Holland Tunnel (part 02)

part 02: friend of yours?

Thanks to MTA service interruptions, I didn't to get back to Pickles’ place until 6:15am. 

Back in baby’s room, I lay awake on the air mattress, keys to my new place in hand, vibrating with excitement. As my eyelids grew heavier and the syrup of sleep filled in the spaces around my thoughts, I heard giggling from the kitchen: Pickles and his girlfriend were up. 

I came out to meet them, bleary-eyed, and he handed me – without asking – a mug of hot coffee.

PICKLES: Long night?

ME: Yeah, I just got in like, 30 minutes ago. How are you kids? 

They exchanged a sneaky look, a giggle. They had a secret, but I didn’t press.

ME: So, uh, okay. I have good news. I found a place to live. Got the keys!

Leaning against the hallway bathroom door, I jingled the keyring I got from Shane. 

PICKLES: Oh, fantastic! Tell us about it!

I explained the Canal Street spot: the location, the room, the weird but charming roommate, his magic place. Then I apologized for being in their hair for longer than expected. Pickles waved away any apology. 

Behind the door I was leaning on, the toilet flushed loudly. I jumped. I didn’t realize anyone else was home.

ME [mouthing]: Did… you guys have a… threesome??

Again, a knowing look between them. Behind the door, the sputtering hiss of a dying aerosol air freshener. Then the bathroom door opened: it was my father.

ME: Wait… what?

PICKLES [laughing]: Told you he’d forget!

DAD: Thanks. That makes me feel… important.

In my sleepless weeks of night-work and roommate-hunting, I had completely forgotten about my father’s visit. He wanted to come to the city to visit his boys for a few days, slumming out here in deep Brooklyn. I remembered now: he got in last night, but I had work and then met Shane and completely spaced. I shared my news (again), jingled my keys (again), then explained my day.ME: So, I have to be at work at five, but… I’d love to get my stuff moved in first so I can get home later tonight. You guys want to come with me, see the place? We can dick around, get some Chinese food afterwards?

DAD: Sounds good to me!

Everything I owned fit in a taxi.

++++

And so I moved in. My brother and father came along in the cab, schlepped my lone duffel bag and one box of books up the stairs while I brought Wedge in his carrier into his new home. Unlocking the door, I looked around for Shane:

ME: Hello? Shane? Anybody?

Captain Galaxy chirped and came waddling over. He smelled Wedge, twitched his tail. I set the carrier down first, so they could check each other out. Galaxy purred, but Wedge growled low and loud, hissing any time the other cat came near.

ME [shocked]: Whoa, I’ve never seen him do that before.

Cats not liking each other should have been – should always be – an omen of trouble. Meanwhile, my father, who does not give a shit about cats, glanced around at the model kits and Christmas lights as I’d done a few hours earlier. He looked horrified and confused.

DAD: And you’re paying how much to live here…?

Clearly this apartment’s appeal was less impressive than Pickles’ Midwood crib. I invited them into my room – which was even nicer by daylight – to show off my view of the city, the Empire State Building. Unpacking my shit took all of 10 minutes. There was no dresser, so I hung my clothes on a shower curtain rod in the room’s narrowest corner. My family congratulated me but also was ready to go outside and get something to eat.

We were putting on our jackets in the kitchen when Shane walked in, whistling a jaunty tune. He looked up and flinched, seeing the three of us standing there. Taking off his tan Carhartt jacket, he wore a tie-dye cut-off muscle tee and black sweatpants with what we all prayed were toothpaste stains on the thigh. He did not take off his iridescent Oakley visor. 

SHANE: Greetings, Daniel and… strangers.

ME: Hey Shane, this is my brother and my father. I wanted to get my stuff moved in before I had to go to work–

SHANE: No worries, brother. This is your place now, too. [bowing robotically at my family] Nice to meet you, Daniel’s family. My name is Shane, like the cowboy movie.

DAD [trying to connect]: Great movie. Alan Ladd.

Shane just nodded. Behind his visor, I knew he was extremely high. Like, you-should-not-be-out-in-public high.

ME: Hey, we’re about to head out, get something to eat. You’re welcome to join –

SHANE: N-noooooo thank youuuuu… IIIIII… [reaches for a lie, finds it] I just ate pancakes. Big ol’ stack of flapjacks with syrup and bacon.

I gave him a wink of understanding and apology. And we headed out into the city.

++++

I was sitting in a Cantonese restaurant across from my dad and brother, staring through the space between them at my own reflection in a mirror behind a large aquarium that’s green with algae. Fat catfish inside spending their entire lives swimming infinite circles, brushing each other with their whiskers. I knew that feeling. I remembered then that I’d barely slept since the night before last. Also really for the last six or seven weeks.

Our waitress came up behind me – I watched her approach in the mucky mirror – and reached over my shoulder to drop three bamboo baskets of dim sum on the table. A whiff of her armpit sweat simmered beneath her perfume. She asked if we needed anything else and Pickles waves her away.

