I Just Want My Pants Back (14 page)

We turned on Nineteenth and traversed the two avenues in silence. Patty stared out the window and I started to get tired again. But suddenly the taxi screeched to the curb and we were there. She pulled five dollars out from somewhere and we were standing on the empty avenue.

“You know,” she said, looking around, “some cabdrivers are very nice. The others just hate humans, they deal with them all day and are sick of them. Those guys are just dogs eating garbage, in my book.” She put her arm around me. “This way, neighbor.”

We walked up to the buzzer of a low-rise building and Patty punched the third-floor button. After a pause, the door buzzed open and in we went to the fluorescent-lit lobby. Patty pushed the button for the elevator. Immediately the door opened. Inside was a big-in-every-way man wearing an oversized T-shirt and sunglasses and holding a walkie-talkie.

Patty smiled at him. “Hi, I’m a friend of Gus’s. We’re just going up to his place.”

Gigantor didn’t miss a beat. “Five each.” I gave him a ten and the doors closed, the gears whirred, gravity was defied, and twenty seconds later we reached our destination. The Stones’ “Country Honk” was playing as we stepped from the bright elevator directly into a dark room. It did look much like it was someone’s apartment. We passed a few old sofas bordering a coffee table where some silhouettes sat laughing. It didn’t seem very crowded; there were maybe thirty people in a room that could have easily held a hundred. Patty led me into the kitchen, where a bald man in a white T-shirt in his early fifties was filling the fridge with Bud bottles from a cardboard case. I guessed this was the bar.

Patty got a Bud and I got a Jack and Coke, hoping the Coke would wake me up a bit. At this point in a late, late night, trying to wake up was among the stupidest things I could choose to do. Also, a quarter-glass of cola was not going to undo any sort of damage. That would take drugs. And I could probably get drugs here. I shook the evil thought from my head, took a sip, waded through a few people, and sank into an easy chair against the wall. Patty pulled up a stool next to me and we drank, surveying the scene. People were generally older than I would’ve expected; only a few folks looked like they were in their twenties, the rest spanning that hard-to-pinpoint age of above thirty and under forty-five.

“A lot of the people here work at St. Vincent’s Hospital; they get off their shifts and need a place to go. A lot of city workers on the eight-to-five shift as well,” Patty said. “Sometimes there’ll be sanitation workers; you’ll smell those, and also a lot of the guys who deliver flowers to the flower district. It’s early for most of them, though.”

I straightened up and reached into my pocket, wondering exactly what time it was. My cell phone read 4:27. Pow, right in the liver. There was no turning back now. I took a big swig of my drink. I was on the moving walkway to Shametown. I promised myself that, before I shut my eyes later, I would drink an entire Gatorade. A friend had once told me that the best hangover prevention was Pedialyte, the medicine designed to keep infants from becoming dehydrated. I made a mental note to buy a case. Then I smelled something. Something warm and familiar. It wasn’t fresh-baked bread.

Patty was exhaling a cloud of pot smoke from a Rasta-style cone-shaped joint. “I finally got some of my own,” she smiled, passing it to me. “Do you want a little, or have you had enough?”

I took it and sucked in the sweet smoke. I tried not to think of her cold or allergies or whatever it was. “I want more than enough,” I coughed with a bad British accent. Out came the smoke. “What movie?”

“I don’t know,” said Patty, taking the joint and putting it to her lips. “
Apocalypse Now
?”

“
Arthur
,” I said. It was one of my favorites. Dudley Moore played a drunk amazingly well. My second-favorite movie with a drunk in it was
My Favorite Year
, starring my pseudonym, O’Toole.

Patty passed the joint back to me. “Dudley Moore, it was so sad what happened to him. Watching him degenerate like that, it made me cry. You know he was a fabulous piano player, but after he got sick he couldn’t even do that. I saw him on
Sixty Minutes
before he passed, poor thing.” She coughed and I heard the sea inside her shift.

