Читать книгу Dragon at the Edge of a Flat World - Joseph Keckler - Страница 9

BLIND GALLERY

My friend gets a travel grant and leaves town. I take over some of her shifts, working for a blind gallerist on the Lower East Side. He’s not one of those blind people who you forget is blind. He won’t let you forget. He begins every few sentences, “Now, I don’t know if you know this, but I’m blind …” He is very erudite and with-it and his friends are always coming over to read him art reviews, The New York Review of Books, new poetry, new literature, on and on. But if you are me and you ask him, “Say, did you read the such-and-such article in The New Yorker,” he’ll reply, “See, the thing is, Joe, I’m blind.” Choking on laughter, he adds, “Can you imagine a blind motherfucker like me reading, uh, The New Yorker and some shit?”

My boss speaks through his teeth with a sense of strain and release, as though he is always simultaneously inhaling or exhaling a hit of pot. A breezy and hip walking bass drifts perpetually from the stereo behind him. He has a phone next to him and he makes calls all the time. But if the phone rings and I pick it up and it’s for him and I turn to him and say, “Hey, so-and-so is on the phone,” he replies, “I can’t talk to him. I’m blind! Tell him I can’t talk. He’ll understand—he knows I’m blind.” Sometimes my boss takes naps in the middle of the day. Sometimes, when the phone rings, he wakes up and picks it up. Yawning, he whispers, “Yeah, I’m in meeting right now. Mmmm, bye.” When I ask him how he curates shows he mutters, “I got people I trust. I rely on their opinions.”

I am quite diligent the day I start. Because my boss cannot monitor me—not visually, anyway—I don’t feel rebellious like I do at other jobs. On the contrary, I feel a sense of honor and responsibility to take care of business with efficiency and care. When my friend calls him from out of town to see how things are going my boss says, “This Joe motherfucker is professional as shit. That motherfucker is PRO. FESH. UH. NAALL!” He deems me to be so professional that he soon decides to hire me on for a while. Even after my friend comes back to town. I work shifts on the days she doesn’t.

I have forgotten to mention that my boss’s gallery is in his apartment. He sleeps on a couch in the living room. In the morning he wakes up, sits up, and swivels his body, placing his feet onto the floor. The setting transforms around him: magically, he is at work. Interns began flooding in. Well, one intern. “Is fatso here yet?” my boss asks.

“No, not yet,” I say. “She’s not fat,” I add, thinking that he might not know, since he is, after all, blind.

“Yeah, let’s give fatso a call,” he replies with a grin. “Let’s get ol’ fatso on the horn. See when she plans on, uh, rollin’ on in here.”

I have various duties. Sometimes I handle development. Joe, can you call this rich motherfucker and see if he’ll wire some money into our account?

Other days I oversee marketing. Joe, could you, uh, order a bike messenger? See if he can take this postcard invitation to our next opening up to Yoko Ono? I just heard on the news that she’s back in town.

I also work in programming and one day my boss has a special mission for me. “Joe, listen. This friend of mine, a poet, uh, passed away.” I nod solemnly, though my boss can’t see me. “I mean this motherfucker just dropped dead,” he continues. “So, uh, some of us are going to put on a memorial reading and we need a venue. I’d like you to go over to the XYZ Bar tonight and look into how we can book a reading. We just want to read some of this guy’s poems since he just dropped dead on us, see.” He feels around on the table for his checkbook, opens it, and scribbles out some numbers and loops. “I’ll pay you an extra hour,” he says, tearing out the check and handing it to me.

“Oh, thanks,” I say, tucking the check in the right pocket of my jeans.

“I’d go over there myself,” he says. “But, you know … I’m blind.”

First I try simply to find booking information on the website of the bar, which I know to be a downtown destination of NYC literati. There are no instructions, just a phone number. I dial it. Nothing. So after leaving the gallery that evening I walk to the bar.

I climb a tall flight of stairs up to the second floor. I enter a dimly lit room. The air smells sick and sweet—the floor and tables are breathing into the room the stale vapors of years of spilt beers. A distorted, grungy bass line plays repetitively on the PA. A modest number of customers line the room, leaning against walls with their drinks, chatting in corner banquettes. The center of the room is empty.

A woman with messy jet-black hair sits at the bar, hunched over a half-drunk martini. She’s got an unlit cigarette between her fingers. She conducts the air with it as she talks to the bartender. Occasionally she absent-mindedly draws it to her lips, before glancing downward and seeming to silently remind herself that in New York these days you can’t have it both ways: no smoking inside, no cocktails on the street. I sit down at the bar, one seat away from her. The bartender is slender with a long ponytail.

