Jimmy G. chugs and tramples up the stairs to the apartment—the one he shares with his sister—on West 10th over the Korean Deli, with its late night smells of pork trotters and fish egg stew. He finds her reading his personal journal, her eyes glued to the page that states in bold letters: The World is a Homeless Schizophrenic Who Smiles like a Left-Over Rainbow.
"Fuck," says Namami, who is into yoga and yogurt, Insanity workouts, lemongrass incense and bald graduate-philosophy majors at NYU, and is four years older than Jimmy G. but acts like she's forty more. "Can't you knock? You gave me a jitter monkey."
"Stop reading my shit. Or I'll get a lawyer."
She drops the notebook to the tan aniline sofa in the soft-lit living room. The walls are mostly bare except for some framed photos of Mom, Dad, Namani as a little girl at the beach playing with sand, Jimmy G. as a toddler with his loose folds of flesh smiling into the camera as if he and the world could be one, and the graduations.
Namami is wearing a biker's jacket with a check ribbon skirt and a new pair of sneakers she bought yesterday from Payless. Her favorite saying is: "I will never live to be post-menopausal." And she has this obsession with dumping boyfriends who she thinks will dump her first.
Namami works in a record shop in 6th Ave., and at parties she has a reputation for being a drama queen after the fourth Bayou Self, her favorite drink. It’s made with spiced rum and Butterscotch Schnapps, followed by over self-hatred and some awful lip-synching to Art Cube or Malice Mizer.
"Did you feed the twins?" asks Jimmy G., munching on a banana to get his potassium fill so his heart can beat on time. The twins are Jimmy's two pet rats: Pilfer and Gargoyle. Pilfer snorts coke, and Jimmy believes that it gives him telepathic powers.
"Roger, dodger, and Ma called asking how her number one son is. The one who dropped out of life, who dropped out of college, who dropped out of much needed therapy, just so he can feed his manufactured paranoia that the ‘Zygotes from Hell’ are taking over the world slowly but surely; first the water supply then the thought-trains to the brain, and pretty soon we'll be all be a nation of glass-eyed automatons who see rainbows in subway stations. And yes, he's still writing brilliant poems based on H.P. Lovecraft and the demons that sleep under our beds, and yes, Mother, he's still an introverted sea turtle who can't seem to swim to the top."
Jimmy G. pitches the banana peel across the kitchen towards the garbage. He misses.
"I'm glad you find me amusing."
Namani sits cross-legged on the sofa, flipping through an old issue of Vogue.
"I did you a most honorable favor, oh, number one brother. I fixed you up on a blind date with a friend of a friend of a friend. Okay, subtract one friend. I think you're going to like her because you both have something in common."
He sits, poker-faced, then shrugs.
"Okay, I give up."
"You're both fucking nuts and ultimately unknowable."
"And if I forget? Unintentionally, of course."
"I'll cut your balls off in your sleep. Her name's Moe. Where there's life there's hope."
"Stay out of my life, Queen Bitch. Stay in your own underworld."
He slams the door and walks out. Namani turns another page, tosses the magazine, and mumbles to herself, "Fuck it."
They're sitting in a Chinese restaurant on Christopher Street. She's slim, pretty, and tall. Could pass for Psy's favorite groupie. Her voice is soft and flat. At times, she looks intensely into his eyes, as if she could rule him or read his thoughts, or maybe she wants him to believe she can. They talk about their favorite songs. They talk about flowers, her favorite house plants. Then she admits she really doesn't care for them. He asks her if she likes animals. She says that as a child she liked bears, but back then, she liked so many things that weren't good for her. She adds that she once had a dog, a Basset Hound named Mickey, who had sad droopy eyes and a way of making her feel defensive. She tells him she works in a doctor's office by day and moonlights as a singer in a death metal band called DNA Mishap.
Jimmy G. shakes his head and says, “Awesome.”
She tells him that he has some General Tso on his Ferris Bueller's Day Off vest.