I took a small pull on the bone and gave it back to Patty. “I’m done, thanks.” My mind started speeding along and I found myself humming the sappy Christopher Cross tune from
Arthur
, “When you get stuck between the moon and New York Ci…ty…” I was thinking about Dudley, maybe he brought it on himself, maybe he flew too close to the sun by marrying Susan Anton, she was like a six-foot-two internationally credentialed piece of ass and he was like five-nothing and jowly. Then I felt bad. You shouldn’t joke about others’ misfortune. But others’ misfortune was often the best thing to joke about. Some comedians made entire careers out of it. Cartoons too. Look at
Tom and Jerry
. I fucking hated that Jerry. Asshole mouse. The best way to kill him, I thought, would be to feed him a fistful of Alka-Seltzers and a quart of tomato juice, then duct-tape closed all his orifices and wait for the big bang. Or was it his orifi? I took a sip of the Jack and Coke and breathed. My synapses were at DEFCON 5.

Patty was staring off over her shoulder, giggling. I figured she must have been as big a mess as me. I was a huge mess. I was a toilet. I was at the bottom of the landfill where all the toilets went, soiled and shivering but dancing gamely like a Rockette. “What are you giggling about, huh?”

Patty turned and pushed her hair behind her ears. “Oh, nothing. I just had déjà vu. I was thinking for a second that we were the same age. Because that’s how I feel, especially when I’m tipsy, and when I look at you and see your little line-free face, I forget that I’m a lot older. This could be any night for me from twenty or thirty years ago, you know?” She smiled. “Anyway, I was thinking about this one guy I used to run with, Douglas, and how we used to always smoke pot in bars, kinda like this. Back then, I’d get so nervous and paranoid when I was high. I always thought some stranger on their way to the bathroom was going to narc on us. I was really silly about a lot of things, you know? Well, you don’t know, but you will. But then again you kind of won’t I guess, because I kind of don’t. I’m still silly about so many things. Maybe it’s because I never settled down or had kids, but I think my brain is in arrested development or something like that. Or maybe I’m just drunk.” She laughed, took a long swallow of her Bud, and sank back into her seat. “But I’m happy with it all, you know? I did pretty good,” she said quietly.

People had been arriving at the apartment, and little by little, it had filled up. I reached into my glass, took out an ice cube, and sucked on it, finally crunching it up between my molars. The time had come. “What do you think, Patty? Should we split before the sun rises?”

Patty stood up and stretched. “Yeah, let’s go.”

We got into the elevator with the big fellow and went back down to the lobby. It was that time when it’s almost light but it’s not but it is. We walked to the curb to hail a cab as a jogger bounded past. We looked at each other and cracked up.

It happened in the cab as we were speeding toward home. A bad wave of exhaustion and nausea. “Suddenly feeling grim,” I said through tight teeth as I rolled down the window. Stupid fucking child-safety window only went down partway. Great, I was going to have to thread the needle. With vomit. But fuck them all, I didn’t care if I puked in my shirt and had to wear it all day in the hot sun at a beach volleyball tournament.

“Keep it together, Jason,” Patty said, rubbing my neck. “We are so close.”

I bit my lip and focused out the window on the blur of the awakening city. The wind blew through my hair but I still felt like shit. We finally pulled up at the corner and I jumped out of the cab and started racewalking toward our building. Heel toe heel toe. Patty caught up with me a second later. “Let’s get you upstairs, partner.”

I never noticed it before, but the sun rose really quickly once it got itself started. Everything was turning yellow and the fucking birds were squawking. Patty opened the door and we hurried inside. Bad sweat drenched my brow. I took the stairs two at a time, keys already in hand. I wasn’t going to make it. I reached our landing and made a desperate attempt at the lock, but it was too late. Krakatoa erupted deep within me and I covered the bottom of my door with what Jesse Jackson might’ve called a multicolored mosaic. Sucking for air, I tried to remember what I had eaten, my face inches above the mess. The smell hit me and I retched again. This was the worst, the fucking worst. I was on my knees waiting for the next wave. I wiped my mouth with my forearm, tears in my eyes, nose running. “I’m going to fucking die,” I groaned. I let fly again. Less colors, more liquid.

