into sleep. When I awoke again, it was dark out and I was starving. I recalled the barf episode of the night before, and quickly brushed my teeth. It was only six PM. I took a shower and a couple of Tylenol and called Miguel to ask him when I could come in to start training. He instructed me to come in as soon as the energy was right. I dressed and got the F, then changed for the L to Third Avenue where I walked south to the theater. Upon my arrival, Miguel asked me, “Are you sure you’re in the right energy so soon?”
“I stopped in a nearby Radio Shack and checked on the meter. I’m ready.”
“All right,” he said, and we began with a tour of the theater.
“This is your theater,” he explained as we walked to the stage. “You must look at it as if it’s a part of your own body.” Sex was lurking all around us. It was crouched low in the darkened seats and projected high on the stage.
“This way” He led me to a staircase behind the stage and to a downstairs room. The place looked and sounded like a medieval dungeon, with dark stone walls, puddles of water, virtually no lighting, and the moans. There was constant moaning all around. A hand out of the darkness groped my thigh.
“Fuck off!” I yelled.
“Shhhh,” Miguel whispered back. “Occasionally someone might reach out; all you do is simply take their hand and push it away. Not rudely or quickly, everyone here is as human as you are.”
We went back up a staircase to the front of the theater. “Now look here.” He pointed to a burnt-out bulb. “Ow, see that? Ow ow, you should smart when you see that. A bulb is burnt-out and now the theater is in pain. Say ow.”
“Ow. Why?”
“You should be in pain until you replace the bulb. You’re both the nerve system and the lymph node system of the theater.”
“You mean the white blood cells,” I corrected his little metaphor.
“Why not the lymph node?”
“Well, isn’t the lymph node just sweat and pimple pus?”
“So?”
“Well, the white blood cells destroy foreign objects that enter the body Didn’t you see the movie
Fantastic Voyage?”
“I thought the spleen does that.”
“No, the spleen stores blood, and I think the liver cleans it.”
“All right, enough. You’re the spleen, the liver, the white blood cells, the lymph nodes. You’re all of that and anything else you can think of.”
He gave other pointers as we walked back through the dark theater. Looking up at the beam of projected light, I saw something strange. As I walked down the aisle, I noticed the ray from the projection booth was parallel to the seats. Out of an architectural interest, I squatted to inspect the incline of the floor.
“You wouldn’t have a level, would you?”
“Very good,” he replied, and yanking me up to my feet, he quickly put his finger over my lips and murmured, “I’ll explain later.”
“Explain what?” I asked as soon as he closed the office door behind us.
“Did you notice the angle of the screen?”
“No, what’s wrong with it?”
“It’s slanted backward at the top. And all the seats are anchored at such an angle that everyone sitting has to apply a soft but constant thrust to sit back in the seat.
“Doesn’t anyone complain?”
“No”—he grinned—“they just leave. No one can bear it for more than a couple of hours.”
“You can probably get a team of carpenters to fix it,” I replied. “Who fucked up?”
“Fix it? That’s like fixing the Mona Lisa! It’s brilliant.”
“Brilliant?”
“Look, porn theaters aren’t like other theaters. People come to a porn theater and they stay forever. This way they either leave or they suffer.” It was an interesting theory, but who could guess how many patrons never returned because they didn’t care for the back strain?
“Who thought of it?”
“Only one man could come up with something so ingenious, Otto Waldet. Did you ever see the last scene of
Lady from Shanghai?
I Otto built that set for Welles. He was a set designer up until the early fifties, when he was blacklisted. By the early sixties, he started one of the first chains of gayporn theaters. He just died last year.”
“Is that why the projection booth is at that strange angle?”
“Oh no, that’s something entirely different. This theater was initially a nursery school. The projection booth was built between the second and the third floor.”
I was introduced to my staff: a middle-aged box office lady named Rosa and a Cambodian porter named Thi. Miguel finally led me back into his office and had me fill out a W-4 form and then we agreed on a mutually accommodating schedule.
“Why don’t you work with me the rest of this evening so we can get to know each other?”
The evening was almost over anyway, so I decided to stay for the remainder. Opening up a compact refrigerator hidden under the desk, Miguel took out a couple beers and a bag of banana chips. Then he pulled out a small television and we decided on a football game. It was a remarkably American evening for a neo-hippie in a gay porn theater.