Paul Silverman Stories

Now I can talk about the place with the long-handled shovels and the dirt. Take you there, just like I took the kid. In the end Didi threw me out of the house for it. She said I had no business taking the kid to a place like that. He was just out of diapers, it’s true, but he could walk a straight line, and I took him, because a chain of fathers is important. That’s what I believe, and in the way this chain goes I’m the kid’s father and Zev was mine. Didi always fought me about this. She said Zev was an animal. She didn’t want the kid within ten miles of him. Ever.

An animal? Harsh I’d say, although Zev did break a face or two, but never for money. Not the sort of person Didi wanted at her parties. She even wanted to keep him away from our wedding, maybe for fear of crushing the canapés.

What did Didi know about animals? She wasn’t born in the Tsar’s manure piles. She never wrestled a horse to get its shoes off. She was born with a silver filling in her mouth, right here. A dentist’s daughter who married down. Me – down – that’s who she married. A son of Zev, Zev who hardly ever spoke, certainly not in English. His tongue was tied even in Yiddish. He earned his keep breaking sidewalks with a steel pick. For Italian padrones, who called him their Jew cavallo, their Jew horse.

Zev used to make a fist and the kid would hang on it with both his hands, as though it were some kind of carnival ride. By then Zev’s beard was ash-gray, his skin candle-yellow, but the fist was still like a horse’s hoof. The kid could do this for hours, hanging on Zev’s fist and spinning through the air, making this crazy screeching sound. But not like any human. You could swear it was the screeching of a bird.

*******

The burial place was in a sea of tenements, but the look of it was straight out of the Tsar’s potato fields. The old beards knew only one way to get buried. Didi had never seen such a thing. Not a coffin as she knew it, carved and shiny-thick. But pine boards, raw and white and thin, loosely nailed together, slipping this way and that as Zev was carried to the hole and the tall mound of city dirt. You could see snatches of ash-beard or eye-pouch as the top board rattled around. The dirt was piled high and the hole was deep. It smelled of smoke and sewer steam, and there was only a single tall shovel. It stuck up from the dirt pile, waiting for us. We were supposed to go up, each of the men, one by one. I’d seen it before, one shoveler at a time, men working slow as a dirge, until the mound was gone and the hole was filled and nothing showed, only the beaten-down dirt. But on that day the first shovel-full brought a sound from the crowd that was like nothing I’d ever heard. A moan, I suppose, or a cry – there just is no word for it. So dreadful and deep it felt like it was coming from Zev too. Something in the hole had shifted – it must have been the earth below, moving - and the pine top-board was shaken way out of position. There was a crack a mile wide and the dirt fell right on the face and the beard, and all down the yellowed white shirt. The kid saw it and squirmed and tore at my eyes. But I held on, even when Didi tried to pull him away from me. I wouldn’t let go, I even missed my turn shoveling. I missed my turn and I was the son. The kid screamed as I carried him away, following the others past the stones, through the iron gate to the smashed sidewalk.

All those times I went back to the grave I went alone. Didi wouldn’t go. She begged me never to let the kid set foot in the place. She said he wasn’t the same kid, not after that day, and it was all my doing.

Now when I go to visit the burial place I can see them both, my two closest, now, then and forever. Zev I can see just by staring hard at the granite stone, at the Hebrew letters. The granite is no more than a fog to me. I can squint and see all I need to see.

The kid is there too. Alive, I guess you could say, and above ground. He won’t get the meds himself, so I bring them to him. Not to him directly, I give them to the two old keepers who sit in the shed of an office, with their prayer-books, shawls and skullcaps. They make him tea and a little soup. The kid has his own beard now, too, black as Zev’s once was. He stays on the smashed sidewalk, for the most part. They can’t budge him, not even the cops, who are kind of amused. The crate he’s found keeps out some of the wind and none of the cold. At least it’s wood, not cardboard. Thin slats of wood, whitish. It makes me think of the day with the pine and the dirt. After dark the two old beards close the gate. They tell me that’s when the kid pushes his face through the iron rails and makes this sound, a bird sound that lasts long into the night. It’s a soft sound, somewhere between a shriek and a whimper. No complaints from the neighbors – they don’t even hear it. Maybe Zev does.

In an earlier life Phil Blodgett was just Blodgett, because it suited him better. It was a time when he felt preyed upon by men in black suits, and when he was wild about cherrystone clams, the raw, pink wet ones.

Blodgett couldn’t resist those clams. He was a pig for them. On any given night he’d go by the kitchen raw bar ninety, a hundred times. At least three of those times he’d grab a juicy, just-opened cherrystone and suck it down before Gus the Shucker even noticed. Waiters were no more allowed to eat clams, oysters or shrimp from the kitchen than they were allowed to help themselves to Stoli or Wild Turkey from the bar.

Blodgett acquired his own black suit, his waiter’s tux, at Keezer’s used clothing store in Cambridge. The head waiter, Bobby, gave him no choice in the matter of career apparel. “Fredo’s is a class place,” he said. “We all wear tuxes. You put your little ass in a tux if you want to work at Fredo’s.”

Blodgett considered himself an actor at the time, which meant he took a class or two at B.U. or Emerson extension, paid to have head shots taken and showed up now and then at auditions for local commercials and industrials. He had a couple of screen credits but had yet to be cast as a principal player; he was still waiting, and longing, for the camera to look on his handsome face for at least a full second - while he spoke a real line.

He told his acting friend Erica - the one who made him pose for her, oiled all over and stroking his penis - that he looked forward to wearing a tux each night because it made him think of English plays and films with butlers in them. “I’ll be the butler of Fredo’s,” he said. “What do you think of that?”

Erica frowned with those pouty, princess lips of hers. “Phil the butler. It doesn’t sound right.”

“Then I’ll be Blodgett,” he said. “Blodgett the butler.”

So it began. Just Blodgett. And he joined the black suit brigade. French-serving the vegetables. Boning a whole sole calabrese. Swiveling around the tables like a matador with his little towel. He had the waiter’s gene. Working when the rest of the world was partying. Groveling suavely for tips on nights like New Year’s Eve, those American ceremonial nights when all wait-people are left out and very alone. De-shelling the lobster for New Year’s couples and lovers. Fussing foppishly over the bananas flambé while the girl gropes the boy under the table. “I wait,” said Blodgett, assuming a Shakespearian pose in front of Aldo, the half-wit dishwasher. “I wait, therefore I am.”

