Nothing Is Terrible Read online

  The boy who may have been the boy in the park with the pot reclined at his station reading The Village Voice. This time he looked to me like Joseph Samuels, so basically I had no idea what the hell was going on.

  “I’m back,” I said.

  “Yes.”

  “No one came to get me.”

  “Yes.”

  “You told me to wait outside and someone would come get me. That was forty minutes ago.”

  “I’m having a vague recollection that leaves me indifferent.”

  “I’m here to see—”

  “I know.”

  “Are you related to Joe Samuels?”

  “What can I do to persuade you to go away?”

  “I’m related to Skip Hartman. Do you know who she is? Joe and Ruella came to our house for dinner.”

  “Oh, so you are September Hartman’s little—yes, well, that’s a whore of a different color. Oh, did I say whore? I meant horse.”

  “You’re as funny as breast cancer.”

  Something like glee entered the rough field of the face of this boy or man who resembled Joe Samuels, except inasmuch as he was black where Joe was white, and who resembled the boy in the park, except inasmuch as he had a rough, wide face where the boy in the park had had just a face, as far as I could remember.

  He put on an ear-and-mouthpiece headset and appeared to be pressing numbers on a console. “Joey,” he said into the mouthpiece, “that little, ah”—he looked down at me questioningly, I made a certain unequivocal gesture, and he said—“girl is here to see you. The one—uh, residing at September Hartman’s pied-à-terre.”

  Moments later, fat Joe Samuels burst through a pair of swinging high-chrome doors to our right. “This is fantastic,” he said to me. “You’re here just in time to see what’s going on inside now. Your timing is fantastic.”

  The thinner, darker, younger, supercilious version of Joe looked at me now with something that was neither quite arrogance nor jealousy.

  I said, “Joe Junior here made me sit out on the sidewalk for an hour.”

  “Oh, Joe Junior, as you call him, likes to play. Let him have his fun. He’s a sweet kid,” Joe Senior said.

  “My name is not by any means Joe Junior. My name is Stephen Samuels,” Joe Junior said haughtily.

  Joe said, “Great things are afoot. Come right this way, sugar.”

  “My name is not by any means sugar. My name is Mary White,” sugar said haughtily, and was taken by the wrist and swept further into her own life.

  I remember kind of falling down a hallway and entering a white room that was filled with commotion and bright lights and silken limbs and large personalities and sophisticated camera equipment. The effect was dizzying—more than a small, traumatized, and nauseated child should be expected to understand or retain. People were taking pictures of other people against white walls and under bright lights shaded by gray umbrellas facing the wrong way. In fact, on the whole, plain people were taking pictures of pretty people, and I believe I’ll stop just short of developing a theory about what sort of person stands on which side of a fashion camera, for theories are a boy’s pastime. No theories here, Jim. Just plain old observation, and pretty goddamn sloppy observation at that. You know what I’m saying?

  Joe let go of my wrist and one of the blond women from the taxicab approached me, yelling, “Ruella thinks you’re very special!” She was standing practically on top of me and had linked her arm in mine but had to yell to be heard over the terrifyingly impersonal dance music. “Have you read Beyond Good and Evil yet?” the woman, an American, yelled.

  “No, but I’ve lived it!” I yelled.

  “Ruella turned me on to Nietzsche! It’s like I read Nietzsche and I go, ‘This is what I’ve always thought about everything? But he’s actually saying it?’ I read it and it’s like, ‘Oh my God I know what you mean!’ You have to read it, it’s so amazing and Ruella totally loves you. Listen I’ll buy you a copy of Beyond Good and Evil and have it messengered, what’s your address?” I told her my address, which she must have memorized because I didn’t especially see her writing it down.

  Joe entered my field of vision and yelled, “Mary White, this is Cindy Chenille! Ruella’s training Cindy to be a model as well as an Übermensch!”

  “Is Ruella a model or a photographer?” I asked.