DAD: So. That roommate of yours...

PICKLES: Yeah. What. Is. That. Guy’s. Deal?

ME: He’s odd, no question about that… but he’s fine. He works on film sets.

DAD: Are you guys, you know… 

He pushed one finger through an “O” he made with his other hand, pumping it in and out. My brother, about to bite the tip off the top of a soup dumpling, blanched. He’d never even considered that possibility.

ME: We are definitely just roommates. He was the warmest of like, nine thousand strangers I met on Craigslist over the last month or two. Plus, I love the space, the location–

My father snorted, threw his hands over his head.

DAD: Good! Very nice to hear. [looks away] Hope it works out for you.

That dismissal ended all discussion about my life for the rest of the visit, and in the months that followed. We wandered outside and over to the Chinatown Ice Cream Factory, got black sesame cones, and then oh geez! Look at the time, I’ve gotta schlep my exhausted bones back up to Midtown and pay that rent.

++++

Which I did.

Apparently, I was at work for eight hours. 

On autopilot, recalling nothing.

++++

Going home afterward is a breeze: the trains are infrequent at 3 am but a major improvement over Brooklyn. Then 10 minutes on the downtown 1/9 and five minutes’ walk in the cold. Inside my building, I’m already toasty by the time I reach the third floor.

Shane owned an electric kettle, so I made myself some instant noodles – an extra-large bowl of Spicy Seafood Shin Ramen – and took them outside through the kitchen window. On the wrong side of my circadian rhythms, I was so far past exhausted that I felt a new burst of energy. I couldn’t sleep, and why would I want to, with this view, this moment? 

Sitting on the wet tar paper, hot ramen resting on my knees, the commercial billboard threw its color-changes up into the clouds. Familiar faces appeared and morphed into others as I sat slurping spicy noodles and breathing, just breathing slowly. I saw the faces of the girl I’d just broken up with, the woman whose love I didn’t value, the brother whose kindness I took advantage of, the friend I wouldn’t let be there for me. I carried shame about these, wanted to be a better person than this. The shame was burning me literally even now, a fiery pain spreading from my lap to thighs and balls that I just couldn’t ignore.

Or maybe there was just a tiny hole in my cup of noodles. Maybe my shame was just an idiot trickle of hot soup that would boil my loins unless I stood up and kept moving.

++++

I did keep moving. And so did time. First a dazed shamble that worked its way up over a week to a brisk Manhattan stroll. 

And it turned out, Shane was right. I did absolutely love living in that area by the Holland Tunnel entrance. Our pocket universe was the westside nexus for three of downtown Manhattan’s main arteries – Houston, Spring, and Canal – all running at angles that narrowed to converge right here. This made it exceptionally easy to get around anywhere downtown.

By day, I walked to the city, exploring, making friends, flirting with cuties, taking my sweet time as I made my way uptown in time to clock in for second shift. I was a regular at daytime screenings in near-empty theaters, drank afternoon pints at the good old Ear Inn. Sucking down cheap dumplings and half-sized cans of Thai gray-market Red Bull syrup, I wandered every side street in Chinatown. Even with my meager income, I came home with imported treasures from Chinese markets and pirate VCD-DVD shops, feeding my belly and my brain.

Wanting to do some light nesting, I brought home a few bags of groceries from an Asian market. But in our kitchen cabinet, there was hardly any space for my stuff. Shane actually didn’t keep proper food there, just bulk packages of snacks like Slim Jims, Ho-Hos, a big tub of JIF peanut butter. But one item of his took up nearly a whole cabinet: a massive plastic tub of Colon Cleanser. 

I didn’t want to shame him by asking about it, just worked my Asian groceries around it best I could and hoped the tiny cockroach scouts inside our plumbing didn’t locate my food stash.

++++

Shane and I both liked to get high, but after that first night on the roof, we rarely got stoned together. Not on purpose, we just passed each other on opposite schedules: I worked nights, walked the city during the daylight, and didn’t sleep much. Shane… worked? I supposed? Slept? His door was closed half the time during daylight and I respected that. When we did intersect, it was always to crash: we’d just nod to each other en route and close our doors.

The cockroach problem was real. They weren’t the prehistoric winged Palmetto bugs I grew up with in Florida, but they made up for their size in sheer number. Shane showed me his technique of bashing a few and leaving the remains around the sink’s opening.

SHANE [very seriously]: It is brutal and disgusting, but it’s the only thing keeping us from a full-scale invasion. Once the little shitheads peer out of the disposal and see their friends’ hairy legs and crushed heads… they’ll think twice about coming after my peanut butter and crackers!

To me, assigning them personality and intelligence made me imagine the stories they told about us in their world beneath our sink.