“Fuck you,” said Aldo, plunging both bony arms into the gray, greasy water.

Every time Blodgett put on his well-worn tux he could smell the armpits of the last three men who had owned it, and no amount of dry cleaning could erase the stink. It was the penalty for buying Keezer’s absolutely cheapest, most-used model. But Bobby had told him not to go overboard. “You’re only going to get it stained with lasagna anyway, honey,” he had advised, and sashayed away with his armful of menus.

After just one month on the waitstaff Blodgett left his roach-ridden Chelsea rooming house. He was a convert to Little Italy and the waiter’s life. He moved to the North End and to the domain of a new landlord, some Baciagalupi who lived off the rents squeezed from three tomato-stained tenements. Blodgett’s place was right across from an Italian butcher shop, where the window was crammed with skinned lambs and rabbits strung up for Easter. It made sense to be there, just around the corner from Fredo’s and a stone’s throw from the other Italian restaurants too, just in case things didn’t work out. The apartment Blodgett found was a pre-urban renewal classic; so small the toilet, sink and stove were all in the same room. He could piss and fry an egg at the same time.

The waiters were fed at five sharp, giving them ample time to finish and set up for the dinner rush. Lino, or one of the other fat-armed cooks, would do up a trough of baked ziti, always overcooking it because he had better things to think about. The waiters would line up with plates and the cook would shovel and dump, distributing the burned ziti more in the manner of a zookeeper than a chef.

Carrying his ziti plate, Blodgett would always do a sly detour by the raw bar, but there were times Gus would catch him in the act.

“You like a fucking seagull, stealing clams from the boat.”

“What’s a clam to you, Gus? One lousy clam.”

“If I had a cleaver I chop your fucking hand.”

But Gus would always relent. “Take your fucking clam. Fucking seagull.”

Among the black-suits was one genuine black-shirt, an old Neapolitan they called Dutchy, after the Italian Duce, because he was a major fan of Mussolini and his causes. This meant Dutchy after all these years was still fighting the Ethiopians, whom he saw as all the African people walking the face of the earth, including every last black living in Boston. “Mussolini, he clean ‘em up,” Dutchy said to Blodgett. “He come here, make ‘em all into soap.”

“Mussolini’s dead, Dutchy.”

“You think he’s dead? Not dead around here.”

That very night, Bobby steered a party of Harvard professors to Dutchy’s station. The academics all loved Dutchy for his age and his humbled English; he was their peasant Methuselah, straight out of Fellini. It made them feel they were more in the grottoes of Italy than a plastic booth nine hundred feet from Boston Garden, and they always went with his recommendations, dishes he claimed weren’t on the menu.

Blodgett heard Dutchy say to the eldest prof, “hey, tonight you get Steak Africane. Lino make it for you special.”

The whole party ordered it – tenderloin in a black butter sauce, deep and dark.

“See, I serve them niggermeat, a la Africane,” Dutchy said to Blodgett, stacking his tray and pushing through the kitchen doors. “Make Mussolini proud.”

In front of the professors he did a little bow, sized up the generous tip possibilities, and ordered Blodgett to run back for sides of linguine vongole, on the house.

“Make it al dente,” he hissed. “Not the fucking steamed shit in the steamtable.”

Blodgett did as he was told and even helped Dutchy clear the plates, dumping the uneaten Steak Africane in a doggie bag. At two in the morning he closed up and left the North End for the South End and the Fenway. He followed a small rat into a Symphony Road apartment house and shared the contents of the doggie bag with Ollie, his new friend from the Beth Israel Hospital film. The B.I. was doing a twenty-minute industrial for staff training. A down and dirty production; no union amenities, not even a box of free doughnuts for the cast. Blodgett and Ollie were playing orderlies, chosen at callbacks under the usual Oreo strategy: one white youth and one black, both equally handsome, both equally stuck in jobs spilling piss and shit out of bedpans.

“You’re eating niggermeat, you know,” Blodgett said, swigging a fat hit of jug wine. “That’s what he calls it. I mean it.”

“Tastes good,” Ollie said, his mouth full of the tenderloin. “Tastes like me. Can I visit you at your job some day?”

“You can go anywhere you want. They’re not all racists like Dutchy, you know.”

“Yes they are,” said Ollie. He grabbed the jug and thrust the neck in his mouth, like a gas pump into a tank. “But I want to see the motherfuckers for myself.”

They wound up back in the North End, both sleeping in Blodgett’s dwarf apartment. At noon the next day they trudged across to the Café della Sport - to pry open their eyelids with double espressos. And if all the other customers’eyeballs had been bullets, they’d have been shot dead a thousand times.

“It’s 1986,” said Ollie. “But in Little Italy it’s 1886.”

Blodgett couldn’t believe it. “You can stay with me all you want,” he said. “You got a rat in your place.”

“It’s not a rat. It’s a large mouse. And if I stay with you I might wind up cooked in a Calzone.”

“Calzone a la Africane.”

After espressos and biscotti they made their way to the hellish Auto Mile in Norwood, where Blodgett handed some huckster on a windswept lot all the tips and wages he had to his name. In return he and Ollie chugged back to town in the lemon of lemons, a kicked-around, rusting MG roadster.

“I wanted an actor’s car,” Blodgett said. “It’s the best I could do.”

“You’re not an actor,” Ollie said. “You’re a waiter.”

Blodgett had one good reason, one only, to justify the midget car. It was like his apartment. Sized to fit cramped Little Italy, the fruit-strewn alleys and backstreets that were skinny as capellini.

As it turned out, the initials MG were significant. A portent. He spied them that very night, embossed on a cigarette case of phony gold. Mando, the head of the back room, stole into the storeroom where Blodgett was sneaking a break among the onion sacks, trying to cop a few minutes of peace away from Dutchy, his dictator. Mando slid out the gold-toned case with his spindly, tobacco-yellow fingers and lit up.