"Oh," he says, flustered, smearing his vest and shirt with a napkin.
He tells her that he works as a short order cook at a Greek restaurant where they serve fifteen kinds of hamburger specials. He moonlights as an underground poet uncovering the layers of deception internalized from the “Zygotes of Hell”, a small community that rules our lives and controls our runaway train-thoughts.
She laughs, then studies him, her eyes unwavering, her lips mashed together.
"Seriously?" she says.
He shakes his head like a child caught stealing candy.
"It's like I dropped out in my third year of pre-med. I wanted to uncover what's under the flesh in a metaphorical way, which is in some sense, deeper and more relevant. Does that make any sense?"
"I think so," she says, chewing open-mouthed on an egg roll.
She offers him an untouched roll. He refuses and points to his half-filled plate.
Later she tells him that she was once into muscle dudes, but the attraction, although strong, always burned itself out.
"Do you feel a connection?" she asks.
"Sort of. It's, um, wavering, and at times, shorn."
"Mmmm…Let's play a game of ‘Dare You Dare Me.’ I like doing it on first dates. It helps to spur the, uh, creativity. You tell me something very embarrassing, and I'll try to match it."
"Why not? Go first."
She swallows hard the last of her egg roll, then flashes her eyes at the ceiling.
"The first guy I ever loved, well, maybe not the first, was a midget. Okay, that's a shitty term. He was my little man. He will always be my little man. And I treated him so badly because of his size, the way he couldn't pronounce certain words, and the fact that we weren't entirely compatible. And it's funny in retrospect how I read that Alan Ladd stood on lifts to kiss Sophia Loren in the movies. Well, that's neither here nor there."
"I think I read that too," Jimmy G. says, pointing his chopsticks at her.
She stares down at her plate and swallows hard.
"Somehow he found a way to penetrate into my core, my soft spot, as in perforating my armor, in the sense of Gestalt therapy, in the sense of armadillo, you know? I couldn't believe how bad he hurt me. He just jumped off my bed one night after we were making out and he said it's over. The chemistry is gone."
"And what did you do?"
"I said something like ‘Good riddance, little man. In these parts, I'm quite a catch.’"
"That's moxy."
She offers a whimsical smile, a twinkle in her eyes.
"He became an actor. He always told me that one day he'd be in demand. Well, wouldn't you know, the last time I saw him he was in a TV commercial advertising some floor cleaner that was totally organic and left the floor smelling of apple orchard. Or peach orchard. I forget. It came in several scents."
"That must have been hard," says Jimmy G., snapping a broccoli in half with his hands.
"I punished myself for years. I played all kinds of games with people, pretended that nothing mattered. I tried to hurt men, even the hard kind with several coats of armor. It's funny how in retrospect you're always a genius who sees everything in perspective, but it's too late."
"Yeah," says Jimmy G., "I think it's built into our neurons and synapses, into our phenotypes. I wrote a whole chapbook of poems that touched on that very subject. It never got published. I mean, yet."
"And here's something less embarrassing but still is something you don't usually tell someone on a first date. Am I a strange bitch or what? I have this neurotic thing with guys. I push them to the edge, actually force them to dislike me, do all kinds of weird insulting things, and then when they tell me to fuck off, I have to be alone for days. I mean, just drowning myself in this pool of self-pity."
She makes a grandiose gesture with outstretched arms.
"What if they fall in love with you?"
She swings her head side to side and raises two hands, palms up.
"Some drown. Some don't."
"Yeah, that's deep."
"Who are we, Jimmy?"
"Not sure. It's something I'm exploring, myself."
"We're fakes. We're half-fakes. Nobody would steal us."
"I'm not sure if I were not-me that I would steal myself. Does that make sense?"
She tilts her head, asks the waitress for more water.
He focuses on the tiny trail dribbling down her chin.
"Talk to me. Tell me what you can't."
"I'm really kind of embarrassed to say it."
She wipes her chin, folds her hands under jaw.
"I told you. Now play by the rules of the game. I don't care. I want to hear it. And make it good and real."