  “Oh, no, no, no, no, no!” Cindy Chenille said. “Ruella is very spiritual and also very sensual! It’s like this: it’s like she is beautiful and she is sitting in that chair in this room and the photographers take our picture in the room and the picture comes out beautiful! Do you understand?”

  “No!”

  Cindy Chenille strode off into a crowd of those glamorous people who were either having their pictures taken or dancing or both.

  Joe led me to the director’s chair in which Ruella was seated monumentally He pressed a button on a small neat pile of black metal boxes and the music abruptly stopped. All conversation in the room stopped a moment later, as if conversation were not worthwhile without the struggle to be heard over the music. Joe pressed a skimpy black headset to the side of his large multitextured face and said, “Okay, people.” His voice sounded over the speakers that had been amplifying the music. “Take a lunch break.” All who had been dancing or shooting photos or meditating or carrying a bracelet left the room. Ruella and Joe and I remained alone in the enormous white room.

  Joe picked up a thermos off the floor, removed the cap, poured a pale brown liquid into a red plastic cup, and handed the cup to Ruella. “I prefer Gatorade but she likes this herbal stuff,” he said.

  “Several years ago I went on a spirit journey and spoke with some of the local plant life of southern New York State,” Ruella said.

  “The plant life’ll talk to Ruella,” Joe said. “Plant life clams up around me.”

  “You don’t let the plant life get a word in edgewise, darling,” Ruella said. “I asked the plants permission to harvest them for the good of myself and the people I love.”

  “She asked them what would be a nice drink for her to reenergize during her work, which is strenuous.”

  “What’s your work, exactly?” I said.

  “Darling, you are an intrusive little munchkin and I like you.”

  “Is that guy related to you?” I asked Joe.

  “What guy?”

  “The one who made me sit on the sidewalk.”

  “Oh, Stevie? He’s my bastard son. He’s filling in for the real receptionist, who got in a motorcycle accident, who I hope he gets back here soon skull fracture or no, because Stevie’s a riot and a brilliant kid and everything, but he sort of sits out there in reception and offends the wrong people every second of every day. Kid’s a bright ne’er-do-well and I blame myself.”

  “Who’s his mother?”

  “I’m not involved with the mother at this time, is the nature of these things. She’s on the Coast with an upstart fragrance company. I somewhat left the two of them eighteen years ago, and six years ago the kid shows up in my living room with his whole patrimony concept that he was very convincing about, a real bright kid. I like having him around but I just don’t know what to do with him, but I have a few ideas.”

  Skip Hartman entered the room, in brown leather. Cindy Chenille was pretty and Ruella Forecourt was magnificent, but Skip Hartman approaching with her long bare arms and leather vest and her level stride and a straw picnic basket with silver hasps overwhelmed me with scary delight. Ruella jumped up out of her chair to her full height and Joe bobbed his head vigorously. We were all happy to see Skip Hartman!

  “There’s no getting around the fantastic spinal carriage on you, Hartman,” Joe said.

  “In Skip Hartman I sense a quietude animated by a powerful life force,” Ruella said.

  “Skippy!” I said.

  “Wary Mary!” Skip said, and bent at the waist and offered me her hair to mess up.

  “She was once a model herself, you know,” Joe said to me.

  “Is
that where all your money comes from?” I asked.

  “No,” she said. “All my money comes from my father, a physician who struck it rich with a medical invention.”

  “What did he invent?”

  “A sort of crude proto-IUD. I have since aggrandized his holdings through prudent investment.”

  “And teaching,” I said.

  “No one aggrandizes through teaching,” she said.

  “She is so forthright,” Ruella said.

  “She ain’t that forthright,” I said, and while there may have been some truth to my remark, it sprang from a deep irrational mistrust of all who came close to me. What I would say now is that it’s better to trust someone who is untrustworthy than not to trust anyone at all.

  “Did you see my fine young man Stevie out there?” Joe asked Skip.

  “I did not.”

  “He wasn’t at the desk?”

