New York Short Stories Read online

  Frankly, he was worried. The truth was, it could be the early stages of dementia. The senior moment jokes were wearing thin as his hair, and he spent more time looking for things than doing the things he used to. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d been naked in bed with a woman.

  He was habitually distracted, submitting to anything and everything. Every new building that replaced an old one sent him into a quiet rage. They seemed to be sprouting up everywhere, stiff beehives making their way downtown along the main avenue near his apartment. Small tenements and creaky loft buildings sat in borrowed time. Jackhammers and dust had become part of the atmosphere in the way the ice cream man’s tinkling bell had been, the old man in a worn suit singing ‘Ohhhld clohhthes…Ohhhhld clohhhhthes’ in the courtyard under his bedroom window. The man with the number tattooed on his arm who would stand in the courtyard at dusk and play the violin. People would throw down change in brown paper bags. This was before he understood that these were not ordinary things.

  Now, there was no courtyard. Beautiful People passed him in the street, phone in one hand, coffee in the other, water bottles conveniently hung from net tubes attached to their backpacks. They worked in the beehives so they could afford to live, eat, and talk on the phone in whatever reprocessed authenticity was left. He tried to avoid Little L.A. where Europeans came to spend their strong currency on more than his measly pensioner’s dollar could buy.

  In winter, he hardly went outside. Now the weather was turning warm and war was everywhere. He walked to the park, past stores selling things he didn’t need or want, but might make life more interesting or comfortable, past apartments which, at one time, no one with money or status would dream of inhabiting, but now they paid good money to walk up six flights to a renovated box with cheap new appliances, eat micro-waved leftovers from last night’s take-out in front of their large flat-screened TVs, and watch mediocre independent films, all for a price that at one time could have bought an eleven room house in a privileged suburb.

  A couple walked by. He overheard the woman say, “I’m one of those people who has deep feelings.” The man looked at her and said, “That’s okay. I like people who have deep feelings.”

  How long had it been since he’d been naked in bed with a woman? Lola Schwartzberg. She never touched a drop. A freight train could have been coming toward her and she would have stared it down. She went barefoot, even at dinner parties, and rolled up her pants like she was planning to walk in a river. Everything she did, she did without apology. She was so comfortable in her skin that whatever she did was okay, in fact charming, to everyone. Except him. What he’d found charming in the beginning ultimately sparked his irritation. She had no use for it and told him he was uptight, jealous, and a prick. So that was the end of that. He heard she went off to Costa Rica with her Brazilian doorman slash aspiring novelist.

  Why did he sometimes feel like he might hurt someone? His days seemed to consist of listening to snippets of conversation overheard on the frenzied streets and looking for lost things or avoiding looking for lost things inside the confusion of his apartment. A whole day could go by when he spoke to no one. He hated going out where everyone was busy with devices to keep them from forgetting what they had to know, all of which seemed pointless. Memory had become something that could be bought, stored, and retrieved at will. He had no access to these devices. It was necessary to write things down on little scraps of paper and stick them to various spots on the wall, or the refrigerator. After a while the slips of paper blended into the rest of the clutter and became part of the general blur of things.

  Sometimes he thought he’d be better off if he moved into the bathroom where there was less disorder. Bring in a hot plate, put a mattress in the bathtub and plug in a radio and TV. He’d have to run a phone line. These thoughts made him feel crazy. He needed more sleep. He slept too much. He was impatient for things to happen. He couldn’t keep pace. He was bored and lonely. There were too many people making demands.

  Someone was cooking. He smelled potatoes and roasting meat. A television flickered in one of the banks of windows across the street. He turned on the radio. He threw some sliced onion into a pan of melting butter, then some eggs. He thought about how certain things were so automatic you didn’t have to remember to do them, or how to do them. Or not. This made him feel a little reassured. He took a plate and utensils from the dish drainer and pushed some things aside to make a clear space on the table. He picked up the magazine article he’d started at breakfast and began to read. He imagined someone knocking at his door. The Chinese girl down the hall who designed logos for corporations. He imagined her asking him for salt or milk. No one did that anymore, no one knew anyone well enough to ask for what amounted to a handout. People bought and sold, came and went. They barely looked at each other getting on and off the elevator. He imagined the Chinese girl naked in his bed, it didn’t matter how she got there, the next morning sitting at his table, which she’d cleaned and set with matching plates, serving French toast with bacon from a platter he’d forgotten he owned.

