The Unprofessionals Read online

  Since he seemed interested, I decided to tell more.

  “Once I was sent to Saks Fifth Avenue to purchase underwear for the owner’s husband. ‘I am going to send you on a very personal errandt,’ she said with a German accent, even though she was Belgian, or claimed to be. The undershorts for the overweight, blubbery husband were a large size and an expensive price.

  “That was a bad errand, but every few years my friend would still remind me about the erasing of the walls,” I told him.

  Another errand I’d been sent on was to deliver a piece of sculpture, by subway, over to East End Avenue. Having had a childhood fear and hatred of the subway—the noise alone was a reason—the minute childhood ended I began taking buses, walking, and spending any available funds on taxis.

  “The Lexington Avenue line is good, we send our daughter on it,” the owner said as she gave me some tokens from an Hermès satchel bag that was high style for grown-up women at the time. These bags didn’t impress me one bit. The empty-headed idea seemed to be: a lot of flourish opening the clasp, unbuckling the strap with fluttering manicured fingers, with a sparkly, antique diamond ring flashing around during the opening procedure.

  The sculpture was a big, heavy piece of white plaster with melon-size round things attached to the front and back. I took a taxi and paid for it out of those funds of mine.

  As I told the boy about these adventures, I became almost ill with the anxiety of remembering the hideousness of my mental condition and living situation at the time. I may have been realizing unconsciously, or in some other manner, that this had been the beginning of the setup for my lack of a soul.

  I saw where I was at the moment, listening to his story as the true high point of the evening. I saw that the place of nothingness had gotten into motion during those years—nineteen, twenty—the same stage he was at right then as an on-the-spot participant, and he had diagnosed that there would be no improvement for either of us.

  I got a jittery feeling that quickly increased to a panicky feeling, and forgot to do the breathing exercises recommended by Dr. Andrew Weil every possible chance he could. I didn’t yet have a woman dancer’s book Healing Mudras: Yoga for Your Hands, by Sabrina Mesko, or I could have put my hands on my chest where I felt the quivery, trembly panic originating. Because on the phone and in person people can hear the breathing and misinterpret it, but no one would be able to hear the hand exercises.

  “At least you’re in your own car and not on a subway,” I said to the boy.

  “My father’s car, but yes, it’s better,” he said, and continued right along. “I can’t believe that they sent you on the subway with sculpture. How expensive was it?”

  The boy liked to know the price of everything. He loved money and was already planning a life of great wealth when I met him at age eleven, and probably before. When he was eighteen, he didn’t like his cousin’s girlfriend acting like “one of those generous kinds of people who are always thinking of giving to and helping others.”

  I mentioned this quote at a dinner I attended in a Japanese restaurant with the boy’s family and the girlfriend. They were surprised. He was absent from the dinner; he was probably in an alley somewhere.

  “That’s not like him, to say anything good about anyone,” his father said.

  “He didn’t mean it as a compliment,” I said in the style called blurting out the truth.

  The table full of the boy’s relatives started laughing all at once. I saw how good it was to make people laugh—all those faces smiling and laughing. I wished I’d pursued my acting career as a comedienne.

  “AND SHE’S a Beowulf scholar!” the boy had told me. “She has friends who are members of the Beowulf Club. Can you believe that? The members receive a Beowulf monthly periodical.” When he said “Beowulf Club,” I was overtaken by an outburst of near-hysteria. He knew about this club and he’d been keeping it to himself.

  “See?” he said.

  I did see, I told him. I’d given up the required early English literature course when they got to Ralph Roister Doister. Just the word “Beowulf” brought back a slew of bad memories of the college experience.

  The one thing I’d done that had impressed him was to purchase, at a reduced price, a pale-peach Armani linen jacket I’d seen at night in a store window in Boston. The jacket had the design of an outdoor parka, hood and all, but the boy didn’t have to know that. I let him think it was as elegant as he wanted it to be.