“Clam boy,” Mando said, and muttered something rank about pink, juicy cherrystone clams and the female sex organ. With a shrug, Blodgett suggested the raw, open clam could also be compared to the male baboon’s ass.

Then he asked, “You slow tonight too, Mando?”

“Slow, fuck yes. I can’t live on this shit.”

Blodgett asked him what the G on the cigarette case stood for.

“My last name. Fuck, what you think?”

Mando was the waiter who ran the back room the same way Dutchy ran the front room. They were the two field generals, and the other waiters were the troops. As for Bobby, he talked a big game up front, the day Blodgett was hired, but in reality he was head waiter in name only. He bossed no one, because he dished and swished too much for Nicky, the big boss, to take him seriously. Bobby was more like the male hostess than the head of anyone, lisping and hugging the menus to his chest as he wiggled down the aisle, leading the parties to their tables.

“Hey, clam boy,” Mando said to Blodgett, “you suck one tonight yet?”

“Had three tonight. Gus was in the walk-in freezer digging out shrimp. I could have had six.”

Although Mando looked like a pimp he was actually a family man, a career waiter with four kids. He worked every split shift, sometimes seven days a week, and every holiday. Mando was a pro; he could carry six zabaglione up his long arm. So Blodgett was flattered when Mando asked him to leave Dutchy and come work the back room with him.

“I got the okay from Nicky,” he said, “don’t you worry. Tonight I fire two guys, they suck cock anyway. Then it be just you and me. We work the room, maybe we can make a buck.”

Mando wasted no time showing him how to pork up the tips. There were the legal ways, such as passing out thin chocolate mints at the end, making sure you placed an individual mint in front of each diner. Always good for a few extra bucks. There were times when eye contact worked, or kneeling, or simply touching a shoulder. There was knowing which people to keep out of your station, if possible: two old ladies splitting a check, for sure; and all parties of sailors, and any and all people from Maine.

As for those who tipped the best … without question guys who were dating each other were very good. And guys who were dating each other who were priests were so good they could duke you a hundred percent - and more than that if there was something about you.

Mando waited till the dead part of the evening to instruct Blodgett in the less than legal way to pork up a tip. He took him outside and showed him Rico, the man in the cap who parked cars. Rico was a cross between a jockey and an ape; tiny-assed with wide shoulders and hands like gorilla paws.

“Ever hear of Willy Pep?” asked Mando. “He could have been the next Willy Pep. Fast as a plane, punch like a train. Instead he parks cars for Nicky. And other things.”

Mando let the comment sink in. Then he stubbed out his cigarette, lit another and went on, explaining that all over Boston the restaurants were switching to computerized registers. Machines that automatically priced the items and spit out the checks. But the North End guys like Nicky were so goddam cheap they still had their waiters scribbling out the bills by hand. Every man, even the ancient Dutchy, carried a pencil and a bill-pad in the breast pocket of his tux.

Fredo’s also didn’t take plastic, none of it. Nicky always said he would rather break sidewalks with sledgehammers than hand over four percent to American Express.

Mando fixed his pimp eyes on Blodgett and spoke gravely. “When the fucking computers come in I go looking for a new job. Open a grocery store or something. Get my own computer.”

But until that day, Mando continued, he would go on applying both ends of his pencil. Using the lead point to tack on an extra ten percent or so to the bill. Then using the eraser to remove the ten percent once the customer had handed over the cash.

Blodgett found he had no moral objections whatsoever to being double-tipped. He kept his eraser clean, pocketed the bonus cash, and made sure his addition was exactly right when he finally handed in the checks to the cashier. Even on shit nights he came out with a decent wad in his pocket. Two tips for every one.

Three weeks into the scam Blodgett asked Mando what would happen if Nicky found out what they were up to.

“Then you see Rico,” he said, “and Rico see you.” Blodgett could feel the bolt go up Mando’s spine and leap into his own. He had the sensation they had both been hanging out for the subway and suddenly they’d been shoved, from behind, onto the third rail.

From that moment on, Blodgett was seized with a touch of that third-rail feeling again and again. It hit him every time he stood before Ralphie the cashier, who was a kissass first cousin of Nicky, waiting to turn in a fucked-over check.

“Hey, clam boy, you got to take a chance to make a chance,” Mando said, attempting to settle Blodgett down.

On St. Anthony’s Feast Day, Fredo’s was a zoo. Outside, the trumpets blew somberly and the holy procession marched through the angel-hair streets, one street skinnier than the next, holding the saint high in the air above the sweating crowd. The tenements emptied as crones in shawls and men in Bicycle Thief undershirts clawed into the sea of people, begging for room to pin their dollar bills over every exposed inch of the sacred figure.

The image of the saint covered with money was still in Blodgett’s head, shortly after the huge dinner rush died down, when two tall priests came in and were seated deep in the back room, in the darkest table. Even in the shadows Blodgett could tell they were flush-faced Irishmen. They wore civilian jackets over their black shirts and white collars; they smoked Gauloises and French-inhaled languidly, and they sent Blodgett to the bar for two Negrones, the pungent, ruby-hued martinis of Italy.

“Make them with Tanqueray and Cinzano, real Cinzano,” said one of the priests as Blodgett pivoted and headed off. He felt the fatherly eyeballs lasered on his back. Feeling so coveted brought out the actor in him, and he gave his hips a little bounce, a la Bobby, even though it made him feel sluttish.

Suddenly Mando swept alongside, whispering stage directions. “Those two spend,” he said. “Do the antipasto yourself, in front of them.”

“I think I am the antipasto,” said Blodgett.

It was Blodgett’s luck, not good luck, that Nicky himself was tending bar tonight. Nicky was so much the owner, his every action seemed motivated by divine right. The way he patrolled the long stretch of mahogany made it all look smaller, more a podium for an iron-fisted tyrant than a long counter staffed by a human in an apron.

“Two Negrones,” Blodgett said. “Straight up. With Tanqueray and Cinzano.”

Nicky nodded, but ignored the bottles of Tanqueray and Cinzano displayed on the mirrored shelf behind him. Instead, he reached under the bar and came up with two no-names, Mount Vernon Gin and Rossini red vermouth. Blodgett knew Nicky was boosting the margins by slipping in rotgut, but the murderous way Nicky squeezed the necks of the bottles as he worked told him something. Told him to keep his mouth shut.