  He went back to his magazine. Mingus sang on the radio, something about eating chicken potpie. He wanted to call someone. He looked through his phone book. Every name recalled some personality flaw, some problem that he didn’t want to listen to or be reminded of. He turned on the TV and checked the channels. No one finished a sentence before he flipped to the next—one after another. He turned if off and took out a record at random, a Tunisian singer. He sat on the couch and let his eyes follow the line of the curtains. They fell in a soft V of white lace, lit by a low sun. He watched the light change until there was no more. The record had stopped hours ago.

  LUSTRUM AT THE FLUSHING RKO

  BY KIRPAL GORDON

  Although seventh grader Colleen Greenleaf had done her research, she knew she was losing the argument.

  “You said to choose a name that holds special meaning.”

  “No one has ever taken X for a Confirmation name.”

  “I’ve looked up a lot of names. X says so much to me.”

  “The bishop’s performing the sacrament. I can’t allow it!”

  “Why?”

  “It’s simply not Catholic, Colleen.”

  “But I’m Catholic and would be more so as Colleen X.”

  It was May 1966. Earlier that week, Colleen had received an F on “X: How Malcolm Little Became Malik Shabazz,” a book report on his recently published autobiography, and now she realized the failing grade, her first ever, was a miscalculation on her part. She’d compared the fast lives of Malcolm and Saint Augustine, how their confessions spoke to her of the power of redemption. She’d also remarked on the black pride side of Malcolm’s ministry, how converts to Roman Catholicism like the Irish, thanks to eight hundred years of the English, faced a similar journey out of assumed inferiority and indentured servitude. What better proof of being right than a failing grade she thought. She wanted the name, Colleen X, to remind her of Ireland’s Celtic twilight amidst the Vatican’s pinkie ring pageantry.

  “Forget X,” her mother said.

  “Take the name of a saint,” Sister Peter John said.

  “You’re a saint, Sister. Peter John, then.”

  “Those are male names, Colleen.”

  “Then your name, Mom.”

  “Not my name.”

  “Because Oona’s the goddess of witches and fairies?”

  “Pick a name right now, young lady, or I’ll pick one for you. I’ll not have you wasting the good sister’s time.”

  “Joan of Arc then. If I can’t have your names, and you two mean the most to me, I ought to have a warrior’s name since I’m getting enrolled in the army of Christ,” she said, hoping to sound old enough to make her own decisions.

  To re-acquaint her with her actual status, the nun told her to wait outside in the hall with her face to the wall while the adults discussed her fate. Colleen gave the wall a few minutes but soon walked over to the window and looked out. B
eyond the muddy parking lot the convent grass was singing. Purple and crimson rhododendrons bloomed around Our Lady’s grotto where nuns were arranging lilies. All week long during the May Pole dances and song rehearsals for Mary, Queen of May, she sensed that this celebration had older roots. She’d researched the subject at the Whitestone library and found it to be so.

  Dismissed by the nun, she raced down the stairs and got in the family car though she did not share what she’d learned of May Day with her mom. In the cold silences and mean looks on the ride home, she got the distinct impression that sassing the nuns or making fun of the Church were not suitable pursuits for a young lady such as herself. At dinner she discovered seen-and-not-heard to be the better part of valor.

  However, the next morning she awoke and the bed was bloody. Frightened, she ran to the kitchen, showed her mother and insisted she was too distraught to go to school. Her mom handed her a sanitary napkin, alluded to her predicament as the curse and insisted she not miss the school bus or there would be hell to pay.

