Holland Tunnel (part 04)

part 04: medicine bag

Shane was home the rest of the day and night, moving things around in his room with his door closed.

I was supposed to be working on a project behind my own door, but I was constantly distracted by the clumsy clomps of work boots on plywood. Instead I spent most of that evening sexting with a tattoo artist who called herself Mugwump I’d met online a few weeks back. Things escalated this evening:

MUGWUMP: u like dum-dum lollipops?

ME: those lil ones from the dentist’s office? yea

ME: but i dunno why they give you candy after you just got your teeth cleaned

MUGWUMP: i always carry dum-dums in my bag 

MUGWUMP: case I need to suck on sumthin

ME: … what flavor?

MUGWUMP: cherry. always cherry

MUGWUMP: can i stick my dum-dum up ur butt?

ME: only if you suck on it after

MUGWUMP: ooo meow now my stomach growling

ME: lol maybe we should meet up

MUGWUMP: yea dummy i need food 

She lived on the LES. We decided to finally meet in the middle, in person, for soup dumplings, maybe Dum Dums for dessert.

++++

Sitting across from Mugwump, she was crusty-hot but we had zero chemistry. After she ate her dumplings and most of mine, she excused herself to the restroom and never came back.

Maybe it was me. I was only half-listening to her. I couldn’t focus on anything but Shane’s impending travel. Whether he was gone for weeks or months, I was building sand castles in my head about how he’d just never come back, and whatever boiling point we were barreling toward would just pop like a bong hit in a balloon and dissipate, and then I’d grandfather in to his lease — assuming he even had one — and I’d replace him as the new Shane, the High Lord of the Pocket Dimension.

That fantasy ate up my walk home on Canal against the freezing wind off the Hudson. Dumb thoughts. Childish hopes.

++++

But when I got back to the building around 11:30 pm, I could hear Captain Beefheart blasting from the sidewalk. The stairwell stunk of cigarettes, beer, dank weed. It was coming from our place. 

Opening the door to our place, I braced myself for the shitshow but the kitchen was empty: just a pile of coats, hats, and boots in the corner. Shane’s rager was confined to his room, with the door closed. And I wasn’t invited.

++++

The prog rock and bong smoke continued for hours. I lay fully clothed on my bed in my own closed bedroom with my pillow wrapped around my ears. At some point, those noodling rock records shifted to Depeche Mode and OMD karaoke, drunk and stoned voices bellowing and warbling… how many fucking people could squeeze into his tiny room?

Then, suddenly, the voices stopped. A menacing silence crept in. And from the silence: an awareness of many bodies breathing, shuffling feet on plywood, then moaning, banging on furniture, banging on the walls.

In my room, I stared out the window. Snow was falling, dusting the rusting fire escape, outlining the red bricks of SoHo with thick white lines. It was not quite 2:30, maybe I could still make last call at The Ear.

++++

Last call was made as I entered the bar so I ordered three whiskeys. Behind the bar, Sammy laughed; she’d seen me on my best nights and my roughest and gave me a wink.

SAMMY: One of them?

ME: You cannot imagine.

I drained the first whiskey. As she started to wipe down bottles and countertops, I closed my eyes in this safe corner of the pocket universe. I could imagine the sweaty, toothless, sour-smelling group sex going on in my apartment right now and prayed it would stay confined to Shane’s room exclusively.

I started to tell Sammy — and the other two stragglers — about the Shane orgy I was trying to ride out at the bar counter. Unanimously, they’d all been there: this was New York City, after all. 

An older woman named Elaine — I’d seen her in here loads of times before; I heard she was a famous playwright — piped up from the corner table that sat underneath the rickety staircase:

ELAINE: Living through shit’s part of the reason you came here.

I raised my second glass to that, and as the whiskey shot down my gullet into my stomach, Elaine stood up with a wobble and strutted over like she meant business, then collapsed onto the stool next to mine.

She wanted a last drink but Sammy had already called last call. I slid my third whiskey over to her and she toasted me with it:

ELAINE: This is a kindness. They always come back around.

We sat together in silence in that ancient bar, under its wooden beams and plaster walls and sordid history. Peaceful, almost prayer. We breathed together, alone in our thoughts, until Sammy flashed the lights over the bar and turned the dimmers up to full brightness. It was time to go. Elaine’s crumbled body stepped off the stool and extended vertically until her spine was straight, her neck long and high. She was a good head taller than I was, the coat she pulled on expensive.

ELAINE: Honey, are you going back to the orgy, or do you need a place to crash tonight?

My glance back at her said it all. 

ELAINE: I’ve got a nice antique sofa in my study. No expectations, okay?

She tugged at the elbow of my coat and walked toward the exit. I followed.