Following protocol, Blodgett took a small round cocktail tray off the stack. He held it, in respectful obedience, as Nicky loaded on the pair of Negrones, but he became embarrassed when a sudden case of the shakes seized his tray-hand. The liquid, which should have been still as the glass itself, shivered visibly. Blodgett turned away to hide the panic - too quickly, and Nicky caught him.

“Hey, kid, no cocktail napkins? Where’s your manners?”

Blodgett grabbed two napkins and fled back to Mando and the priests.

By the time he reached tableside he was calm and suave again, so much so that one of the priests, the most fatherly of the two, stopped in mid-sentence and followed Blodgett’s every move in serving the drinks, the way a camera shooting slow-motion follows the twists and turns of an athlete or a muscular horse.

“You have a classic North Italian face,” the priest said. “Classic. Does that make you blush?”

Blodgett said nothing and smiled modestly. To his knowledge he hadn’t a touch of Italian in his veins, North or otherwise, and if he had a church at all it was Congregationalist.

He set down the cocktail napkins and backed off a good ten feet. The Irish priests said “Salut” to each other and lifted the Negrones to their lips. Suddenly the one who had oozed over Blodgett’s facial features turned dark as a demon.

“Waiter,” he snapped, “what’s in these drinks?”

Blodgett rushed back, putting on the best poker face he could. He mumbled and fumbled with his order pad.

“This isn’t Cinzano,” the priest declared. “It’s not Tanqueray either.”

Without a word of protest Blodgett swept up the drinks and trotted back to Nicky’s bar.

“These are priests,” he said, holding out the tray. “They say it’s not Cinzano and it’s not Tanqueray.”

Nicky was dead-silent for a moment, still as stone. Then a smile crept on his face and he spread his palms over the two drinks, as though he were a priest himself, the bar was his altar, and he was blessing a pair of sacramental goblets.

“Now it’s Cinzano,” he intoned. “Now it’s Tanqueray.”

And with a wave of his hand he sent Blodgett off to complete his mission.

The mood, back at the priestly table, was no better than when he had left. Blodgett put down the drinks gingerly, the way one would serve raw meat to snarling wolves. And he put down new cocktail napkins as well.

The fatherly priest sipped first and closed his eyes, de-constructing his long, slow swallow.

Finally he looked up and spoke.

“Grazia,” he said. “This is what we ordered.”

And Blodgett bowed.

“Let me bring you bread and olio,” he said. “And I’ll toast it for you too.”

The priests dined and drank like cardinals, running up the largest tab Blodgett had ever seen from a deuce, a party of two. In the lulls between courses and wine changes they called Blodgett over, just to look at him, contraposto, as though he were a marble statue in a ducal garden, and not just an acting student in a tux that smelled like it once belonged to an old man with a goat.

“Jim would like to photograph you,” said the less boisterous priest, speaking of his companion, the fatherly one who had sent back the Negrones. “Would you like that? Jim has a big Hasselblad.”

Blodgett had noticed that the less he spoke the more he intrigued them. So he said nothing, nothing at all, and went away to add up the bill. He tried to walk the way the statue of David might walk if it came to life.

“These are your padres,” he said to Mando. “Do you still want to add the spiff?”

You’d be stealing from your church.”

Mando reminded Blodgett of the saint being paraded in the streets, money pinned on him everywhere.

“Tonight I be his partner,” Mando said. “So what’s wrong with that?”

Thanks to the priests, when Nicky finally locked the doors Blodgett had so many bills in his pocket he couldn’t stand it. He shot home, raced up the four wooden flights to the dwarf apartment and turned the key, eager to grab Ollie and slam down to the after-hours joints deep in the old Roxbury, the dusky, jive-dive Ollie places. There he would slug Jack and Coke, suck up some more cherrystones, oysters too, and duke a few other waiters as royally as the priests had duked him.

In no time flat his plans went down the shitter, big time. There sat Ollie, cowering on the can in the kitchen, his eyebrow torn open, balling up his socks and throwing toothbrush, razor et al.into his gym bag.

“Who kicked your ass?” Blodgett demanded.

“Nobody in particular. A hundred flying beer bottles.”

“Let me fix you.” Blodgett reached for the torn eyebrow, the gash in the butterscotch skin, but Ollie pushed him away. At this phase of Blodgett’s life it was the skin that got him going more than anything else, the sheen and polish of it. It wasn’t a gender thing – at least he told himself it wasn’t. It would have been no different if Ollie were a girl named Mollie, as long as she had the tone, the buff. Skin to skin; mirror to mirror, I am you and you are me – it was easy, so easy why even think about it?

“I’ve been waiting for you all night,” Ollie said. “I want you to drive me out of here. I’ll never sleep in this hellhouse again.”

He trembled as he spoke, sweated and shook blood on the floor, and when he explained how they had come at him Blodgett couldn’t deny Ollie had every right in the world to shake, to shit, to run like the wind itself.

They had been crouching behind crates and garbage cans and cars on the narrow side street, all hopped up with fervor from the Feast Day, the berserk posse of Little Italy kids who had seen Blodgett and Ollie come and go, come and go, night after night. The moment Ollie popped out on the stoop they let the bottles fly like burning arrows, doing the whole nigger go home thing, the vigilante rant from another century. Nothing you would ever see in Cambridge, in Brookline, not even in fucking Charlestown, not in this day and age. Only here, in the North End; and only there, in the other end, South Boston, probable home of the Negrone-loving priests.

While Ollie stuffed his gym bag and steeled his nerves, Blodgett went back down and brought the MG right alongside the stoop, like a police boat at a dock. The shitbox sounded its standard death rattle, but it moved. Blodgett scanned the streets like a getaway man, beeped the horn and Ollie sprinted down. He jumped in and Blodgett floored the pedal, nearly crushing a mangy cat. As the North End receded from view, Ollie went from panic to funk. He flat-out refused to party. Blodgett left him on a street corner, skulked back to his empty bed and slept horribly, nothing in his stained black pants but cash.