  Intrigued by her new status as a childbearing maiden, she sat on the school bus reflecting on how silent her mother had become in the face of her first period. She knew this wasn’t personal, that her mom probably grew up thinking sex was something shameful and forbidden, not a proper topic of conversation, whereas she thought sex full of innuendo and allure leading to something fun and joyous. Thinking back to the nun’s lecture on abstinence, virginity, and self-control versus disgraceful coitus, criminal abortion, and unwanted babies, she decided the church authorities didn’t know much about sex. That’s why an eighty-year-old pastor counseled young newlyweds, why a drunken priest drove the altar boys home in the parish car, and why many Irish couples, convinced that birth control was a sin, had more kids than they could feed. Reflecting on Malcolm’s message of self-determination, she decided X would remain her Confirmation name no matter what pretense she would have to play out for the folks and the officials.

  Getting off the big yellow bus, Colleen X walked up the fifty-four steps to All Sorrows Grammar School and took her seat in class as the nun finished the drawing. A disk of white chalk, a sun in a sky of blackboard: That was one’s soul. It was the final lesson before Confirmation, and she suspected a soul that white was more like a Sunday dress about to get soiled or spoiled by her tomboy antics. Unlike her dress, her blackened soul required confession, contrition and communion to grow the white back. She wondered if the nun had fallen captive to her own metaphor: the soul had no color or form. It wasn’t a thing but an indwelling within consciousness. Since it was invisible, immortal and immutable, it couldn’t get soiled or spoiled by anything material she did or did not do. No, she realized, this fallacy in confusing spiritual with material was driven by fear and concocted by the Holy Roman Empire to keep her obedient and pure.

  If there were two paths to knowledge—sharing the curiosity and getting your knees dirty or remaining pure and obedient—Colleen X found a higher calling in curiosity. She understood that mortality and sexual knowledge were the real crimes out of Genesis that expelled Adam and Eve from Eden and made childbirth work and pain. But it was also a mysterious life. It was not the inheritance of an invented original sin but a real dance band playing soul music. To move her whole body rhythmically with a handsome young man like Hector Correo in the motion that replicated the motion that had conceived her was the climb up out of the solitude of adolescence into the duet of adulthood. She wanted to dance the Watusi and whatever it was that James Brown did.

  So when The Tablet, a weekly tabloid of worldwide Church activity, arrived, and the nun suggested the class read the good news of the missionaries fighting godless Communism in the Soviet Union, Colleen X turned instead to the movie listings from the Legion of Decency, a committee of upstanding laity who recommended by category—and delivered with the gravitas of a papal encyclical—what films released from Hollywood Babylon that Catholic school children needed to be protected from. She noticed that a new release, Pagan Spring, B.C., was now on the top of the XXX list, the most objectionable.

  The next morning she checked the Daily News and discovered the film was playing at the RKO Keith’s in Flushing. Had she not been grounded for wanting to be confirmed X, she would have pleaded with her mom to let her go on the bus to the Saturday matinee by herself, but being punished for doing nothing wrong necessitated a declaration of independence. While her mom shopped for groceries and her dad worked in the basement and her older brothers played ball in the park, Colleen X picked up the phone, dialed and waited for a response.

  “Hello?”

  “Hector?”

  “Yeah. Colleen?”

  “Yeah. I’m going to the RKO. Wanna meet me there?”

  “Yeah. When are you leaving?”

  “Now. The movie starts in thirty minutes.”

  “Okay, I’ll meet you inside.”

  Colleen X hung up the phone, slipped out of the house, and walked to the bus stop. Warned by her mom that the neighborhood was getting bad with dope peddlers known to frequent the pizzeria in order to put dope in the dough, she stood in front of the pizza parlor but saw no one who looked suspicious. When she got on the Q-15 headed for Main Street, rather than worrying about her descent into a widening snake pit of sin, Colleen X felt she was taking her life into her own hands.