  The only other thing he liked about my situation was my height. He had a fear of not being tall and as a teenager had contemplated a new surgical procedure that lengthened the femur bones by sawing them in half and adding steel extenders. It could offer a few more inches, up to twelve.

  “How many would you do?” I’d asked.

  “I’d go for the maximum,” he’d said. “While I was at it.”

  At the time he was five-five, so I said, “Do you want to be six-three?”

  “Might as well,” he said. “It couldn’t hurt.”

  “By the way, it must be painful—the postsurgical part,” I said.

  “They give you morphine. You don’t feel any pain,” he’d said.

  JOBS OF YOUTH

  ABOUT TEN THOUSAND dollars,” I said about the price of the sculpture.

  “People are like this,” he said. “Even more so in that generation. Why didn’t they use an art-messenger service?”

  “They said it made a better impression to send an assistant.”

  I remembered myself with youth and looks intact, and my mental state at the time preventing me from knowing I had any of that.

  “What were you wearing?” the boy asked. “School clothes like you do now?”

  “I wore Marimekko dresses every day, sleeveless in summer and long-sleeved in winter. Do you know what they were?”

  I felt more sick and anxious at the thought of the dresses and perhaps having to describe them. I shouldn’t have mentioned the word “Marimekko”—the dresses, the era, and the Rolling Stones. The song “Get Off of My Cloud” came into my mind.

  Another job I’d had was to work at a Marimekko store in New York for the summer. My job was to rearrange bolts of Marimekko fabric while I climbed up and down a light-colored wood rolling ladder designed for just this purpose. By coincidence that Rolling Stones song was played all day long, and up on the second floor there was no air-conditioning and the heat rose, especially up high on the ladder, where I was often on the verge of fainting.

  Later on, I heard that certain male customers took the opportunity to look at our bare legs and even our underpants underneath our short dresses while we were up on the ladder. This was before the present lewd era in which men can see nakedness and underwear right out in public, anywhere, anytime.

  “I’ve heard, a bit,” he said nonchalantly. “Some girls I knew in New York told me about the dresses.”

  “I can’t believe they sent you on the subway wearing a Marimekko dress and carrying a ten-thousand-dollar sculpture,” my friend, the one who’d objected to the wall erasing, had said at the time. Before that, in a discussion of public transportation, she’d said, “I’ve never seen a well-dressed woman on the subway.”

  “What does being well dressed have to do with it?” I asked her. Subway riders could be seen reading Catch-22 at that time in history. Since she’d been brought up on the Upper East Side, she didn’t understand the question. At one time, she confessed, during college, she’d had a drawer filled with Hermès scarves. I’d never heard of Hermès scarves and thought that Greenwich Village was the only place to buy clothing during the college years. I’d never heard of scarf collecting. Later, she gave them all away in a state of growing character development and improved taste.

  “So anyway,” the boy said, “they decided to haul out all these gigantic wardrobe containers and put them on the street for the sale. You know those cardboard containers that moving companies use for shipping clothes? It’s those, but they weigh a ton—they’re loaded with
velvet capes and boots with metal ornaments. Normally I’m very efficient, but it was time to take the lunch orders, so I attempted to shirk the manual labor. These two women I’ve endeared myself to were in charge and said, ‘Okay, get the lunch, we can handle it.’”

  I imagined the boy endearing himself to the women. I was glad that he still had the ability to endear himself to people after becoming an addict and losing his way in life and working as an errand boy at Creative Monsters.

  I’d never known any upper-middle-class intellectual addicts. Keith Richards came to mind when the boy’s father had first informed me about his son’s condition that summer before. I tried to be optimistic and I offered the Rolling Stone as an example of recovery. When I told him that there were success stories and said, “Keith Richards,” he said, “Who’s Keith Richards?”

  How could a person of our generation not know who Keith Richards was? The boy’s father knew the whole history of rock and roll and had met Chubby Checker when they were both in high school. He’d also met Fabian, but that was more of a joke.