  “I saw a great many youths frolicking in the style of the age,” she said, “but I did not see Stephen, and I quite think I would know him if I saw him.”

  Joe said, “So in essence any lunatic—I’m not impugning you here, Hartman—could walk in off the street with no one to stop him and stab Ruella in the heart.”

  “Joseph, you are so violent,” Ruella said.

  Skip put her basket down and retrieved a folding table from across the room. She put her basket on the table and removed the baguette sandwiches and the modular plastic champagne glasses and the cold bottle of champagne with the fancy orange label.

  “What am I gonna do with that kid?” Joe said.

  “I believe it is up to him to do something with himself,” Skip said, joining the stem of a champagne glass to its vessel.

  “Which brings up an interesting point,” Joe said. “Namely, my Stevie’s gifted at math and science, and since you’re having trouble teaching the gamine here you should have my kid over every day to tutor her.”

  “I think I don’t need another irresponsible child in my house at this time,” Skip said, and popped the cork on the champagne.

  I pointed to the three plastic champagne glasses Skip had put together and said, “Who’s not having champagne?”

  “You,” Skip said.

  “Oh, I see, so it’s okay to have sex with me but I can’t drink a teeny glass of champagne with lunch, is that it?” This wasn’t a straightforward complaint so much as it was the opener for a vaudevillian routine Skip and I were working up. Her part in the routine was to blush, remove the fourth champagne glass she had been hiding in the basket, and fill it for me. “Cheers,” she said.

  “To my son the math and science tutor,” Joe said, “because we obviously can’t let him work here anymore.”

  Skip said, “Listen. Absolutely not.”

  Joe said, “So he’s a little angry and smokes marijuana all day and he’s a bit at loose ends which I’m not entirely innocent for since I’m his father so he does the marijuana and gets it out of his system and he’s someone who’s youthful for Mary here and the two of them can relax together because you know what a drag we adults can be.”

  “Nothing doing.”

  “September, he’s had some tough breaks.”

  “Oh, I’ve had some tough breaks,” Stephen Samuels said, ambling toward us through the white room wearing an array of loose, gauzy, beige garments that were wrapped and tucked and folded and belted in ways incomprehensible to me. “I’ve had a hard life. I’ve fallen on hard times. I’m a Dickensian urchin of the streets, where life is but a toy. Early childhood trauma, negative environmental conditioning, all the disadvantages,” he said, illustrating with large elliptical motions of his right arm in the air. “Miscegenation, inversion, economic deprivation, buffeted by the winds of fate. True, I was a bright, resilient child and I rose above the odds, but then I fell back down under the odds.”

  “He’s funny, right?” Joe said.

  “Hey, are you the guy who tried to sell me pot in Central Park or what?”

  Stephen Samuels seemed to be pondering how to answer this. “Yes. And to my credit I am the only openly homosexual marijuana dealer in the lower Central Park area. I am also unaffiliated with any of the larger marijuana cartels. I’m a self-starter and a go-getter. Marijuana is a way to both express my discontent and alleviate it. Still, I would love to quit this terrible business to somehow better serve humanity.”

  “See?” Joe said.

  “Come here, Stephen, and let me give you a kiss,” Skip said.

  He approached her and kissed her on one cheek, made an unnecessarily wide arc around her face with his face, and kissed her on the other. She held his hand in one of hers and patted him on the wrist, gazing at him. “You’re all grown up!”

  “So give him a job.”

  “Oh, I can’t believe this,” Skip said to Joe while continuing to look at Stephen. “I don’t know whether you were kidding about the marijuana or what, Stephen, but you may not sell it at or near my house or use the telephone at my house to sell it. In fact you may not sell marijuana or abet in the sale of marijuana while in my employ. I cannot believe I’m agreeing to this.”

  “May I smoke it outside of your house?” Stephen asked.

  “That’s your motherfucking business,” Skip said angrily.

  “Mothahfuckah!” Mary said, mock-angrily.