He does this nervous kind of cough as if he's about to sing before an audience with musically trained ears.
"I'd like suck your nipples before the upcoming apocalypse turns us to stone."
She stares past him, saying nothing.
"Somebody once said to me. Well, something like that. Not that exactly."
"Really? Small world."
She asks for the check. He says he will pay. She says 50/50. He says 30/70. They settle 40/60.
She says she doesn't feel they'd be fully compatible, which doesn't mean they can't be. There's just something about a guy who wears 80s clothes on a first date. And she doesn't like the fact that he played so easily into her hands with the ‘Dare You Dare Me’ game. That doesn't mean, she adds, that she thinks he's a filthy creep or a pushover.
Outside the restaurant, they shake hands, and she says she wants to think more about this, to mull over it, and that in the mean time, he should see other people, and try to become a poet laureate.
“Always aim high,” she says.
He says, “Sure.”
She kisses him on the cheek. He blushes.
They waive down their respective cabs.
One night after he goes to bed, he hears tiny stones hitting his bedroom window.
He rises, opens the window, looks out and down. It starts to rain.
It's Moe, standing in shorts, sandals, and a tee-shirt. No bra. Her tee-shirt clings to her breasts. Her nipples are erect.
"I've been thinking about you," she says.
He yells out that he wrote this really fucked up poem about her, not that she's fucked up, but in her absence he felt this really weird connection and that he could really latch on to her demons and help her come to terms with who she really is.
"Could you please shut the fuck up," says Nanami. "You're talking in your sleep again."
Jimmy G. puts on a coat over his underwear and t-shirt. He rushes outside, stands in his oversized slippers before Moe in the rain.
"I feel your darkness, and the groping, the attempt at light," he says, as if a pivotal scene from his favorite horror movie with romantic interludes.
"I had a dream of you standing naked except for that stupid vest. You were hard." She takes off her shirt.
"Are you hard?" she asks.
"Does it rain chaos in Chthulu?"
"I can be your best monster."
On the barren sidewalk at 3 A.M., under anonymous stars, a block away from the blat of a taxi, he sucks her nipples until the world goes soft.
"Fuck," says Namami, who is into yoga and yogurt, Insanity workouts, lemongrass incense and bald graduate-philosophy majors at NYU, and is four years older than Jimmy G. but acts like she's forty more. "Can't you knock? You gave me a jitter monkey."
"Stop reading my shit. Or I'll get a lawyer."
She drops the notebook to the tan aniline sofa in the soft-lit living room. The walls are mostly bare except for some framed photos of Mom, Dad, Namani as a little girl at the beach playing with sand, Jimmy G. as a toddler with his loose folds of flesh smiling into the camera as if he and the world could be one, and the graduations.
Namami is wearing a biker's jacket with a check ribbon skirt and a new pair of sneakers she bought yesterday from Payless. Her favorite saying is: "I will never live to be post-menopausal." And she has this obsession with dumping boyfriends who she thinks will dump her first.
Namami works in a record shop in 6th Ave., and at parties she has a reputation for being a drama queen after the fourth Bayou Self, her favorite drink. It’s made with spiced rum and Butterscotch Schnapps, followed by over self-hatred and some awful lip-synching to Art Cube or Malice Mizer.
"Did you feed the twins?" asks Jimmy G., munching on a banana to get his potassium fill so his heart can beat on time. The twins are Jimmy's two pet rats: Pilfer and Gargoyle. Pilfer snorts coke, and Jimmy believes that it gives him telepathic powers.
"Roger, dodger, and Ma called asking how her number one son is. The one who dropped out of life, who dropped out of college, who dropped out of much needed therapy, just so he can feed his manufactured paranoia that the ‘Zygotes from Hell’ are taking over the world slowly but surely; first the water supply then the thought-trains to the brain, and pretty soon we'll be all be a nation of glass-eyed automatons who see rainbows in subway stations. And yes, he's still writing brilliant poems based on H.P. Lovecraft and the demons that sleep under our beds, and yes, Mother, he's still an introverted sea turtle who can't seem to swim to the top."