He awoke to a sky that filled his postage stamp of a window with the color of pent-up pus. The bulges of yellowish gray threatened a furious downpour. But the storm hadn’t broken yet; it was all in a state of suspension and foreboding; and not a drop had been shed on the filthy panes.

This was his day off, and “off” was the operative word. He wanted to dump his tux in the drycleaner, and scoot away in his roadster to points unknown. He pictured a part of the Cape, beyond the storm clouds, that corresponded to his images of the Riviera. Endless asses bronzing in an infinite tanning booth.

He swigged and spat mouthwash, threw something on, grabbed the musty tux and the car keys and hit the stairs, bounding as though he were breaking jail.

In the street Blodgett’s shoes turned to stone; and he could no more move than a fly whose legs were stuck to flypaper.

But it was his eyes that were freezing him in place, not his feet.

He was staring straight at the MG. It was there, right where he left it. Same car, same color: rust-pocked racing green. But its position had changed; it was on its back, like an insect that had been flipped over by a shoe or a shock of wind.

The first wave of nausea slammed Blodgett then and there. He felt nausea as though it were a human hand, long fingers in a sleek black glove, reaching right through the skin of his abdomen and grabbing the organs, clamping them so tight the blood stopped and the nerves howled.

He almost doubled over, but the imagined hand loosened and withdrew as swiftly as it had come. Blodgett walked to his car, walked all around it and finally knelt beside it, at the point where he could best read the letters scrawled on the windshield.

Niggerlover, the letters said, although the scrawler had messed up the spelling, leaving out one of the g’s. For a fleeting moment Blodgett’s optimism gene kicked in, telling him he was only being accused of loving some place called Niger, a river in Africa, or an old name for Nigeria. The next moment he was back realizing that Niger, in this neighborhood, could only mean Nigger, and that Nigger could only mean Ollie.

A jab of something purely animal told Blodgett to make tracks at once, to run with all his might; but a counter-jab of something very human told him no way, not without my car. So he scurried for the cover of his building and his apartment, where he hoped he could phone a tow truck.

Just before turning heel he ran his finger over the white scrawl, wondering if it was paint or just chalk. The waxy feel and the smell showed him it was neither. It was soap.

Mussolini, he clean ‘em up. He come here, turn ‘em all into soap.

As Blodgett hightailed it up the steps, he kept whipping his head around, looking for the ghost-gang he knew was after him, the hundred teenage Mussolinis of whom Dutchy would be proud.

Back upstairs he slammed the dead-bolt, and the very phrase scared him, signifying he might be bolted in dead. Then he began calling around, telephoning garages in neutral neighborhoods. Finally, someone sent four apes who picked up the puny MG as easily as a side of beef and dumped it upright. The vehicle bounced on its tires and shook off a side mirror and a shard of rear bumper, brown as a rotted tooth. But every other appendage, including the windshield wipers, seemed to stay attached. Blodgett watched the operation from his high narrow window, and as soon as the tires hit the ground he was down the stairs like a gazelle pursued by cheetahs. He took a wet rag to rub out the soap-scrawl and his pantload of cash to placate the apes; and to get them to stay right where they were, guarding his escape, at least until he was around the corner and in high gear.

Twenty minutes beyond the North End, where the Southeast Expressway opened up, a welcome wave leaned into Blodgett, and he in turn leaned into the accelerator. It was the sheer force of the moment itself, the moment in which he saw the facts for what they really were. He was out of harm’s way, he could still be a waiter and a young actor anywhere on this earth, he was heading south and the bloated yellow-grey clouds were heading north. Blodgett could even see streamers of blue at the horizon, and the streamers to him meant the festive fuck-all party that was Provincetown. The scent of it was already in his nostrils, that beach in the dunes of Truro; the sunbathers topless, bottomless, limitless.

Blodgett had forgotten the black-gloved hand; but it hadn’t forgotten him. It let him get as far as Hyannis, just about half way down the peninsula. There the clenching fingers reached right through Blodgett’s wall of skin and stomach muscle, found the raw, coiling intestine and began to squeeze. Here, there and everywhere, sometimes lightly and other times so hard it wrung perspiration out of every pore on Blodgett’s body, and strength from his muscles. He pulled into a Mobil station and parked on the side, where the rest rooms had handwritten signs that said customers only. Inside the station he purchased a candy bar just to get his hands on the key to the toilet, one of those keys they affix to a crude chunk of wood so big you can’t pocket it. Walking around to the rest room door he had the sense Hyannis was in a different galaxy, one with a system of gravity that made putting one foot after the next a stunningly exhausting exercise. He also had an urge to get the candy bar out of his sight – just drop it on the ground, anything – because even the feel of the wrapper in his hand was nauseating.

Inside the cool, solitary cell of the men’s room he discovered just how topsy turvy this new world was. Blodgett took a shit and it was white, white as limestone. He pissed and it was brown as cola.

The men’s room mirror showed him the new Blodgett. A person with skin befitting a wax museum, steeped in a yellowness he associated with infection, the yellow that oozes out of a dirty wound. The taint was deepest in the corners of his eyes.

For the first time in his life Blodgett felt so bad he wanted to go to the doctor, and he was fearing bad things. The A-word. He bought a little gas from the Mobil attendant for no other purpose than to insure he got accurate directions to the Hyannis Hospital. The oily-faced attendant, as he stuffed the fat nozzle into the rickety MG, made a point of rolling his eyes and generally acting insulted, as though he were being called upon by some diseased dandy to jam good U.S. gas into a thing that wasn’t even a car, a contraption no better than a shitpiece roller skate.

But the roller skate rattled away and found the hospital.

To Blodgett, the doctor they gave him might just as well have been an undertaker in a white coat.

“You’re a sick man,” he said, but the pitiless look on his face - a melodrama face with a villain’s mustache - seemed to say, “you’re a sickening man.”

Shivering in the johnny they had made him wear, Blodgett heard the doctor’s voice swerve in mid-sentence and turn as metallic as the steel examining table, which made him shiver all the more. He paced back and forth in his medical white coat and began to speak gravely of the blood tests. They had been positive. Blodgett slumped, doubled up by a new wave of cramping.

But the morbid doctor never proclaimed that Blodgett had the A-word. It wasn’t on his clipboard that day.