“What you want?” he asks me eventually.

“Hi,” I reply cheerfully. “I actually just came in to get some information. I work for a gallerist, a blind gallerist, who is trying to organize a memorial reading for a friend of his—a poet who just passed away—and I need to know who I can talk to … about booking. A reading.”

“Yeah?” the bartender says, lifting his chin, “Well I’m such a fucking bartender that all I can do is pour a drink.” He turns and walks away from me.

“Can I get a gin and tonic?” I ask.

“Five,” he says. I slip him seven.

“So is there a number or an email address that I can give to my boss?” I ask, adding, “I would really appreciate whatever you have.” The bartender reaches for a book of matches, and tosses them at me. The XYZ phone number appears at the top.

“Thank you,” I say. “But I already dialed this number and there was no … info …”

“Give it up!” The black haired woman laughs, tapping the filter of her unlit cigarette. My eyes follow imaginary ashes as they fall from the end of it into her now-empty martini glass. The bartender snatches up his shaker and refills her drink. “You’re not going to win. Can’t you see that?”

“Win?” I repeat. “I don’t need to ‘win.’ I just need to book the reading of a dead man’s poetry. My boss would have come himself, but he’s blind! You are such a ‘bartender’, I understand that,” I say, raising my voice as the bartender moves into the storeroom, out of sight. “And I bought a drink from you. Now can you please let me know who I can talk to?”

After several moments the bartender reappears in the darkened opening of the storeroom. “Leave,” he says. “You leave now.”

He’s got a vodka bottle in his hand. The woman leans on the bar with one elbow, and swivels to face me with a crooked smirk, twirling her now limp and wrinkled cigarette as though she’s flashing a weapon.

“I’m not leaving,” I declare. I am emboldened by duty, and also by gin. I am not here for myself—not here on my own time, my own dime. No, I am on the job. On the clock. The setting of work surrounds me like an aura. Furthermore, I am here as a representative of the dead and the blind. “If you want me to leave, you’ll have to call the police and see if they can make me. I’m going to sit right here.”

The bartender slams the bottle down. He reaches under the bar and presses a button. The music stops. Every head in the bar turns toward him, toward the two of us. He waits for a hush to come over the meager crowd before pointing at the door and shouting, “Get out now!”

I pretend not to have heard him. I become totally still. I say nothing. I just sit in my stool and stare blankly at the bottles in front of me. They are assembled in tiers, a Roman senate of psychoactive beverages. The bartender picks up the vodka bottle. He walks out from behind the bar. He unscrews the cap. He takes a swig: he spits it at me. It soaks my right shoulder and stings my neck. I don’t move. He takes another swig and spits it at my face. I close my eyes. He circles me clockwise, continuing to fire eighty-proof loogies from every direction. Some people are watching but no one reacts.

Leaving the bar is not an option I consider. But how can I extract myself? I can’t allow this bartender to assault me with whatever items he has on hand. Is there someone I can appeal to here? As another jet of burning liquid grazes my left thigh, I instinctively slide my hand into my pocket in order to protect my cell phone. Suddenly it occurs to me—I could transport myself out of the bar without leaving. I pull out the phone and dial.

“It’s Joseph. I am at the XYZ Bar.”

“Oh yeah, Joe?” replies my boss, with a rasp. “You figure out how to get this memorial going? Tell ’em this guy just dropped dead.”

“The bartender is spitting liquor on me,” I state.

“Oh yeah? Spittin’ on you? Well, Joe, those motherfuckers over there are crazy. That’s all right. We don’t have to do it over there. We can do it over at, uh, Saint Mark’s.”

Now that this pronouncement has been made, I no longer have business here. I return the phone to my pocket, turn, and walk with matter-of-factness out the room, down the stairs, and out the door onto East Fourth Street.

I wander around the East Village, which is quietly bustling, alive with crepuscular chatter. I stop intermittently to sit on the stoops of strangers. I cook up plans. Revenge plans. Maybe I could return to the bar with a Super Soaker squirt gun, I think. ‘That’d learn ‘im. And with which liquid might I fill it?

As the night air dries the liquor and saliva from my skin and clothes, my rage wanes. Eventually I resolve simply never to darken the door of the XYZ again.

The next morning I wake up. I reach over and pull the check my boss gave me out of my jeans. The numbers he wrote were already jagged and wild and now they’re blurred from vodka. But they’re still legible. I walk over to the bank. I deposit that check. It bounces.