  So reader, I must admit, to the credit of my guardian, that I did after all receive a form of secondary education loosely based on the American high school method of one teacher per discipline. Stephen Samuels: mathematics and hard science; Joseph Samuels: fine art; Ruella Forecourt: philosophy; September Hartman: literature (less by inculcation than by osmosis). As for history: nobody at all, as befits an orphan-American.

  A couple of years passed until the next event I can think of to tell you about—time enough for a healthy sapling to grow into a small tree. Not that I knew any saplings or trees. In fact, I wish I had planted a sapling when I was twelve that I could have returned to when I was fourteen and sixteen and eighteen, the way a smart young boy did in one of the books I read about people who grow up and, you know, the tree grows up with them. I am and always have been about as far from a sapling-planting mentality as a person could get. I wish there were a tree now to prove I was once twelve.

  What I will say about this period of a little more than two years that I will more or less not be talking about is that nothing and nobody at that time could deliver me from my isolation from all humanity; that was mine to be kept whole by; it guarded me fiercely. I don’t mean that there was not an informal mishmosh of good people in my life. I mean that I had a kind of force field around me made of tough talk and fake self-sufficiency, and nobody knew how to break through the force field. Here’s how I like to imagine they could have broken through the force field: they get together and throw me a birthday party where we all eat cake; they sing me that song; then, spontaneously, every single person I know in the world comes over and hugs me and squashes me almost to death. A big group hug from all the people I know, with me at the center. Lots of things have happened since that time—some of them good, even. My life has changed in ways I intend to tell you all about presently and that might surprise you. But I never did get that group hug. Who ever gets the total group hug? Do you?

  6 Dirty Little Secret

  Okay, are you familiar with the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle? This is the principle wherein an atomic physicist cannot bring her measuring rod close enough to an electron to measure it without altering the very properties of the electron she wishes to measure. Never mind that there was not so much as a single girl physicist who got her measuring rod anywhere near an electron in Heisenberg’s day that I know of; I think my point is obvious: as it is in quantum physics, so it is in love. And that is why, instead of asking Skip Hartman where she went when she left the house without me, I tailed her. This was on a cold afternoon in the late winter of my sixteenth year.

  She walked over to Fifth Avenue and down Fifth to Seventy-ninth Street. I remained ha
lf a block behind her. I say “tail,” but this is just a slang term for secretly walking behind someone and did not in any way satisfy my longing to be a part of her body.

  She entered a flower shop, bought a bouquet of wildflowers, went to the corner, and boarded the crosstown bus. The hardest part of running alongside the crosstown bus was running alongside it through Central Park, where it picked up a lot of speed. Luckily Skip had kept me on a strict schedule of sprinting despite a bum knee that I kept bound in a tight bandage. Still, when she got off the bus at Seventy-ninth and Broadway I was trailing her by thirty yards, gasping for breath. And thank the god of all spies for the high breeze on that day; otherwise I would not have seen the few unmistakable wisps of hair that had come partially loose from the Hartman head just before that head dropped below ground level into the Seventy-ninth Street station of the Broadway IRT. She cleared the subway turnstile and I stood halfway down the steps just out of her sight, catching my breath, shivering, underdressed for the cold, carrying no token or money, for I was not a very clever spy.

  A Number One train arrived. I eased myself down the stairs, leapt the turnstile, and boarded the train in the car behind the one Skip had boarded; this way I was able to follow her and keep an even distance just by sitting still. She stayed on the train for a long time. We were carried along, each in a separate lighted vessel that trembled in the dark tunnel that ran beneath the lighted air of the planet that kept us apart from the dark and stifling cosmos.

  When Skip Hartman got off the train, we were so far underground that we had to take a cavernous elevator up to the street. I did not feel I could risk not getting on the same elevator that Skip got on, so I got on it, standing behind a tall man. She did not discover me and I was a little disappointed: shouldn’t she know when the person she loved best in all the world was in the same elevator with her? The doors opened and we walked out into the street.