The disease he had come to discuss was from another part of the medical dictionary.

The H-word.

“Hepatitis is serious,” said the doctor, in his chilliest undertaker voice. “If you don’t take care of it, it can take your life.”

Given the diagnosis Blodgett had expected, this grim pronouncement seemed like a reprieve from the gallows, a mere slap on the wrist. The H-word may have been Hepatitis, but for him it was Hallelujah.

Yellow skin, white shit, brown piss. Now Blodgett wanted answers. Who did all this to him?

Not Ollie, it turned out. Not Erica. Not Jim the priest. Not the Navy captain or the Navy captain’s wife. Not the stylist who smeared her powder over the hot spot on his forehead for his bedpan-emptying part in the B.I. movie. Not the three-chinned state rep who stalked him, begging to suck him off, in a long black official car all the way from the Golden Dome down the slope of Beacon Hill to the Haymarket pushcarts.

It was Gus the Shucker who did it.

“Tell me your favorite food,” asked the doctor.

This was the last thing Blodgett wanted to discuss. His appetite was obliterated. The very thought of food made him want to hurl.

“Tell me.”

Blodgett told him but the doctor already knew. Bootleg clams from contaminated beds. Sewer food. They’d been dropping people like flies all month. Greater Boston was a hepatitis hot zone.

All those smart, suave moves. Hovering at the edge of the raw bar like a seagull, waiting for Gus to duck into the refrigerator for a new bushel of oysters. Then swooping in on the cherrystones.

Perhaps it was Gus himself. His fingers. Maybe Gus never used toilet paper.

“I’m admitting you for a few days,” the doctor said. “We need to check your bilirubin.”

Blodgett thought he was talking about a Jewish kid. He had never been with any Billy Rubin, far as he could remember. But after two days in an isolated room – they installed him in a special wing for communicable diseases – he began to get a handle on hospital talk, on the neat little shorthand hospital people have for the most calamitous events. Room 356 stroked out. Kill that monitor, will you?

Not drinking alcohol for a solid year – the doctor’s orders – didn’t seem hard to bear, not at the time, because the very thought of a Jack and Coke sliding down his throat brought the bile sliding up. As for work, the doctor said nothing about that, but Blodgett felt no more capable of carrying a food-laden waiter’s tray than lifting the iron-framed bed they had him in.

For all he knew they had already canned him. Unlike cooks, waiters were seen as being a dime a dozen; and he had been AWOL two days. With his yellow left hand Blodgett picked up the phone on his bed table. With his yellow right index finger he dialed Fredo’s. He wasn’t sure who picked up, so he asked for Mando.

There was a long silence, followed by rustling and muffled voices. Then Bobby came on and asked him where he was.

“I’m in the hospital,” Blodgett said. “Sick as puke.”

“Isn’t that interesting. That’s where Mando is too. The one next to Campagno’s funeral parlor.”

“You’re kidding? I never saw Mando eat any clams.”

Bobby laughed a bitter laugh. “Clams? Mando didn’t eat clams. He ate knuckles, honey. Served by Rico.”

Just the way Bobby said that gave Blodgett the whole picture. Ralphie the kissass cashier, starting to punch in a check, spotting something that makes him tilt his bifocals, wrinkle his nose and squint. Split-second later he’s zooming in like a high-powered lens on a faint gray blotch, the telltale erasure mark. Next comes Rico, the axe-fisted little ape, the bantam who could have been Willie Pep, taking Mando apart on the asphalt of the parking lot.

And Nicky licking his chops. Pouring Rico a Strega.

“If Mando wakes up at all he’ll be lucky. Or unlucky. If he wakes up, he won’t be Mando.”

The words carried such a bolt of terror Blodgett almost dropped the phone, as though it had suddenly turned live and hot with deadly electricity. He thought of the subway and the third rail, of big hands pushing him off the platform.

“You don’t fuck with our checks. You don’t steal our money.” Bobby’s voice became thin, cool and sharp, a stiletto voice, stabbing at his ear.

“And if I were you, honey,” Bobby said, “I’d get my little ass to another planet.”

Which Blodgett tried to do. Tried to do in spite of the black-gloved fingers laying strangle-holds on his sensitive stomach parts. In spite of his bloated liver making his feet so heavy he could hardly drag them out of the hospital door. Drag them he did, but this time he found the scabbed-up MG was as comatose as Mando. Dead-silent, not even a whirr or a whine. And Blodgett crept back to bed to hide behind the whitecoats and consider his options.

Everything was extra work, even the telephone. It had the leaden heft of a small barbell.

Ollie was not an option. He clicked off in two seconds flat.

Erica, the pouty princess, was so amused at Blodgett’s description of himself, yellow inside and out, she said she’d drive down from Boston just to see it. She called him dahhling, doing the theater-school Tallulah thing, and said she’d bring him daffodils, a big yellow bunch.

If he felt like it, she said, her voice shrieking into his ear, they could do the scene from Menagerie, the one about Amanda and her jonquils.

The woman with three breasts stopped to look at the card, and even picked it up. It was one of those all-occasion greeting cards done in mock retro style. On the front was a fifties-style illustration of a prim but sexy and curvaceous housewife. She wore the dress you always see, that very domestic dress that doesn’t show much skin but really makes the point that the wearer has an hourglass figure. Her lips were big and red and smiling widely, but something about the smile was ironic. The housewife was poised behind a big easy chair, and she had both of her hands on the top of the chair-back, hovering over it lovingly and protectively. The most noticeable feature of the easy chair was that it was empty. Clean as a whistle and not a single crease or bump in the cushion. And the message, in a retro typeface, made it clear what she was smiling about. It said: Sometimes the best man is an imaginary man.

Although the woman with three breasts didn’t purchase the card, she lingered over it, because the card said so much to her. She was killing time in a shop in a big urban mall, one that was near a major museum. Imaginary men were of the utmost importance to the woman with three breasts. Since her early teens she had run into them or conjured them up wherever she went, and by now she was quite the connoisseur. Very early on, her few experiences with non-imaginary men – cruel to say the least - had convinced her that the imaginary route was the way to go. The only way, if she wanted a life free from the torture of ridicule and rejection.