  She also knew that without an accompanying adult she couldn’t get into the picture, so she had padded her new training bra and had spent a lot of time tarting herself up with her mother’s cosmetics in order to look older. Luckily, she convinced the ticket lady to sell her an adult admission. Although this eliminated any popcorn, candy, or bus fare home, she didn’t care. She walked through two sets of doors and stood in the center of the immense lobby of the RKO Keith’s movie palace next to a three-tiered water fountain and felt the hot afternoon slip into cool eternity. The sound the water made throughout the lobby was reassuring, and her eyes adjusted to the hushed, indirect lighting which cast the walls of the balcony in sensual golden shadows. Unlike the interior of the church of Our Lady of All Sorrows which caught heavenly rays of sun illuminating stained glass windows, the round lobby was bathed in a permanent twilight, what the nuns called the witching hour, a sky whose soft blues darkened to deep purples as they reached higher amidst floating clouds and glittering stars.

  Studying the decorative trim on the sweeping staircase, the ornate balustrades, the thick red carpet, the Spanish colonial parapets, she marveled at the elaborately sculptured Moorish revival columns that resembled entwining serpents reaching upward from under the earth. She felt rivers open up inside her where caves led to secret ceremonies.

  Domed ceiling of my star-crossed twilight, she prayed, I am this labyrinth; I am the anatomy that makes Jesus incarnate. Mother of God, it’s the fate of Lucifer bearing light I accept; Heaven’s only a projection booth, a room in my head no one can enter, and I long to break open in shared loving desire. If this be hubris, if loss and abandonment, shame and misery are all I’ll know, I’ll suffer the pagan price, just like my ancestors, only let me square up later for right now I want to stand and be counted in this lustrum at the RKO among other initiates curious and intrepid.

  “Colleen?”

  She turned and there stood a smiling Hector Correo.

  “You look older,” he said admiringly.

  The lights flashed off and on so they walked up the stairs, entered the balcony and sat in the dark.

  Pagan Spring, B.C. proved to be as boring as The Tablet, unable to live up to its billing as a revealer of ancient mysteries, but Hector knew how to kiss and that knowledge was worth the price of a thousand admissions.

  Colleen X understood she would soon be facing parental punishment, but as Hector held her hand and walked her home in real twilight, the fulfillment of stars she had long wished upon now made her a young woman forever changed.

  NAMOR

  BY J. ANTHONY ROMAN

  My lease is about to expire, and I’m not sure what I’m going
to do. If I re-sign, my rent goes up to the point that it will be vital for me to earn an income, no more passion work. My home is part of my very being and my workplace.

  I grew up in the Mott Haven section of the Bronx. “The Mott Haven section of the Bronx.” I say it like that because it’s how all the newscasters used to announce it when they were reporting on whatever drug-related, multiple murder happened that day. I’m proud of where I’m from, but it doesn’t agree with my soul. I left Mott Haven years ago and never looked back, at least not as an option for habitation.

  Watching my mother’s ability to sketch the faces of our family and the hands of praying saints, I picked up the habit of art. My family supported that, and it evolved into graphic design. I used being an artist as my main excuse for leaving the hood. I mean I had to be closer to work, so that meant downtown Manhattan. I found a nice sublet on the east side, and eventually took over the lease. I currently have half-a-career as a freelance graphic designer.

  I have this really cool client whose porn site I work on, and he’s one of the few I can stand being around when I’m not charging them by the hour. We’re throwing them back and I tell him my story, and he’s like “Bro, you’re like Namor the Sub-Mariner”

  That is, the Namor the Sub-Mariner, created in 1939, by artist and writer Bill Everett. Namor was what happened when a human sea captain seduced a princess from Atlantis, creating Marvel Universe’s first mutant. Often confused with DC’s Aquaman, Namor has a fully amphibious physiology, super strength, speed, a pair of wings on his ankles, and what truly legitimizes him as a marvel, the ability to fly.

  Namor suffers from biological duality. Humans are scared and jealous of him because of his abilities. The Atlantians, although they recognize his regality and power, know that he is not a purebred, and the other half of him happens to belong to the race that’s destroying their environment. Half-human, half-Atlantian, never truly embraced anywhere. It’s because of this Namor was always helping mankind one day, then attacking it the next.