Jimmy G. pitches the banana peel across the kitchen towards the garbage. He misses.
"I'm glad you find me amusing."
Namani sits cross-legged on the sofa, flipping through an old issue of Vogue.
"I did you a most honorable favor, oh, number one brother. I fixed you up on a blind date with a friend of a friend of a friend. Okay, subtract one friend. I think you're going to like her because you both have something in common."
He sits, poker-faced, then shrugs.
"Okay, I give up."
"You're both fucking nuts and ultimately unknowable."
"And if I forget? Unintentionally, of course."
"I'll cut your balls off in your sleep. Her name's Moe. Where there's life there's hope."
"Stay out of my life, Queen Bitch. Stay in your own underworld."
He slams the door and walks out. Namani turns another page, tosses the magazine, and mumbles to herself, "Fuck it."
They're sitting in a Chinese restaurant on Christopher Street. She's slim, pretty, and tall. Could pass for Psy's favorite groupie. Her voice is soft and flat. At times, she looks intensely into his eyes, as if she could rule him or read his thoughts, or maybe she wants him to believe she can. They talk about their favorite songs. They talk about flowers, her favorite house plants. Then she admits she really doesn't care for them. He asks her if she likes animals. She says that as a child she liked bears, but back then, she liked so many things that weren't good for her. She adds that she once had a dog, a Basset Hound named Mickey, who had sad droopy eyes and a way of making her feel defensive. She tells him she works in a doctor's office by day and moonlights as a singer in a death metal band called DNA Mishap.
Jimmy G. shakes his head and says, “Awesome.”
She tells him that he has some General Tso on his Ferris Bueller's Day Off vest.
"Oh," he says, flustered, smearing his vest and shirt with a napkin.
He tells her that he works as a short order cook at a Greek restaurant where they serve fifteen kinds of hamburger specials. He moonlights as an underground poet uncovering the layers of deception internalized from the “Zygotes of Hell”, a small community that rules our lives and controls our runaway train-thoughts.
She laughs, then studies him, her eyes unwavering, her lips mashed together.
"Seriously?" she says.
He shakes his head like a child caught stealing candy.
"It's like I dropped out in my third year of pre-med. I wanted to uncover what's under the flesh in a metaphorical way, which is in some sense, deeper and more relevant. Does that make any sense?"
"I think so," she says, chewing open-mouthed on an egg roll.
She offers him an untouched roll. He refuses and points to his half-filled plate.
Later she tells him that she was once into muscle dudes, but the attraction, although strong, always burned itself out.
"Do you feel a connection?" she asks.
"Sort of. It's, um, wavering, and at times, shorn."
"Mmmm…Let's play a game of ‘Dare You Dare Me.’ I like doing it on first dates. It helps to spur the, uh, creativity. You tell me something very embarrassing, and I'll try to match it."
"Why not? Go first."
She swallows hard the last of her egg roll, then flashes her eyes at the ceiling.
"The first guy I ever loved, well, maybe not the first, was a midget. Okay, that's a shitty term. He was my little man. He will always be my little man. And I treated him so badly because of his size, the way he couldn't pronounce certain words, and the fact that we weren't entirely compatible. And it's funny in retrospect how I read that Alan Ladd stood on lifts to kiss Sophia Loren in the movies. Well, that's neither here nor there."
"I think I read that too," Jimmy G. says, pointing his chopsticks at her.
She stares down at her plate and swallows hard.
"Somehow he found a way to penetrate into my core, my soft spot, as in perforating my armor, in the sense of Gestalt therapy, in the sense of armadillo, you know? I couldn't believe how bad he hurt me. He just jumped off my bed one night after we were making out and he said it's over. The chemistry is gone."
"And what did you do?"
"I said something like ‘Good riddance, little man. In these parts, I'm quite a catch.’"
"That's moxy."
