The grave’s a fine and private place, but none, I think, do there embrace.
The idea of Hell as a vast and monstrous location is a very old one. Of course, so is the idea of God being a robust old man chucking plagues and thunderbolts at the objects of his disapproval.
I guess both notions helped get us out of the trees and caves and into more enlightened businesses, like modern warfare. Now we get to throw the thunderbolts at those among us of whom we disapprove. That’s progress for you.
But hey, where did Hell go? It is tempting to adopt the suspicions of any veteran of protracted combat, and say it is the battlefield. The problem with that is twofold. Battles end, and the participants are, by and large, innocents in any larger sense. Hell would have to accommodate that larger sense.
A grander denizen implies a smaller place. An exclusive club that takes a lifetime’s worth of diligent effort to acquire entrance.
Perhaps Hitler, Churchill, and John Lennon body shackled together in a sauna would constitute one room at the infernal country club. I know, John Lennon does not really qualify, but I am trying to keep it light here in this dark topic.
The popular and soon to forgotten Anne Rice may have an intuition worth pursuing. Hell could have franchises, much like MacDonald’s, in the wealthier sections of large cities. Unlike a fast food outlet, there will be no neon or gaudy colors. These places will be very discreet.
It would be the sort of place Norman the Neck might book a weekend, when he has to change skins. A place where looking the other way is simply another phrase for Customer Service.
If such places be in such a way, I suspect I have visited them briefly with Monica!
At first glance, the Upper East Side of Manhattan is rather homogenous. Its residential real estate can be divided into three parts: Monstrous gleaming obelisk high rises of recent origin; old school stone high rises typified by those on East 72 St.; and brownstones.
Of these, I have a great fondness for the old school high rises. They really do exude a sense of the better things in life. Close to museums and parks, if one had such privilege, it would be a nice place to raise privileged children.
The obelisks repel me. I have no idea what would possess someone to sink vast sums of money into a glass horror uglier and gaudier than the office buildings infesting downtown. No wonder the kids have attention deficit disorder. It’s a defense mechanism against the intentional ugliness of a gaudy sham.
The brownstones are a wild card of interior variety. Most of them have been gutted and renovated numberless times in the course of their more than half century of existence.
However, there is another aspect of the Upper East Side tucked away in its eccentric boundaries. The area around Sutton Place seems like a tiny little village apart. Also down by the fifty ninth street Bridge. There are occasional besieged looking "mansions" that look like they might have been built in the eighteenth century. Set back from the sidewalk, these edifices are so strange as to be invisible. The DAR has one surrounded by a white picket fence somewhere on Sixtieth St.
Naturally I learned about another one from Monica! We were on the outs again, and she found herself another place of her own. This seems to happen about every two years when she has a birthday coming up. I guess there a certain magic in the early November chill.
I was okay with it. Whenever she lived with me, the money I saved on splitting the rent was always more than offset by the hosing I would take on day to day trifles like buying breakfast, lunch to go, dinner at some rip-off paradise, going out for a few drinks. But of course, the rent she did help with was always the first card thrown on the argument table.
It was like being on a twenty four seven date, but with bills too. Bills were things that did not exist in the world according to Monica! She laughed about them, and made sure that they were all in my name.
Truth is, I laughed too. I loved being with her despite the chaos and turbulence. And it was not just the wonderful physical intimacies, although wow there, when we clicked. I loved holding her hand. I loved her arm around me. I loved reading poetry with her. I loved her. Guess I still do, to judge by what I put in my head when I masturbate.
In her way I am sure she loved back. We always seemed to come back together. And God only knows, if it had just been about money, she could have found far vaster financial and sexual resources than mine.
All that having been said, the frayed wealthy edges of this big city, where she pulled dollars and made connections, were strange to the point of eerie.
So I get the call.
"You’ve got to see the place I’ve scored. It’s only five hundred a month. And it‘s in the Upper East Side!"
Given the fact that we had been living together in a twelve by fifteen rat hole Chelsea studio that was almost seven hundred, this rent was practically free. There must be a store’s worth of other shoes waiting to be dropped.
I stifle the impulse to ask if this is part of a fellatrix-in-residence program at a new bordello.
"So where is it, exactly?"
&$34Here’s where this is really wild. We’ve walked past it dozens of times on some of my go sees down by the fifty ninth street Bridge. But you’d never know it was there.
&$34One of the last of those places set in off the street. It’s on sixty second street way over by the water. It’s called the Lion’s Mouth Mansion, even though it‘s more like a very large cottage. It’s up on a little micro hill, obscured by these two weeping willow trees. I swear, you wouldn’t even know you were in New York. Robert found it for me.&$34
Ouch. Well, what can I say? Robert The Best is a long term client who always gets The Best. Robert The Best is a WWII veteran who in these NYC eighties would have to be in his late sixties to early seventies.
Robert The Best has an Austrian accent, but claims to have been one of the American liberators of Buchenwald. The customer is always right.
Robert The Best makes his money dealing in expensive Austrian glass and crystal objects of some kind of implied d’art. However I cannot, for the life of me, figure out how that has made him a millionaire two or three times over.
Any millionaire of this kind of status is constantly knife fighting to keep his money from eroding in value.
Whenever Robert The Best takes her to Italy, they stay at the finest hotels with The Best value. His eight year old Mercedes was made in The Best Year of the century. It goes on and on, blah blah blah.