++++

The first crack in our honeymoon – and the first lingering question mark to appear in my new life – began in our bathroom. The tile had filthy yellowed grout, a carpet of pubes behind the toilet, a knot of long blonde hair in the shower drain that sometimes moved up to the soap dish but was never just flushed down the toilet. And that toilet, filthy inside and outside, wore its years-old diarrhea patina proudly. I bet Shane had never cleaned it even once. 

We spoke a few times about it, tensely – bleary-eyed apologies, promises instantly forgotten – until I broke down and went at it with dollar-store rubber gloves, scouring pads, and Vietnamese Comet until it absolutely sparkled. But after just a few days of pine-freshness, the dump-funk rolled back in again. And no matter how much I cleaned, I couldn’t keep up with whatever was being thrown down our pipes.

Did Shane have a medical condition? Maybe he douched before ass-play? I never asked, but tensions had begun here, over toilet paper. I bought enough for both of us every few days, never making a big deal, never asking him to chip in.

But whenever I did re-stock the bathroom, I always had to remove a roll of paper towels from the top of the toilet tank. And when I used the bathroom next, the paper towels would be back, whether we’d run out of TP or not. Was Shane wiping his ass with paper towels? Did he prefer to wipe his ass with them? Was I missing something brilliant here?

I never found out. But it reminded me of the bucket of Colon Cleanser in the kitchen cabinet.

A clue? Foreshadowing?

++++

At any rate, after a few weeks, I was finding a nice life-groove and now, finally, the world-bruised creative organs in my skull were starting to itch again. I’d picked up a discarded wooden door, found some leftover PVC pipes in the alley around the corner, and built into my bedroom fireplace the art desk I saw myself working at the first time I set foot in the room. I was ready to return, for real, to my art-making practice. 

Down in Miami, I’d spent the last 18 months developing an all-digital workflow for making comics and just had my first comic published (a collab with my brother in his series STYX TAXI). On the strength of that short, Pickles and I were invited to contribute to an erotic indie comics anthology called Smut Peddler. It was the perfect thing at exactly the right hungry moment. I dove into it full blast.

Our six-page story was called “Schmear,” about a Jewish boy sneaking into his job at a Lower East Side bagel shop with his girlfriend and a stolen Viagra pill and boning until the boss finds them at sunrise. I went down to Essex Street at dawn to a century-old bialy shop where the Puerto Rican bakers let me inside to shoot reference shots of the bakery’s interiors. From there I went home to smoke up and make comics.

It might have been a long holiday weekend, because I lost all track of time for days, powered by Thai Red Bulls and my trusty one-hitter, working on multiple pages at once. Our silly script took form as a black-and-white photo-realistic piece that I tried to make feel like Woody Allen had shot a porn film: horny teenagers, Jewish humor, seventies bush.

By the time I got to the last remaining panel of Schmear (I was working out of order), part of me wanted to collapse onto my sagging futon and sleep for a week. But the panel I’d saved for last featured an absurdly large hose of a cock, vibrating and spurting. I mean, that was the job, right?

I’d collaged out the figure references with a combination of porn actor bodies and celebrity faces, then scaled up a photo of a meaty cock to an impossibly silly size before I started drawing. It was so fucking stupid and fun, this piece of ours, I was stoned and cracked-out, laughing to myself while rendering the figures.

And then I heard breathing behind me, smelled slightly-sour sweat. 

The level of Red Bull syrup in my bloodstream was already legendary and lightning shot through my spine, spinning me around on my desk chair to find Shane watching me work from the doorway.

From just his body language, I knew Shane had taken something harder than weed. His whole body was in a state of ongoing curling, shoulders and hips and knees and neck, all of him undulating like a twist of live snakes or a cat in heat.

SHANE [looking at the giant cock on my screen]: Oooooh… friend of yours?

He was also naked, but for a pair of turquoise bikini briefs. His penis was semi-hard, pressing against its fabric, leaving a tiny wet dot near its tip. 

SHANE [giggling]: I had no idea you were so very talented, Daniel! Oh my Jiminy Crickets!

As he laughed, he slid his back up and down against my door frame, working its edge in between his butt cheeks. Any words I might have had – should have had – flew out my window to hide on the fire escape. Shane became aware of me watching him and got self-conscious, his face flushing even deeper red:

SHANE: Oh no, I– I’ve crossed a boundary, haven’t I? [looking down at his bare feet] I’m… sorry I’m like this.

ME: No, but definitely yes, boundaries… but I’m glad you can recognize that.

SHANE [overheating]: It’s just… this pill I’m on is making me feel… soooo good right now, you know?

His eyes flicked up to find mine and held my gaze.

SHANE: You think you’re going to be up much later? Maybe when you’re finished with whatever, we can smoke a bowl in my room? I’ll put on a shitty old science fiction movie?

And as he stood there in his tiny blue briefs, his asshole rubbing the doorframe of the room I was renting, that tiny dot of precum became a bold-faced question mark at the end of what exactly the fuck had I gotten myself into.

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