Patty kneeled beside me and put her hand on my back. “No, you’re not,” she said.

I retched again, inverting my stomach like a reversible raincoat, but nothing came out. “Ugh, Christ! How do you know?” I cried, and spat into the puddle.

“Because it takes one to know one.”

I looked over at her, a string of saliva hanging from my mouth.

“Lung cancer,” she said.

I contemplated the tight little smile and the eyes that didn’t wink to say, “Just kidding.”

“I’ve got lung cancer,” she repeated, her voice steady, her expression stone.

I turned back to the dirty floor. The taste of bile rolled over my tongue. Gravity took it from there.

12

After twenty-four hours of whispering “I promise I will never drink again,” I was back at work Friday morning, on time. I felt mostly better but Wednesday night had been like a punch to the throat. I manned the receptionist desk, uncrumpled my brown bag, pulled out a bagel and OJ, and went online to see if any interesting e-mails had arrived during my sick day. Stacey had written, inviting me to dinner with her and Eric that night. I felt I could handle it, and so I replied in the affirmative. Besides, I had a few things I really should be asking them if I was to actually accomplish anything before my next rabbi class.

Tina had written letting me know there was an eighties-themed party that night as well. The thought of alcohol and girls dressed up like Olivia Newton-John circa
Xanadu
gave me the sweats, but I knew enough to know you never knew. That was the thing about promises; you could always say, “I made you, and I can break you.” I hopped on IM.

Melinda wasn’t in yet, the phone wasn’t ringing, nothing was happening. I clicked from the
Times
over to
Pitchfork
, excited to mock her tardiness for a change. The site loaded and the record review section stared me in the face. “Ah yes, record reviews,” I thought. Maybe now was the perfect time to finally write one myself.

I quickly opened up a Word document and saved it as “jason.reviews.” I settled back in my chair and fingered the keys for a few moments, unsure of where to start. I didn’t even know which record I wanted to critique. Sara walked out of her office and started to make photocopies in the far corner. I wasn’t going to be able to focus on this at work. I quit out of Word and started Google Image–searching things like “grandma thong” to see if anything spectacular came up. Things did come up. Apparently, those who fancied old women liked their old women to also be “hairy.” Now I knew. I was learning and growing.

Time passed, slowly but surely. JB came out of his office and holy crapola right up to me at the desk. It was an occurrence as rare as Halley’s Comet.

“Hi, Jason. Have you seen Melinda today?” he asked, fingering the knot of his tie. JB wore jeans and a shirt and tie every day, without fail.

“Um, no, she hasn’t come in yet, actually,” I said. We had absolutely no rapport. “Maybe she’s sick, usually she calls if she’s going to be late.” I paused, then decided to throw in for good measure, “There’s a stomach virus going around, it really knocked me out of commission yesterday.”

“Oh? Well, I hope she’s okay. Let me know if you hear from her. Thanks, Jay.” He crinkled his forehead. “Do you prefer Jason or Jay?” he asked. It was a question that would’ve been polite six months ago, when he had first hired me.

“Oh, um, either is fine.” I cringed.

“Very good,” said JB, and he walked back to his office.

I returned to the Internet, wondering if JB thought I was an oddball. It was getting near time for lunch, and I considered calling Melinda’s cell phone. But I didn’t have to; she walked through the door a moment later, taking her sunglasses off mid-step.

“Oh, hello,” I said smugly, and opened my arms wide. “Don’t worry, because I have it all under control.”

She cracked a grin. “That’s good. Because I just sold my fucking play!”

“What?! Awesome!”

“I know! I just came from my lawyer’s. Can you believe I have a lawyer? I have a cramp from all the papers I had to sign.” She was beaming.

“Wait a second. Like two days ago you were all like, ‘I don’t know, probably never happen, it’s all preliminary’ and shit,” I said.

Melinda pulled a chair over and sat down. “I know, it was close then, but I was feeling superstitious and I didn’t want to jinx it. I haven’t even told my parents or anything. Actually I’m going to call them and some other people, and then let’s grab lunch and talk, ’kay?”