This makes Robert The Best a reliable, if sometimes stingy client for Monica! He constantly asks her to move in with him, and she constantly sidesteps the offers.
&$34What would that make me as the kept woman? Another of his best of the second best trophies? No thank you. And he‘s a grouchy fuck to boot. And you know in six months he‘d toss me for some twenty year old.&$34
So it’s Robert The Best to the rescue again with another of his weird angles. Like when he told Monica! That he’d hook me up with The Best porno agency when she brought him some pictures of me sleeping naked in the throes of a morning erection.
True. But it was a gay porno agency that wanted me to blow sixteen year olds. Thanks Robert, but that’s twelve ladders worth of rungs below second best. No thanks.
I caught some hell over that incident, because I got drunk later that day and called him up suggesting some cool social plans I had for when we could have the pleasure of a face to face. Keeping the story short, he pulled some strings and got an Order of Protection against me.
Was he ever steamed when he found out he spent that money on an alias that proved to also happen to belong to somebody who had died in a shoot out covered by all the local papers a month ago. Pure coincidence, I swear it.
So when the cops he bought came by to serve it, I simply pointed out they had the wrong guy. Nor did I, Darius Wheeler the Third (boy did that ever sound good right about then) fit the description of Daniel Wheelock jr.
He was four inches taller than I, and had the wrong hair and eye color. Thank God for lifts and the tinted contacts I wore the one time I met the scum. There are advantages to living with aspiring actress models. Few as they are, they are still to be treasured. Saved my ass.
Monica! was furious, of course. Took almost forty eight hours and three hundred of The Best dollars before everybody was laughing about the idiocy.
&$34So what’s in it for the Lion?&$34
&$34They need a part time caretaker.&$34
&$34Oh ho! And how much soul sucking time might that be? Ten hours, twenty? You know how the rich are once you‘re depending on them.&$34
&$34That’s the best part. Only four hours a week.&$34
&$34Let me see if I have this right. For a mere five hundred dollars plus sixteen hours labor a month, you get a mansion?&$34
&$34No. Of course not. I get a one bedroom apartment that’s built over the old carriage house. You have to see it. It has amazing potential.&$34
&$34How much work does it need and how big are the water rats and cockroaches?&$34
&$34I looked it over pretty carefully. There’s no signs of wildlife at all. Not even roach casings. Amazing. It just needs a few coats of paint and it’ll be gorgeous. They might even agree to let you move in, if everything works out.&$34
&$34I’ve heard that before.&$34
&$34This is different, Weeze. You have to see it.&$34
&$34Good enough. Do you need a hand with getting some of your stuff out of the apartment?&$34
&$34No rush. It’s already furnished. I’ll get settled in with a couple of suitcases and move the rest a taxi at a time.&$34
&$34All right. Call me if you need anything. You know I still love you in spite of the bullshit.&$34
&$34And I love you too. Things are going to be better. I can feel it.&$34
The call came in at 1 a.m.
&$34I need you to come over. I’m creeped out.&$34
Happens every time. The first night jitters of Monica! Should have set my watch and circled the date.
"Hon. You know tomorrow is a big lesson day. I got to be up by ten, and I’ve got the students stacked like burgers. Can’t it wait till-"
"I’m scared, Weeze, and you know that makes me horny."
And it’s true. She gets wetter than a dolphin. Still a little token resistance is in order.
"Hon, look. I’m coming over anyway, you don’t have to-"
"Look, I’ll pay the cab and blow you like you’re president of a banana republic. Just get over here three minutes before now. I mean it."
I’m already jumping into my boots. Now she’s got me alarmed. Something in the tone.
I grab the Beretta reserved for heavy contraband runs I got from my employer, Dirty Poncho. Put on a pair of surgical gloves, grab three back up pairs, and pocket a baggy of wiped ammunition. I’ll load it in the cab. Velvet stage gloves on top.
I hate guns in the city, but ever since Reagan’s contraband cowboys flooded the street with nine millimeters, it was a rough trade requirement by 1983. I grab one of my two sizes too big thrift shop suit jackets, and drop pistol and baggy into each of the inside pockets.
Now for the preferred weapons. Cobra spring loaded sap in the cowboy boot, and butterfly knives in each of the back pockets of the black jeans. Quieter, easier to dispose of, and harder to trace.
Keys and wallet checked. Grab the guitar and sling its padded bag on my shoulder, since of course, I’m just a musician on the way back from a gig.
Easy story to cook if I get any questions on the way, on entry to the address, or the God forbid. The gloves make so much more sense that way. I top it off with my lucky Mets baseball cap, brim low enough to obscure, but high enough so as not to be obvious.
On the way out the door I remember the most important thing I never leave without: the fervent hope and prayer that I won’t have to use any of this shit, and that the whole thing is a case of undue anxiety.
My adrenalin and intuition are on red alert. I don’t know why, but hey, that’s why they call it intuition.
In the cab I surreptitiously load the Beretta in the way I’ve practiced dozens of times. Head straight up, admiring the passing Avenues on neon Twenty Third Street. Never looking once at it.
The worst thing about any weapon is its paradox. Although hopefully you never will use it, if you feel you may ever need to use it, you have to practice its techniques as faithfully as if you were going to use it every day.
I calm a sudden case of tremor and jitters with a quick Our Father and a reminder that I’ve only had to use the cobra twice and the butterfly once. Never used the Beretta