Once the woman with three breasts had crossed the line, had utterly and totally put the possibility of non-imaginary men behind her, the rest of what the modern world has to offer opened up to her, on a more or less equal playing field. She was bright, well-educated and attractive – some would even say beautiful. Her face had certain features that could rival those of the housewife in the greeting card, especially its bone structure. From chin to scalp she possessed precisely what models and actresses covet, the skeletal prominence that keeps skin youthful and glowing well into maturity.

After musing over the card, the woman went deeper into the mall to do an errand. There was enough time; she still had a good half hour before the museum opened. She entered a fabric store and carefully inspected the new goods that had arrived. She picked out a bolt of this and a bolt of that, added in some sundries, arranged for delivery and paid by card. The woman with three breasts was a virtuoso with a sewing machine. Soon after puberty she learned to sew for survival, to avoid the mortification of entering a clothing store. She created her own patterns and developed crude designs for tops and dresses that would mask and even flatter her upper physique. But her natural talent and intelligence led her even further - into the realm of fabric artistry. She bought books and taught herself how to cut, with proficiency and a bold flair. She was so adept she became a top seamstress, doing complex repairs and alterations for the most demanding clientele. She was sought after by bridal shops and fine boutiques. They wanted her to work on premises but she refused, insisting that the garments be sent to her apartment, where her at-home workshop had grown from an alcove to two large rooms.

For quite a while, the woman with three breasts flirted with becoming a bona fide fashion designer. Now she was pursuing this goal in earnest. She had found a rep who would handle all the client and supplier contact, allowing her to keep working inside the walls of her home. She had come upon an ancient floral pattern based on the Narcissus, and she began adapting it to various accessories, such as fabric belts and handbags cut out of rare hand-dyed goods she’d located in the south of France. She called her brand just that, Narcissus, and designed her own logo. The name gave her a chuckle. To her female customers it would mean a flower. But to her it would mean the ideal imaginary male. The legendary male so taken with his own beauty he can’t help staring at its reflection.

The act of naming her brand caused the woman with three breasts to take a new look at her own name - Sandra. Her decision, in the end, was to re-style it, and she began calling herself Alessandra. In her view, the name was still the one she’d been born with. All she was doing was using its superlative form.

From the fabric store, Alessandra hurried towards the mall walkway that opened onto the museum gardens. She had to pass right in front of a splashy lingerie store, an experience that made her physically and emotionally ill. Her legs shook and the sweat poured out of her. Every tart of a window mannequin was a reminder of the cross she had to bear – her lifelong dread of ever stepping over the threshold of such a store, of ever going near any retail counter anywhere to acquire a bra. All of hers were home-made, and it goes without saying that the quality and workmanship of these pieces exceeded anything sold in stores. But the real coup was the innovative construction she had devised, a system of rigging and cupping and cinching that, so long as she stayed fully dressed, made her unique abundance seem to be nothing more than normally opulent curves.

After the terror of the lingerie windows came the joy of the walkway, the relief of escaping her monsters and the thrill of entering a domain of soothing pleasures, a true oasis. First came the canopy of open sky, then the fountains and topiary and colonnades, and then the museum itself, timeless and palatial. She walked the huge halls resolutely, buoyed by the sharp echo of her footsteps. She hurried by the queue forming at the café, without so much as a thought about stopping for lunch. This was the first day of a new exhibit, a major showing of classical sculpture, not a day to let a croissant and salad steal time from what really mattered.

The woman with three breasts climbed the temple-like steps to the highest floor of the museum. She bought her ticket for the exhibit, titled “The Time of Heroes,” showed it to a seated guard and entered the exhibit hall. For a moment she stood perfectly still, just to let the cells of her body adjust to the sudden change. Only her eyes moved, and everywhere they darted they found the same thing. Men of stone. Perfect men. Men whose god-like limbs and torsos were unchanged after thousands of years.

Slowly, Alessandra began to move from figure to figure, circling each one like a cat. She paid no attention to the little plaques that explained whether the sculptor was Phidias or Polykleitos or Myron, or whether the sculpted male was a Herakles who had just killed a lion, a Dionysos on a bash, a Hermes about to take flight, or some unknown athlete scraping oil from his ribs. What she was after was a shoulder, a hip, a wrist that struck her as especially agile and powerful. Her mind and her eye worked together, feverishly, as photographer and camera, snapping prizes she could take home with her and keep, summoning them at will for her own physical pleasure. And just as soon as she had made her way through the ranks, she turned from the exit door and retraced her steps the entire length of the hall, once again letting her gaze spill ecstatically over every inch of stone skin. On her third and final trip, when she had reached her saturation point, she let out a small laugh, just audible enough to turn a guard’s head. She was recalling that line from the greeting card, and thinking how very right the line was.

The guard frowned and coughed sternly, and Alessandra rushed away from him and out of the hall. She was finally ready for a little food and drink. At this hour – well past lunch – they seated her promptly in the café, where she ordered a nicoise salad and tea. She slipped her toes out of the tight part of her shoes and attacked the food lustily, feeling her energy ramp up for everything that was to come, the rest of her museum day.

Over the years, she had become so taken with sculpture she had finally joined a basic sculpting class. It was taught in the basement of the museum, by a credible artist, a man who was good enough to place work in the better second-tier galleries. Today’s class was themed directly to the exhibit, “The Time of Heroes.” The students were to work from a live male model posing as an ancient Greek athlete. Ten minutes before class-time, the woman was outside the locked door, so eager to get her fingers into the wet clay she felt shock-waves running through them. And when the teacher ambled up the corridor and unlocked the door, she charged to the front and center, setting herself up as close as she could to the modeling stand.

The teacher made a few introductory remarks and brought him in, the human centerpiece - a young man with a discus thrower’s body but a back-alley swagger. He also had a strip-club smirk, which a glare from the teacher wiped away. The ripped young man knew how to stand like a statue, though, in perfect contraposto, torso twisted just so far to suggest explosive tension restrained by an even more muscular spirit. Alessandra worked feverishly, this time capturing her images in earthy handfuls of clay as well as camera flashes of her own mind. The cup supporter the model wore beneath his thong, the kind of jock used by modern athletes, left something to the imagination. But to the woman with three breasts this was not a problem. Anything male that was imaginary would not be squandered by her; her mind, bursting with pictures from “The Time of Heroes,” could fill in all gaps.