She offers a whimsical smile, a twinkle in her eyes.
"He became an actor. He always told me that one day he'd be in demand. Well, wouldn't you know, the last time I saw him he was in a TV commercial advertising some floor cleaner that was totally organic and left the floor smelling of apple orchard. Or peach orchard. I forget. It came in several scents."
"That must have been hard," says Jimmy G., snapping a broccoli in half with his hands.
"I punished myself for years. I played all kinds of games with people, pretended that nothing mattered. I tried to hurt men, even the hard kind with several coats of armor. It's funny how in retrospect you're always a genius who sees everything in perspective, but it's too late."
"Yeah," says Jimmy G., "I think it's built into our neurons and synapses, into our phenotypes. I wrote a whole chapbook of poems that touched on that very subject. It never got published. I mean, yet."
"And here's something less embarrassing but still is something you don't usually tell someone on a first date. Am I a strange bitch or what? I have this neurotic thing with guys. I push them to the edge, actually force them to dislike me, do all kinds of weird insulting things, and then when they tell me to fuck off, I have to be alone for days. I mean, just drowning myself in this pool of self-pity."
She makes a grandiose gesture with outstretched arms.
"What if they fall in love with you?"
She swings her head side to side and raises two hands, palms up.
"Some drown. Some don't."
"Yeah, that's deep."
"Who are we, Jimmy?"
"Not sure. It's something I'm exploring, myself."
"We're fakes. We're half-fakes. Nobody would steal us."
"I'm not sure if I were not-me that I would steal myself. Does that make sense?"
She tilts her head, asks the waitress for more water.
He focuses on the tiny trail dribbling down her chin.
"Talk to me. Tell me what you can't."
"I'm really kind of embarrassed to say it."
She wipes her chin, folds her hands under jaw.
"I told you. Now play by the rules of the game. I don't care. I want to hear it. And make it good and real."
He does this nervous kind of cough as if he's about to sing before an audience with musically trained ears.
"I'd like suck your nipples before the upcoming apocalypse turns us to stone."
She stares past him, saying nothing.
"Somebody once said to me. Well, something like that. Not that exactly."
"Really? Small world."
She asks for the check. He says he will pay. She says 50/50. He says 30/70. They settle 40/60.
She says she doesn't feel they'd be fully compatible, which doesn't mean they can't be. There's just something about a guy who wears 80s clothes on a first date. And she doesn't like the fact that he played so easily into her hands with the ‘Dare You Dare Me’ game. That doesn't mean, she adds, that she thinks he's a filthy creep or a pushover.
Outside the restaurant, they shake hands, and she says she wants to think more about this, to mull over it, and that in the mean time, he should see other people, and try to become a poet laureate.
“Always aim high,” she says.
He says, “Sure.”
She kisses him on the cheek. He blushes.
They waive down their respective cabs.
One night after he goes to bed, he hears tiny stones hitting his bedroom window.
He rises, opens the window, looks out and down. It starts to rain.
It's Moe, standing in shorts, sandals, and a tee-shirt. No bra. Her tee-shirt clings to her breasts. Her nipples are erect.
"I've been thinking about you," she says.
He yells out that he wrote this really fucked up poem about her, not that she's fucked up, but in her absence he felt this really weird connection and that he could really latch on to her demons and help her come to terms with who she really is.
"Could you please shut the fuck up," says Nanami. "You're talking in your sleep again."
Jimmy G. puts on a coat over his underwear and t-shirt. He rushes outside, stands in his oversized slippers before Moe in the rain.
"I feel your darkness, and the groping, the attempt at light," he says, as if a pivotal scene from his favorite horror movie with romantic interludes.
"I had a dream of you standing naked except for that stupid vest. You were hard." She takes off her shirt.
"Are you hard?" she asks.
"Does it rain chaos in Chthulu?"
"I can be your best monster."
On the barren sidewalk at 3 A.M., under anonymous stars, a block away from the blat of a taxi, he sucks her nipples until the world goes soft.
