You see, I may be trying to forget, but I still remember quite a lot. I think we all do when we put our minds to it (and sometimes, rather more nastily, when we don’t). I even remember something one of those South American novelists said—you know, the ones they call the Magical Realists? Not the guy’s name, that’s not important, but this quote: As infants, our first victory comes in grasping some bit of the world, usually our mothers’ fingers. Later we discover that the world, and the things of the world, are grasping us, and have been all along. Borges? Yes, it might have been Borges. Or it might have been Marquez. That I don’t remember. I just know I got her air conditioner running, and when cool air started blowing out of the con-vector, it lit up her whole face. I also know it’s true, that thing about how perception switches around and we come to realize that the things we thought we were holding are actually holding us. Keeping us prisoner, perhaps—Thoreau certainly thought so—but also holding us in place. That’s the trade-off. And no matter what Thoreau might have thought, I believe the trade is mostly a fair one. Or I did then; now, I’m not so sure.
And I know these things happened in late August of 2002, not quite a year after a piece of the sky fell down and everything changed for all of us.
On an afternoon about a week after Sir Scott Staley donned his Good Samaritan armor and successfully battled the fearsome air conditioner, I took my afternoon walk to the Staples on 83rd Street to get a box of Zip disks and a ream of paper. I owed a fellow forty pages of background on the development of the Po-laroid camera (which is more interesting a story than you might think). When I got back to my apartment, there was a pair of sunglasses with red frames and very distinctive lenses on the little table in the foyer where I keep bills that need to be paid, claim checks, overdue-book notices, and things of that nature. I recognized the glasses at once, and all the strength went out of me. I didn’t fall, but I dropped my packages on the floor and leaned against the side of the door, trying to catch my breath and staring at those sunglasses.
If there had been nothing to lean against, I believe I would have swooned like a miss in a Victorian novel—one of those where the lustful vampire appears at the stroke of midnight.
Two related but distinct emotional waves struck me. The first was that sense of horrified shame you feel when you know you’re about to be caught in some act you will never be able to explain. The memory that comes to mind in this regard is of a thing that happened to me—or almost happened—when I was sixteen.
My mother and sister had gone shopping in Portland and I supposedly had the house to myself until evening. I was reclining naked on my bed with a pair of my sister’s underpants wrapped around my cock.
The bed was scattered with pictures I’d clipped from magazines I’d found in the back of the garage—the previous owner’s stash of Penthouse and Gallery magazines, very likely. I heard a car come crunching into the driveway. No mistaking the sound of that motor; it was my mother and sister. Peg had come down with some sort of flu bug and started vomiting out the window. They’d gotten as far as Poland Springs and turned around.
I looked at the pictures scattered all over the bed, my clothes scattered all over the floor, and the foam of pink rayon in my left hand. I remember how the strength flowed out of my body, and the terrible sense of lassitude that came in its place. My mother was yelling for me—”Scott, Scott, come down and help me with your sister, she’s sick”— and I remember thinking, “What’s the use? I’m caught. I might as well accept it, I’m caught and this is the first thing they’ll think of when they think about me for the rest of my life: Scott, the jerk-off artist.”
But more often than not a kind of survival overdrive kicks in at such moments. That’s what happened to me. I might go down, I decided, but I wouldn’t do so without at least an effort to save my dignity. I threw the pictures and the panties under the bed. Then I jumped into my clothes, moving with numb but sure-fingered speed, all the time thinking of this crazy old game show I used to watch, Beat the Clock.
I can remember how my mother touched my flushed cheek when I got downstairs, and the thoughtful concern in her eyes. “Maybe you’re getting sick, too,” she said.
“Maybe I am,” I said, and gladly enough. It was half an hour before I discovered I’d forgotten to zip my fly. Luckily, neither Peg nor my mother noticed, although on any other occasion one or both of them would have asked me if I had a license to sell hot dogs (this was what passed for wit in the house where I grew up). That day one of them was too sick and the other was too worried to be witty. So I got a total pass.
Lucky me.
What followed the first emotional wave that August day in my apartment was much simpler: I thought I was going out of my mind. Because those glasses couldn’t be there. Absolutely could not. No way.
Then I raised my eyes and saw something else that had most certainly not been in my apartment when I left for Staples half an hour before (locking the door behind me, as I always did). Leaning in the corner between the kitchenette and the living room was a baseball bat. Hillerich & Bradsby, according to the label. And while I couldn’t see the other side, I knew what was printed there well enough: CLAIMS
ADJUSTOR, the words burned into the ash with the tip of a soldering iron and then colored deep blue.
Another sensation rushed through me: a third wave. This was a species of surreal dismay. I don’t believe in ghosts, but I’m sure that at that moment I looked as though I had just seen one.
I felt that way, too. Yes indeed. Because those sunglasses had to be gone—long-time gone, as the Dixie Chicks say. Ditto Cleve Farrell’s Claims Adjustor. (“Besboll been bery-bery good to mee,” Cleve would sometimes say, waving the bat over his head as he sat at his desk. “In-SHOO-rance been bery-bery bad.”) I did the only thing I could think of, which was to grab up Sonja D’Amico’s shades and trot back down to the elevator with them, holding them out in front of me the way you might hold out something nasty you found on your apartment floor after a week away on vacation—a piece of decaying food, or the body of a poisoned mouse. I found myself remembering a conversation I’d had about Sonja with a fellow named Warren Anderson. She must have looked like she thought she was going to pop back up and ask somebody for a Coca-Cola, I had thought when he told me what he’d seen. Over drinks in the Blarney Stone Pub on Third Avenue, this had been, about six weeks after the sky fell down. After we’d toasted each other on not being dead. Things like that have a way of sticking, whether you want them to or not. Like a musical phrase or the nonsense chorus to a pop song that you just can’t get out of your head. You wake up at three in the morning, needing to take a leak, and as you stand there in front of the bowl, your cock in your hand and your mind about ten percent awake, it comes back to you: Like she thought she was going to pop back up. Pop back up and ask for a Coke. At some point during that conversation Warren had asked me if I remembered her funny sunglasses, and I said I did. Sure I did.
Four floors down, Pedro the doorman was standing in the shade of the awning and talking with Rafe the FedEx man. Pedro was a serious hardboy when it came to letting deliverymen stand in front of the building— he had a seven-minute rule, a pocket watch with which to enforce it, and all the beat cops were his buddies—but he got on with Rafe, and sometimes the two of them would stand there for twenty minutes or more with their heads together, doing the old New York Yak. Politics? Besboll? The Gospel According to Henry David Thoreau? I didn’t know and never cared less than on that day. They’d been there when I went up with my office supplies, and were still there when a far less carefree Scott Staley came back down.