  “The Rolling Stone,” I said.

  All he’d said was “Oh.”

  “One of the women had hired a husky assistant for the day of the move,” the boy said. “It’s not as if it was just the women office workers doing the heavy work, but still, it’s a boiling-hot day and they’re dragging the wardrobes around and I’m walking out the door to my father’s Porsche. I get in the car and I’m driving around the parking lot and this contributes to my looking like a spoiled, lazy brat.” He sighed when he said that last sentence. Then he explained, “But it’s how I get to work. There’s no public transportation.”

  I asked how his father got to work, where he was dean of a medical school.

  “I drop him off. Or I take my mother’s Lincoln after dropping her off for some meetings. Anyway, I drive all the way on the freeway packed with traffic, because they all want lunch from California Chicken.”

  “Aren’t they into health food in California?” I asked.

  “No, it’s just like anywhere else. People are obese and unsightly here, as everywhere in America.”

  “I thought they had the greatest health food restaurants in California,” I said. I was disappointed. I’d heard it since 1969, when health food started in New York. Refugees from California told about sandwiches made entirely of organic vegetables and herbs. One bad thing was the avocado on all these sandwiches.

  “They’re not interested. Anyway, those places are in the parts of L.A. far from here. I couldn’t go there to get the lunch orders.”

  “By the way, what movies are they remaking?” I asked, trying to get a better picture of the situation.

  “Earth Versus the Spider-Man, War of the Colossal Beasts,” the boy said without any expression.

  I’d never heard of these and I laughed, but not too loud. Just loud enough to lose that jangly feeling of loose metal springs and bolts in the chest. I know laughter is important for health and I’m always forgetting to get some, same with the breathing and the eight glasses of water.

  “So I get to the restaurant and there’s no place to park. I have to go to private expensive parking—a garage—so I can do the menial delivery. But these two black guys there had pity on my plight and they let me park for five dollars. I said, ‘I have to pick up this lunch order for work,’ and they thought I was like them, a low-level employee, and they gave me a deal.”

  The way he said these last sentences gave cause for concern. An extra bonus of elation came creeping in around the words. I imagined him buying drugs from these guys, or getting a tip on where to get some nearby. I knew it and I didn’t know it at the same time.

  I knew nothing about illegal drugs. I’d never taken any, I didn’t go to Hollywood movies, and I turned off the news if it was about that subject. How it’s done I didn’t know, other than bits of what I’d witnessed in transactions right out in public in Washington Square Park. Sometimes when I had no choice other than walking along the park side, unsavory-looking youths would call out in my direction, “Loose joints.” Since I was used to hearing things called out to me and other young women, things like, “Short skirt,” “Long hair,” “Long legs,” “Cool boots,” I assumed the unsavory ones were commenting on the way we were walking.

  “I get to the restaurant and everyone is well dressed and I’m a delivery boy,” he said. “They’re giving me glances to that effect.”

  “How well dressed could people be at a place called California Chicken?” I asked.

  “This is what they do in L.A. They have nothing else to do but dressing up and associated chores. Oh, by the way, did I tell you who sat next to my mother and I last week at lunch in Beverly Hills?”

  “‘My mother and me,’” I said.

  “It sounds wrong—I know it’s right. My mother and me. Wait’ll you hear this. The one from the murder trial.”

  “The prosecutor?” I didn’t want to think about her face.

  “No, you know who, the one with all the plastic surgery,” he said.

  “That’s all of them, I thought.”

  “No, the worst one. The one who looks like a suntanned monkey,” he said.

  “Is she an actual person?”

  “Yes. It’s unbelievable but true. She was with two friends, all with facial work, the kind of women who look like rich men’s mistresses. And they were all three on cell phones at the same time.”

  “Three? I’ve never seen that,” I said. “What were they talking about?”

  “Nothing. Appointments for manicures and trainers. One had to go outside to finish the conversation. It sounded like an illegal transaction.”