“Sure. Oh, hey, JB just came by looking for you, if you even give a shit anymore, Madam Playwright.”

“Oh, I was supposed to help him on this thing. Oh, well.” She got up and went back to the empty casting room to make her calls in peace.

I was happy for her but a little stunned. Wow, Melinda was out of here. Did you get rich when you sold a play? Nah, that couldn’t be. But still, I was thinking it must be pretty good money; it had been bought by a well-known producer, not some after-school theater. Hell, if it succeeded, it might even go to Broadway. I could say I knew her when. “We were both receptionists at this casting place. I mean, well, I still am.”

Melinda emerged and we went out to a diner around the corner. In between bites she told me the whole story. I chewed and listened and listened and chewed. She told me about her deal and how it worked, and the rewrites of certain scenes she had to do. She really liked all of the producer’s suggestions, so she was excited to get started—which she needed to, stat.

“I better be invited to all the fabulous parties with all the fabulous people,” I said, sipping my Diet Coke through the straw, focusing on getting the last drops hiding between the ice cubes.

“Of course!”

Melinda couldn’t stop smiling and even picked up the bill. We headed back upstairs. She went into JB’s office and closed the door. I went back to my seat at the desk. I sighed and checked my e-mail. Nothing. No one was on IM, either.

A few minutes later she emerged. She didn’t even give two weeks’ notice. She couldn’t. Those rewrites had to start immediately. So she put the one or two things she had at the office in a box, kissed me on the cheek, and left. We each promised to make plans and soon. Then she was gone. That was it.

 * * * * * 

I
ended up being stuck there until seven. I had to work the camera for a casting session for outlaw-biker types. I stood around for an hour videotaping hairy, fat guys, most of whom showed up in leather pants and/or leather vests. Each guy had one line to deliver, and almost all opted to deliver it shirtless: “Yeah, fuckin’-A right I fucked him.” I was wondering if the role was for a gay porn film or a gangster flick. I couldn’t tell from the film title,
Happy Father’s Day
. That could have really gone in either direction. The place reeked of bad breath and musk by the time I left. People had so many different smells. And my job allowed me to experience them all. How magnificent.

After the last Hells Angel or Leatherman, I made my way over to meet Stacey and Eric for dinner at this Middle Eastern spot on Tenth Street that had great hummus and pitzas, aka pita pizzas. They already had a table when I arrived, and were sipping some wine and nibbling on olives.

“Hey, buddy,” said Eric, shaking my hand.

“Look who’s working late,” said Stacey, giving me a hug.

I got myself a beer and, lickety-split, my whole temperance movement was kaput. We figured out our order and got it in to the waiter. Eric began telling us a story about how he had observed brain surgery earlier in the day.

“The amazing thing is that when you cut through the skull, it’s not unlike being a carpenter. You really have to use your body. You could see the surgeon straining his muscles, flexing down on the saw. Even though it’s mechanical, it still requires putting your shoulder to it.” Eric brought his glass to his lips. “It was really intense.”

“I’ll bet,” said Stacey. “I guess that’s why it’s considered the hardest thing you could do, hence the phrase, ‘It’s not brain surgery.’”

“Ha-ha,” said Eric. He kissed his fiancée, then turned to me. “So how’ve you been, Jason, what’s new in your life?”

“Not that much. Work kinda sucks, but that’s not new.”

“Hey, anything happening on the Langford front?” asked Stacey.

“Status quo.” I popped an olive into my mouth and used my teeth to separate the meat from the stone. I was thinking about that surgeon. “Let me ask you this, Er,” I said, taking the pit from my mouth and putting it into the designated pit dish in the center of the table. “What do you know about lung cancer?”

“Um, well, I know a little. What do you want to know?”

“Just an overview is all. Is it treatable?”

“Lung cancer is pretty aggressive, but like all cancer it depends on when it’s caught, and different people respond differently to treatment.” He scratched his eyebrow. “Why? What’s up?”

“My neighbor Patty, I’ve probably mentioned her before, the eccentric older woman who lives next door to me…”

“The one you smoked pot with that time,” said Stacey. Then she frowned. “Oh, gosh, no.”