++++

Under orange sodium street lights, we wobbled together along burst-open asphalt, revealing older cobblestones beneath. Her heels caught in the stones and she nearly lost her footing; I caught her by the elbows just in time. Without thinking, I asked:

ME: You’re out alone. Where’s your husband… [remembering] Dennis…? Out of town?

She snorted and laughed.

ELAINE [making air quotes]: Yeah, “out of town.” Permanently.

ME: Oh. I’m sorry, did he…?

ELAINE: Die? God, I wish! No, he left me… he’s uptown right now, in his love nest with his young leggy assistant. [sucking her teeth] The fucking male ego is the most toxic substance on earth.

She stopped walking in front of an old brick loft next to the firehouse. We were both shivering in the screeching wind as she fumbled with her keys and unlocked the single door.

++++

Entering the vestibule, I noticed the lack of a buzzer with tenant names on printed labels. This whole three-floor building belonged to them.

Elaine hung my coat for me on an old brass hook next to a spotty oval mirror. The stairs were carpeted and curved upwards where they opened to the next floor. Everything was wood and glass and antique furniture they’d collected together. Each wall featured one large painting orbited by a cluster of eclectic, smaller framed pieces. Their bookcases stuffed with hardbacks and keepsakes brought back from far-off lands. This was what life as a successful, creative New York couple looked like.

Sitting at her kitchen counter, Elaine made us spiced tea with honey, served it in heavy ceramic mugs made by an artist whose name I didn’t recognize. 

Then she led me upstairs to her study, brought me a knit wool blanket. I took off my shoes with a drunken grunt but kept my clothes on as my eyelids finally started to get heavy. Just as I sank into sleep, I heard a floorboard creak. I opened one eye, like a grumpy cat. 

Elaine was peering in from the doorway. Her eyes met mine and she smiled, stepping into the study in a thin cotton nightgown with nothing underneath, her wild dark bush on full display.

Groggy, I rose to plant my feet on the floor but suddenly she was on me, straddling my chest, pinning my shoulders down with her knees. Lifting her nightgown, she threw it over my head, forming a sheer tent around us. I looked up at the paunch of her belly, the thin hairs trailing up from her bush to belly button. With her fingers cradling my skull through her gown, she breathed in silence before whispering to me:

ELAINE: Is this okay for you…?

My breath against her midriff, she trembled. A damp, growing heat radiated from that dark hair. She tilted her waist, opening her thighs wider for me. She was wearing a man’s cologne: leathery, masculine. Probably her ex-husband’s.

I leaned in and relaxed, lifting her hips to place herself against my mouth. She whimpered and palmed the back of my skull and pushed my face deep inside her, trying to swallow me whole. 

Her thighs twitched. When she came she shuddered in waves, oceanic, her juices sliding down into the nape of my neck. And when she was sated:

ELAINE [panting]: Welp. So much for no expectations.

ME [laughing]: Unexpected, but lovely.

ELAINE: I got a vibe off you at the bar but got… self-conscious. You’re much younger, and girls of your generation all shave or wax. Not me; I love being a full-bloom woman. Why would I want a preteen cootch?

She shifted her hips, sitting back tall and straight on my ribcage, releasing a suction squelch of air that was definitely not a fart.

ELAINE [unfazed]: But then Dennis — my husband of 21 years — leaves me for someone who certainly is smooth as a Barbie down there. Has the media made all men, like… grossed out by a natural bush now?

This hill I was proudly prepared to die on:

ME: Shaved pussy makes me think of plucked chicken.

Elaine snorted and high-fived me, then got up for a hot towel.

++++

A little later, she sent me on my way after a cup of very good Rwandan coffee. The sun was up now; steam rising from manhole covers and sewer gratings, nobody else on the street yet but a leaky garbage truck with squealing brakes.

I nodded to the big man hanging off the rear handles of the truck with work gloves. He took the cigarette out of his mouth, flicked it directly into the sewer grating:

GARBAGE MAN: Walk of shame, eh? [chuckles] I remember those. Enjoy it while it lasts, boss!

++++

And when I got home, Shane was gone. So was Captain Galaxy. Wedge greeted me at the front door, happy to have his run of the place. The apartment was emptied of trash and all traces of the party, save the ever-lingering weed-funk. He’d left town and even taken his bucket of Colon Cleanse with him.

On Shane’s bedroom door was a taped sheet torn from a spiral notebook that read: REMEMBER 2 FEED MY FISHIES! Beneath it, he’d duct-taped a Ziploc baggie with three new containers of fish flakes, which, as a former aquarium enthusiast, I knew was like three or four months’ worth.

I checked the clock next to the police radio on top of the fridge: I had about seven hours before I needed to start heading uptown to work. I took a hot shower, washed Elaine off my face, and when I was clean, dressed, and ready, I opened the door to Shane’s bedroom.