  I tried to picture the boy, a person, in a restaurant, sitting next to these caricatures of people.

  “So be that as it may,” he continued, “I get the lunch after waiting around in embarrassment for half an hour, I pick up the car, and go there and back in an hour. I’m back at the lot, I drive up in the Porsche. They’re all sitting outside with the costumes, and not one person has come to buy anything the whole day. One Puerto Rican woman from the neighborhood stopped to look at some things.” The hot, dry, dusty poignancy of the scene was getting through to me.

  “So I take the lunch in and they’re all going through the order with anticipatory glee and this one director who’s kind of a pretentious intellectual and a nerd combined but thinks he’s great even though look at what he’s directing, he’s from New Jersey like everyone in California—did I tell you this? When my parents first moved here, I’d tell people I’m from New York and they would say, ‘Me, too,’ and I’d say, ‘Oh, what part of New York?’ and they’d say, ‘Englewood, New Jersey.’ Or, I tell them I live near Gramercy Park and they’re like, ‘Oh yeah, Greenwich Village. I used to hang out there.’ Anyway, this director comes out and sees the staff standing hovering at the lunch order and he says, ‘What’s this? California Chicken? Why wasn’t I informed?’

  “They’re like, ‘Oh, we couldn’t find you,’ and he says, ‘Hmm, well there’s something they have there that I really love—rosemary chicken.’”

  These two words together always gave me a jolt. One, the green herb, the other, a dead bird—cooked together and served on a plate.

  “He has the menu memorized,” the boy said. “So after some conference between him and the assistant, he goes back into his office. The assistant comes out and talks to the office-worker captain. Then she comes over and tells me to go back and get the omitted lunch!

  “I tell them, ‘There’s so much traffic, the parking costs so much, it’ll take two hours!’ The assistant hears this and walks over and looks at me. Then he says: ‘Make it happen.’”

  I’d heard the expression, but I hadn’t heard it applied to someone’s lunch. I thought it was for big-time operations, deals and things of that nature.

  The boy had to go back to California Chicken and start all over. Maybe he saw his life going down the drain with that errand and that day and that trip.
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  “I always thought I’d be in some important position someday and I’d be saying ‘Make it happen,’” he said.

  “You will,” I said. “But the expression will be over by then.”

  “It’s over now,” he said. “Isn’t it?”

  “I don’t even know,” I said. “Why don’t you write this all down as a story?”

  “You do it,” he said.

  “It’s your story. You should do it,” I said.

  “We should both do it! In a hundred years scholars can be reading them and trying to put the pieces together.”

  “Why don’t you just tape-record all these stories that you’ve told me since I met you?” I said.

  “We should be taping these conversations!” he said with too much sudden enthusiasm. “But I have to get off the phone. I hear my father’s footsteps.”

  “Aren’t you allowed to talk to me?” I said.

  “They think you’re a bad influence.”

  “I’ve never even smoked marijuana, or even a regular cigarette,” I said.

  “It’s not you. It’s anyone. They don’t want me talking to anyone. They want me to be only with them. It’s unbearable!”

  “Your mother used to ask me to call you every night when you were in high school and they went away to conferences.”

  “Now they think you’re eccentric and antisocial and don’t do all the middle-class things they do with their circle of the bourgeoisie. That’s actually a compliment. But he’s coming. I have to hang up right this minute. Call me on my cell phone later. You can be mulling it over in the meantime. From an existential point of view.” Then he hung up.

  What I mulled over was why he wasn’t allowed to talk to me. I thought of the song “The Bourgeois Blues” and the line “I don’t want to be mistreated by no bourgeoisie,” even though it didn’t apply to this case.

  ONLY IN retrospect, when weeks passed and I never heard anything from the boy again, not even an addendum to the story he’d told me that night, and later when his father told me that the boy was back in rehab—this time for cocaine he’d bought on the street in Santa Monica—only then did it occur to me that a drug might have generated the energy for the story.