What the live model fed into her imagination, however, were properties that no piece of marble possessed. The glow of living skin, the sheen of sweat, and a scent so compelling the word that shot into her mind was something from the Greek myths: ambrosia, the liquid of the gods. The longer he posed the more it poured out of him, a reek that was half him and half the spray he had doused himself with. Alessandra found herself breathing faster just to get more of it into herself. At one point she even felt her nostrils had turned into a new form of eyes. Without realizing it, she was getting all her impressions from the air around her, applying the clay with the lids of her real eyes shut tight.

*******

Seven months after the class, the woman with three breasts stood up from her sewing machine and sat down at her computer. The smell of the model was as alive for her as it was on the day of the class, and it haunted her. Her business had begun to stumble from the effects. That powerful tool of hers – imagination – was so absorbed in the model it was running wild, with precious little left over for stitching and designing. Something had to be done, and finally she had acted. Unable to sleep or work, she had phoned the teacher of the sculpture class. She spoke in the coolest, most objective business voice she could muster, asking for the model’s name and contact information. It was all about opportunity, she said, opportunity for him. As a fashion designer, she said, she had thoughts now and then about a men’s line – a few choice pieces that fit the name Narcissus: a pocket scarf, a neckband, something bold on the wrist, whatever. For some reason, encountering the model had sharpened her focus on these musings. There was something about him, a je ne sais qua, that made her begin to see the finished pieces, their rhythm and flow. At any rate, she needed to see him again and have a personal session – for which she would pay well.

The teacher gave up the goods, and Alessandra began an email exchange with the model at once. His first name was Tom, which she assumed explained the first part of his email address – TMWFT – which was followed by the usual @ sign and internet provider name.

Today she had stitched next to nothing, but it was as much sewing as she could take. All the magic and promise was radiating from the computer, and she opened it like a banshee. She sat on tenterhooks while the screen filled, suffering the drone of the log-on process as though it were the grinding of centuries. The instant the buzzing stopped she opened her email, and there it was in the inbox, TMWFT re:today. He would stop by her place mid-afternoon, he accepted her financial offer, he would pose or be fitted, be sketched or photographed. He concluded, with an e-smile, that he was ready, willing and able to become the poster boy for Narcissus. Reading it, Alessandra’s head swam, as though the scent of the model was seeping through the emoticon and enveloping her.

And then it was there, really there, a dense cloud of it, as she opened her apartment door and let him in. The aura of him deepened and sharpened as he stripped down in the scant clearing of floor between the dress forms, fabric bolts and the racks of half-sewn garments. Once again he wore a cup and a thong, nothing else. Once again, the thong was blue. Alessandra wondered if it was the same thong as before, and the thought that it probably was – a live link to the day in the museum - hit her like a shot of absinthe, the banned lethal kind, dripping desire. She had to stand guard over every word that came out of her lips, to keep her real feelings from blowing the business façade to smithereens.

She showed him swatches and color samples and scribbled a few impressions on a sketch pad, just to give him a sense that there was a palette and a concept or two behind what they were doing. Today would be brainstorming, she said, just trying things. And then she asked him to stand with both arms raised and bent at the elbows, hands pressing the sides of his hair, as though he had just come up from the ocean or the bottom of a pool, soaking wet. He laughed and asked if that meant he was Narcissus, in which case he would be staring back at the pool, or a mer-man, in which case he would look wonder-struck finding himself in a world without water.

Alessandra seized the opportunity and said if he were a mer-man, and maybe even Narcissus too, he wouldn’t be wearing a mass-produced thong with a piece of athletic equipment stuck inside it. To say what she said was such a leap it made her sweat all over - but to hear her say it made Tom sweat even more. The windows of the room were shut tight and the thermostat was high, set that way on purpose by Alessandra, and now she had the exact moment she had wanted, the sense of being locked in a terrarium with some tropical man-plant, so pungent he had her in near delirium, and in the very next moment she would watch him step out of the thong…

He started to lower it - but suddenly he balked and hitched it back up. What she had caught at the museum, that strip-club bravado, it seemed to drain out of his face and even his limbs, just like that, dulling the skin tone.

This isn’t a class full of students, she said. It’s just me, it’s just us. What’s wrong?

But all he did was stand there, muscles and sinews frozen, haunches stalled like a horse spooked by a wolf howl. She felt the air change, become drier and cooler. Whatever it was that seized him was like a frost creeping onto his skin, killing the spicy sheen, and the ambrosia with it.

Alessandra offered to undress him herself, but this spooked him even more. He shied and stammered and finally came up with a way to defend himself. He turned the game of cat and mouse into a new sport: if you show me yours, I’ll show you mine.

He challenged her to drop the sketch pad – and more. From the waist up, he said, she was covered – there was blouse fabric from both wrists all the way to her neck. If she wanted him to show bottom the least she could do was show top.

Never, she said, because I’m paying you. And I can pay you more too. Is that what you want, Tom? Is that it?

His response was an icy stab cloaked in laughter, a verbal shiver. He told her she had no idea what she was asking for. And when she asked yet again he said, in a dark whisper, consider yourself warned.

With that he thumbed the cloth at both hips, yanked it down and stepped out. She saw it all, the man and the manhood. But there was something about the pouch and its contents. It was swollen with balls, it was abundant, but it was so much more abundant than Alessandra had ever expected.

TMWFT, he said, bitterly. The man with four testicles. Now you know why I’m the loneliest man in the world.

In the moments before she spoke, Alessandra considered the possibilities. Her brain spun with them. She could, and should, reveal herself. At last there was a man with whom she had common ground. He would understand her, they could be lovers. Their difference from the rest of humanity would be their bond. But the more she stared at him the more she wanted to turn away – and, in the end, the woman with three breasts scorned the man with four testicles. Everything that attracted her to the figures in “The Time of Heroes” – the utter physical perfection - made her repulsed by the figure that stood before her, this aberration in flesh and blood.

She dismissed him and shut the door in his face. She never, ever ventured again from the world of imaginary men.