++++

His room smelled — if I had to name it — cummy. It had been straightened up, but the furniture was all a little off-center now, as if things had been knocked around, not put back quite right. When the thin slice of sunlight snuck in around the blackout curtains, you could see the sheen of skin oil, body prints left on the black walls: an arm, an ass cheek, a pair of feet.

His bookshelves were untouched. I perused — can’t help myself, bookshelves are such a window into a person’s mind — pinching his ratty paperback of Beautiful Losers for later.

I opened the drawers of his dilapidated Ikea dresser; they were empty. He’d taken all his clothes, but left his Museum of Shane intact? Where had he gone, and for how long? Was this place just a storage facility for him?My eyes caught the space under his futon; the balled-up laundry and pairs of dirty shoes were gone too. Just his toys remained.

Looking over at the fish tank, I remembered I should probably feed them. Sprinkling some flakes into my hand from an open container onto the mucky surface, his fishies all swam up from their hiding spaces. I watched them swim up toward the green light to feed, the aquarium’s pump gently sending bubbles through an algae-caked tube into a ceramic pirate’s treasure chest. The lid was hinged, and as air collected in it, the lid swung open to release it before slowly falling shut again.  

It was relaxing in here, watching the treasure chest, even if it smelled like jizz.

And then I saw the sparkle of pirate gold: there was a tiny brass key. This was a plot point in A Fish Called Wanda, one of my all-time favorite movies. Looking up at Shane’s VHS shelves, there it was, on the third shelf with the rest of the Monty Python films.

Unoriginal motherfucker. Now I just had to find the lock it fit.

++++

Looking for the lock took time: the Museum of Shane wasn’t just overloaded with stuff and built by a mad stoner craftsman, but it was also organized using a logic only Shane himself understood (maybe). Whatever I disturbed needed to be back exactly as before, otherwise he’d know… and that transgression would cross a line that would bring whatever confrontation was brewing between us to a head.

I started slowly: if I moved a pile of CDs — say, a stack of Amon Düül II, Gong, and early Hawkwind albums — I moved the entire pile as a unit, not individually.

This process began that morning and lasted four more days of obsessive attention to detail before I found what I was looking for.

++++

I remembered how Shane reached between his bed and the wall for his bong and a roll of paper towels. I figured he kept his nearest and dearest tools there, but moving the platform away from the wall, I found just some crusty socks, a dried-up condom, a dead roach. I didn’t clean up because I’m not his fucking mother, but also because everything needed to remain as he’d left it.

As I was sliding the platform back into place, I saw it: in the corner near the jumble of electrical cords plugged into surge protectors. Nearly invisible, black leather against black walls: a handsome old medicine bag like a 1940s small-town doctor would use to make house calls. I wouldn't have even seen it if not for the giant purple double-ended dildo stowed behind it, revealing its outline. 

I went back to the kitchen and fetched a pair of tongs, then pulled the dildo out of the way. The bag was locked; its keyhole tiny. 

ME [to myself, crazy]: Where, oh where, could I possibly find a tiny key? Try harder, unoriginal motherfucker…

Sticking my arm into the aquarium up to my elbow, I fished the key out of the aquarium’s treasure chest. I wiggled it into the locked box, and it opened with a tiny click.

++++

Taking a deep breath, I reached my hand inside, felt around. This is a list of what I found:

• A hard rubber ball, steel O-rings, black leather straps. A ball gag.
• A pair of police-issue handcuffs. Heavy, well-oiled. Not novelty cuffs from the adult toy store.
• A foot-long Crocodile Dundee-ass hunting knife. Antique, bone-handled, smelled of pipe tobacco. Sharpened to a razor’s edge. 
• A small square packet of folded clear plastic. Labeled “Painter’s Tarp.”
• A black leather bi-fold, bound with a rubber band. Inside: two rows of stainless steel surgical tools: scalpels, forceps, clamps, and a menacing three-clawed hook.

My heart started beating faster. I kept digging:

• A massive steel pistol, full-loaded, safety on. A Magnum Research Desert Eagle. Plus five spare magazines.
• Two rolls of matte black duct tape.

++++ 

I sat on the greasy gray linoleum of Shane’s cummy bedroom in a circle of sex toys, surgical implements, and weapons, speechlessly adding up all of these data points: 

He was into S&M? Cool; far be it from me to yuck anybody else’s yum.

Into vintage weapons? Why not? He was also a collector of Japanese toys and a B-movie nut. 

The loaded gun? I was less comfortable with that, but this was America. 

A surgery kink? Again, not my jam but I won’t kink-shame that.

But.

Putting all these things together? I sat there for a long time, searching for the benefit of a doubt, attempting every type of cognitive gymnastic move at my disposal. There had to be some other reason for those specific items to be stored together in the same to-go bag.

In the end, there was only one conclusion: for the last few months, I’d been living with a serial killer.