“Yeah, she told me she had lung cancer. She said she was dying. But this was after a really late night of drinking, I mean, she doesn’t seem weak or sick.” I took a pull on my beer. “But she does have this awful, disgusting cough.”

“Well, it’s impossible for me to tell, obviously,” said Eric. “But what makes cancer patients weak more than anything is the chemo,” said Eric. “Do you know if she’s started that yet?”

“Wait,” interrupted Stacey. “What do you mean she told you after a late night of drinking?”

I gave them the executive summary. Eric couldn’t offer much more, but thought she at least sounded strong if she was pounding drinks. Stacey sort of tsk-tsked me on going out ’til dawn with my neighbor, then missing work hung over, but I let it go. I wasn’t looking for a lecture, and defending myself would’ve brought one on. I was a little sorry I’d brought the whole thing up.

The food arrived and we all started shoving it in. Mouth half full of pitza, I changed the subject. “Let’s talk wedding, shall we?”

“Let’s,” said Stacey.

“Okay,” I said, “well, I’ve been hard at work on your ceremony, and before I tell you my preliminary thoughts, which, let me just say, won’t be until after the rabbi helps me next week, I just wanted to ask you some really basic questions. Like, do you guys want to write your own vows, for starters?”

“I think the traditional ones are fine, don’t you honey?” said Eric, taking another slice.

“I mean, yeah, they’re ‘fine,’ but don’t you think we should personalize them a little?” Stacey turned to me. “We haven’t discussed it yet, obviously.” Then back to Eric. “I don’t think I want to repeat the same vows everyone else does, it just seems so impersonal.” She took a sip of her wine. “What do you think?”

He looked back at her for a moment before speaking. “Okay, that’s cool. So we’ll write something up I guess.”

“Okay, very good, now, let me ask you this,” I said, reaching for more pitza.

“But,” interrupted Eric, “I think it’s nice to say the same vows as everyone else. And by everyone else, I mean the same vows our parents said, and our grandparents, you know? Tradition.”

“Honey,” said Stacey, wiping her mouth with her napkin. “I totally hear you, but I don’t necessarily agree with the traditional vows. Take the part that says that I, as the bride, will ‘honor and obey’ you. That seems a little outdated to me, and I don’t really want to say it.”

“Jesus, it’s not like you have to take them so literally,” said Eric, spreading his arms. “But that’s fine, let’s just take that part out. Boom, done.”

“But why wouldn’t we just write our own? I think that would be nice,” said Stacey.

“Because I think it’s corny when people write their own,” answered Eric, jamming a piece of crust into his mouth. “It’s so pretentious.” He put on a bad French accent. “‘Oh vee are so much more een love than anyone else has evair been. Vee have written zeese sacred words to describe our love to zee whole world.’”

“You’re thinking of your cousins! That’s just because they wrote those saccharine, lovey-dovey ones. Ours don’t have to be like that. And the whole point of a wedding is to show your love to the world, anyway.”

“That’s a whole other story,” Eric said, rolling his eyes at me. “Besides, when are we going to find the time to sit down and write vows? You know how crazy we’ve both been.”

Stacey stared at him. “I think we can find the time to write our wedding vows.”

Eric broke. He reached across the table and grabbed her hand. “Okay, okay, we’ll write the stupid—” He smiled. “I mean
sacred
vows. ’Kay?”

Stacey pulled her hand away. “What the fuck did you mean by”—she deepened her voice to impersonate him—“‘that’s a whole other story’?”

I got up from the table. “I’m going to leave you two love-birds for a minute to visit the restroom.”

I walked away briskly. Marriage looked awesome. I couldn’t wait.

Inside the bathroom I splashed some water on my face and then texted Tina. I wasn’t dying for a big night, but I hadn’t seen her in a bit and I thought I should try to at least grab a drink. She had an actual relationship simmering and it was high time I got some more details. Or I could just bag it and go home and knock on Patty’s door. But Tina texted back instantaneously that she could meet me around the corner for a tipple. I wrote her that I’d call when the meal was over.